Speaking notes for the Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P. Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism at the Eleventh National Metropolis Conference

Calgary, Alberta
March 20, 2009

As delivered

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Thank you very much Howard and Robert, congratulations to Tracy, Linda, the organizing committee, all of the volunteers involved in putting on this conference and a big welcome to Calgary. We are delighted to have you here in this vital and energetic centre of the Canadian west, the Prairies.

The Metropolis Project is unique and vital as I witnessed when I had an opportunity to participate in the international Metropolis in Melbourne in 2007. By the way, Canada had the largest international delegation there even though we were the furthest, the most distant country represented. Gatherings such as this bring together social scholars, policy experts and service providers, even a smattering of politicians as we’ve seen and others to examine issues such as migration, diversity and integration. Thanks to all of you for your valued work that is represented here today and for your work all throughout the year.

Ladies and gentlemen, just as immigration has been essential to Canada’s development, it is an indispensable part of our future and this Government remains committed to it.

Despite the current recession, attracting skilled and dedicated newcomers to Canada will contribute to our future prosperity and success. We expect the downturn to be of limited duration and must look beyond it in our immigration planning.

That’s why when you combine nearly a quarter of a million permanent residents with foreign students and temporary foreign workers Canada welcomed close to 520,000 newcomers in 2008, a number unprecedented in our history. With respect to the inclusion of temporary foreign workers and students in that large figure, we should recall that now thanks to the introduction of the Canadian Experience Class many of those folks will have a pathway to permanent residency, ultimately to Canadian citizenship.

As Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, I’ve worked to link our multiculturalism policies with the work of the other two areas of my portfolio – citizenship and multiculturalism. In fact we’ve combined the citizenship branch with the multicultural program and I think that’s a good fit. My view is that we need today a multiculturalism that is relevant to today’s challenges, not those of 30 or 40 years ago.

In some ways this means ironically a return to the concept as it was first articulated in Canada in our public discourse in the 1960’s by Senator Paul Yucek, an academic of Ukrainian origin who grew up in Saskatchewan and became later a senator from Manitoba. He expressed multiculturalism in the context of our debt to the French and British traditions and the Aboriginal background that were mainly the foundations of any genuine Canadian identity.

He spoke particularly with appreciation about the British Parliamentary basis of our free institutions. As the son of Ukrainian immigrants he knew the value of these institutions in a world where millions lived under the shadow of tyranny. We must always remember that our tradition of pluralism is rooted in our history. It is part of our historically grounded national identity. It is our tradition of unity in diversity. It’s not a recent innovation.

I think we need however to focus more on how all communities can better integrate into Canada and build bridges with each other. We need to encourage citizens already here as well to welcome newcomers more actively into the Canadian family. That means I think that we need to focus our multiculturalism program on the concrete challenges of integration.

What does that abstract statement mean? Well I think it means practically making sure that people who arrive in Canada are as able as quickly as possible to have competency in at least one of our two official languages as a pathway to socio economic integration. It means that amongst other things foreign educated professionals who arrive here don’t have to struggle endlessly in survival jobs waiting for their foreign credentials to be recognized.

I think we also need to focus on youth who can be at risk either to criminality or extremism. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do now through the multiculturalism program. We’ve amended the priorities of the program to focus on rapid pathways to integration, building bridges between communities to avoid isolation while focusing on youth at risk.

Let me offer you a concrete example that I’m very excited about. We’re now supporting a program that was initiated by members of the Canadian Somali and Jewish communities to give opportunities for internships, typically but not exclusively in Jewish professional environments. So we’re taking young kids from a Muslim background, typically disadvantaged from refugee families, giving them an opportunity in a professional working environment to meet people from a completely different background – both helping them to improve their opportunities for economic advancement and enriching as well the experience of those in the professional environment and allowing people to meet folks they might not otherwise do so even they live in the same city.

We want to encourage people to find ways to build bridges of understanding between communities. I’m proud of the contributions that newcomers make every day to our social, cultural and economic fabric. As the Prime Minister noted in 2007, immigrants come to this country to belong to this country. To support this idea our approach is a two way street, to encourage both integration by newcomers and accommodation of newcomers. In short we expect everyone to be responsible to Canada and for Canada to be responsible to them.

So we can address the challenges of racism and social inclusion while building a sense of shared citizenship and social cohesion. In fact, when I speak at citizenship ceremonies, which is really the highlight of my job, I tell new Canadians that our history is now their history, that they have ownership for our collective past. This is because we don’t want Canada to become like what some people have characterized as a hotel, where people come and go with no abiding or enduring commitment to our past or to the meaning of our citizenship.

I believe that the key to this unity and diversity model is the successful integration of newcomers. Integration should be as I say the focus of our multiculturalism. That is why we swear in and in fact as you know through our citizenship program nearly 200,000 new Canadian citizens every year. We are maintaining even in these difficult economic times the most robust in relative terms immigration program in the world.

I believe that you of course, Metropolis has explored these subjects and I know that my policy officials pay close attention to your work. I want to encourage to continue such research and to advise us on possible ways to enhance our approaches. I believe that one area in which we can ask both immigrants and the country to make a greater effort is that of language.

Last January I was visiting our High Commission in New Delhi. I sat in on a few immigration interviews. I encountered a woman who has lived in Canada for nearly 15 years, been a Canadian citizen for nearly 12 years who lives and works in Surrey. This lady was sponsoring a spouse to come to Canada but she could not conduct the immigration interview with the Canadian official in either of our official languages. She had to conduct the interview through a Punjabi translator, which made me wonder.

