... Transcript ...
Judy Aldous:
What do you make of this idea of capping of international students?
Raj Sharma KC:
It seems quite odd to see Marc Miller indicate any concern when these are the policies that have been in place for many, many years. We've seen a dramatic increase in the number of international students. International students contribute $20 billion to this economy. On the same side, we have provincial governments like Ontario and Alberta, they've dramatically decreased the funding to post-secondary institutions. That funding is now being made up by these international students. And so you watch, let's see, let's see what happens when you do this cap on international students and you'll see Queen's University has a $48 million shortfall in part due to a decrease in the number of international students there.
Saima Jamal:
We're not putting them up for success then, because they're already coming with a lot of financial stress. There's this myth that international students are very rich people. They're kids are very rich parents, but when you come here, you just come with the tuition. Most of them work really hard. A lot of them in Calgary, they go to the Gurdwara for food because the Gurdwara is offering free food and free groceries to a lot of them. So they have a lot of financial stress.
Sheba Singh:
In Canada, there is no clear picture. There's this unsaid expectation that if I cannot qualify in an economic immigration pathway, then maybe I need to come here as a student and then stay here because there used to be a pathway for those individuals. And all of a sudden the picture has completely changed.
Alicia Planincic:
Our big finding is that it's not about the number or the level of immigration. It's really about strategy and doing immigration right. Being able to plan for population growth, it's been frankly, a little bit forgotten about up until now, up until we're really facing these issues head on in a way that we can't ignore because housing affordability is the perhaps biggest issue across Canada right now.
Judy Aldous:
What would you say would be a good way forward?
Raj Sharma KC:
What we need to do is we need to get the best of the best and it'll be better for them, it'll be better for us, but a straight cap makes no sense whatsoever.
Speaker 6:
I came with a dream that I'll be a teacher or a journalist in Canada. When I came here, my qualification was rejected. If my qualification was not good enough, why was I given a visa?
Alicia Planincic:
Part of the confusion, of course, is that the selection process itself, where it's like, okay, I've been selected as an economic immigrant so my skills must be highly valued, and then you land in a given province and then you find out, oh, actually, but wait, there's this other step that you don't know about. Yeah, I mean, credential recognition, as we all know, I'm sure is such a big issue and I think one thing that's missing is an opportunity to be able to prove one's skills. And so I think there's this idea catching on, and we're seeing some pilot projects of some sort of a competency test, for instance, within regulated professions to show, "Hey, I have the skills to do this work. I'm ready. I don't need to wait five years. I don't need to go back to school."
Sheba Singh:
How can anybody get Canadian experience if you don't give them an opportunity to enter an organization or if there is no path?
Raj Sharma KC:
We've had a concept since Trudeau, not this Trudeau, his father, around 1970 or so, we had this new concept, the human capital model. So we're going to select immigrants on the basis of age, education, work experience, and language proficiency, not necessarily their ability to work in their chosen field. So we think that we want stem cells, we want, like a stem cell, they come, and they should be able to succeed based on that four core competencies. So that stem cell model is what informs our economic class or points driven base.
Judy Aldous:
Is that a good system?
Raj Sharma KC:
I think greater power should probably be devolved to the provinces where the local governments have greater insight as to their market needs.
Sheba Singh:
People are actually more aware where they're talking, whether they want to move here, is it going to be worth it or not? This conversation did not happen back a few decades ago. When you pack everything, you're here, you have to survive.
Speaker 7:
My question was, there seems to be a bias of the immigrants coming through and then the services that are given to them when they do come through. And then my question is, how do we make sure that the government does actually treat everyone the same way?
Saima Jamal:
That's something that I talk about a lot. There is discrimination before they come. There is discrimination after they come. If you look at the situation that is happening right now, there's a massive genocide happening in Gaza and there's only 1,000 applications that are coming in for the people that are coming from that area. 1,000 compared to a million that were allowed in from Ukraine. The people from Gaza are getting zero support from the government. They're just coming as visitors with a three-year work permit.
Raj Sharma KC:
In terms of framing this as simply that Ukrainians are, let's say European or white, and we're not doing enough for non-whites, it's not accurate in the sense that when you have Ukrainians, the processing and speaking as a former immigration officer, the processing for Ukrainian nationals was relatively straightforward. They had passports that you can verify identity, you can verify, for example, some degree of background checks. We have a huge Ukrainian community in Alberta, in particular, and Saskatchewan as well. My perspective is that we should be sympathetic and helpful to Ukrainians and other populations as well, but, again, to simply castigate it as racism or discrimination because we were able to do more, let's say, for Ukrainians, it doesn't paint the full picture.
Judy Aldous:
Cesar Cala is a leader in the Filipino community, but this idea of bringing in temporary workers and then not offering them an opportunity to become permanent residents, where does that rank in the concerns that you have?
Cesar Cala:
What people don't know is was, in 2008, Canada was giving more visas to temporary residents than those who have immediate permanent residency pathways. So we're creating a class of people that are permanently temporary and we're seeing some of the issues accumulate over time because of that. We are setting people up to vulnerability and being victimized by predatory stuff.
Saima Jamal:
There is so much scamming happening to these vulnerable people, so as refugee advocates, as migrant advocates, we are really asking the government to make them documented, to give them the papers so that people don't take advantage of their vulnerability.
Raj Sharma KC:
I think nobody actually brought this to Canadians that, are we okay with a permanent underclass? Look, for me, work is work, and I even disagree with the concept of low-skill work versus whatever. To me, work is work and we need workers and there's dignity in work. None of our policymakers, none of our lawmakers, none of them discuss this concept that, look, you know what? We're going to go down this permanent underclass. We're going to have guest workers like the Gulf states, and these individuals are going to come, they're going to spend their youth here, they're going to work. They're going to contribute to EI and CPP, by the way, and never collect, and then once we're done with them, see you later.
This is a huge issue. The permanent underclass, okay, it's 2.5 million non-permanent residents this year. It will be three million. It's 400,000 every quarter that we're taking in right now. This is going to lead to economic anxiety. We're going to see now a drop in public support heretofore not happened in Canada before. We are going to see anti-immigrant sentiment and you're going to see immigrant communities themselves express anti-immigrant sentiment.
Sheba Singh:
We talked about equality a lot before, like a decade ago, and now my kids are being taught equity. Not everybody needs the same thing. You cannot just come up with sometimes one policy or one support or one settlement service that is going to help every single immigrant.
Raj Sharma KC:
I'm still a fan of the Canadian immigration system. A lot of it works. I know that there's shortcomings. I know that the people in charge, they're doing us a disservice and they're doing Canadians a disservice, but by and large, the bones are good. And I hope that people aren't viewing it as a broken system. It's not broken at all. It's look to other countries like the U.K. where they're going to offshore refugee determination adjudication and send vulnerable refugees to Rwanda, a country that we accept refugees from. So look around. Canada's still doing well. The promise of immigration is still there. We need to do better.
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