Is this an isolated example? Regrettably I don’t believe it’s isolated enough. Regrettably it’s too typical I believe of our failure to give people an opportunity to integrate. How can a woman such as this really open the doors to economic opportunity, to broader social integration, if she’s locked out by linguistic ability?

I believe that one area in which we can ask both immigrants and the country to make a greater effort is that of language. Language gives people the tools they need to further their skills and find their place in the world. The ability to effectively communicate in either English or French is crucial to success in Canada.

This need for language skills is one way to explain that while both male and female immigrants are more likely to have university degrees compared to native born Canadians they earn significantly less than native born counterparts. Now as many of you may know this month a new report from Statistics Canada confirmed the importance of having ability in English or French in the success that immigrants experience in our labour markets.

Government policy has recognized the importance of language. Programs such as Link as well as our enhanced language training and Bridge to Work programs give newcomers in Canada access to programs that aim to develop language skills.

How broad typical is the case of the lady of Punjabi background that I mentioned? It’s hard to say but this much I can tell you. Only 25% of newcomers to Canada actually enroll in the free Link programs that we offer to permanent residents prior to citizenship. The language of instruction for newcomers to Canada serve many purposes for newcomers but the title explains their main goal – to help them learn English or French.

Why is response so low and what can we do to address it? Are the language training programs we support responding as much as possible to the needs of newcomers? We’re working to address these issues and I really look forward to input that you can provide.

In the first Speech from the Throne following the last election, our government promised to work with the provinces to increase uptake in settlement services.

Since 2006 we’ve substantially increased, more than tripling funding to settlement programs to the tune of an additional $1.4 billion over five years in provinces and territories outside Quebec to reach roughly the per capita funding for Quebec. So the funding is there but I still have questions about the actual response from newcomers. Are there new ways we should consider to better encourage the use of settlement programs such as language training?

This is why I’m interested in exploring if some sort of certificate could be given to newcomers for an appropriate amount of language training, one where they could use the language training provider that they feel would be best for them and one which would also be portable. We all heard, many of us perhaps, about the Federation of Municipalities commentary yesterday of the costs to large municipalities of secondary migration. Perhaps a certificate like this would assist with settlement costs for centres of secondary migration.

I realize that this idea breaks with the status quo but I still believe it’s worth discussing because of the possibilities it raises. Perhaps it would prompt settlement organizations to be more responsive to the needs of newly empowered newcomers. Again I would really receive warmly your input on this.

Let me say a few words about what I regard as the top priority of new Canadians that I meet across the country and that is the issue of foreign credential recognition.

Just two weeks ago in Edmonton I met a Syrian obstetrician gynecologist who’s lived in Canada for five years. She did her full medical training, several years of residency, delivered hundreds of babies in her country of origin, came to Canada with great hopes and aspirations and for five years has been a chambermaid cleaning hotel rooms, for five years has been unable to get a clear, direct pathway or answer on her credential recognition while we desperately need doctors to deliver babies.

Here we have a medical doctor cleaning hotel rooms. This is a human tragedy. It’s an unspeakable waste. It causes untold emotional stress for women and men like this doctor and it must stop. We have taken action at the federal level. We launched the Foreign Credential Recognition Referral Office in 2007 to help prospective immigrants understand our labour markets before they come here and to explore ways to improve foreign credential recognition.

I’m delighted as well that on January 16th of this year the Prime Minister led a consensus among the heads of the provincial governments to create a national framework for credential recognition by the end of this year and our government has put $50 million to put the meat on the bones of that national framework in the months ahead.

I’m also pleased to announce today that the Foreign Credentials Referral Office (FCRO) is continuing to advance its important work and today we are releasing, the FCRO is releasing a booklet entitled, which will be available on line to newcomers, entitled “Planning to Work in Canada? An Essential Workbook for Newcomers” which can be found at credentials.gc.ca. Its aim is to help prospective immigrants before they arrive in Canada to prepare a personalized action plan to find a job that fits their training.

It will include information about how to begin the credential assessment process as well as how to explore alternatives when immediate access to the previous professions isn’t possible. While this will be useful to recent arrivals in Canada we also encourage potential immigrants to begin this process prior to coming to Canada so they’re better prepared to enter the labour force when they arrive.

In that regard I’m really impressed by the great work being done by the pilot project, the Canadian Immigration Integration Project which we do and sponsor in cooperation with the Canadian Association of Community Colleges. I visited one of our offices in New Delhi where we are giving newcomers a head start on integration including credential recognition after they have received their invitation to come here as permanent residents but before they land.

These are just some of the many concrete challenges we face as we try to improve the tools that we offer to newcomers. While newcomers have a duty to integrate, we have a responsibility to make the tools of integration available. We’re doing more than we’ve ever done before and I want to acknowledge the great work done by our many settlement organizations and provincial governments as well.

We all must redouble our efforts to ensure that the Canadian model of immigration, of integration, of pluralism remains a successful one.

In a country as diverse as ours, this will challenge those of us in government to ensure that all public institutions, as well as with the private sector, work together to respond to newcomers’ needs and help them to integrate into this country. I hope that all of us in Canada can open our minds to new ways to promote integration and to continue the work of building this country and its connections to the world.

As you can see, there’s no lack of subject matter for those of you who do research to study and at the same time our government will work to emphasize policy that is based on the kind of evidence that experts such as you produce. In a country as diverse as ours, this will challenge those of us in government to ensure that all public institutions as well as with the private sector work together to respond to newcomers’ needs and help them integrate successfully into this great country of equality of opportunity, of hope and of opportunity.

I hope that all of us in Canada can open our minds to new ways to promote integration and to continue the work of building this country and its connections to the entire world.

Thank you very much.