Governments sometimes lack foresight, frequently lack courage and all too often leave behind a mess of some sort that must be fixed by their successors. The architects of a 2002 overhaul of the Canada Immigration and Refugee Act - the Chretien Liberals - were arguably guilty of all three.
Under these reforms, visa officers stationed at Canadian embassies around the world must process every application they receive and they must be processed sequentially within their category. That is, family applicants are dealt with on a first-come, first-served basis. So are potential business-class immigrants.
Visa officers have no discretion and no ability to manage the lists of applicants. These lists have been growing. The backlog stood at fewer than 100,000 in 1993. By 2000, it had grown to 500,000. It currently stands at about 925,000 - two-thirds of whom are skilled workers - and it could reach 1.5 million people within five years.
Applicants are waiting an average of six years to find out whether they will be admitted to Canada. That could hit 10 years if the backlog is allowed to grow. This is obviously a no-win situation for those who dream of becoming Canadians and for the visa officers who have no latitude to manage the files that land on their desks.
The current government in Ottawa has concluded that the system has become a drain on the Canadian economy. As Prime Minister Stephen Harper put it in a speech to the Canada India Foundation on April 18: "Many skilled immigrants are giving Canada a pass and moving instead to countries like Australia and New Zealand where the wait is measured in months. Many of those waiting have the skills, education and work experience needed by the Canadian economy right now."
The aging of the Canadian population is another problem. The prime minister cited figures showing that Canada's labor force grew by 200 per cent in the past 50 years, but is expected to expand by only 11 per cent in the next half-century.
"The least understood economic challenge in Canada and many other western countries in the generation to come will be the potential for widespread labour shortages," he concluded.
The government is introducing a package of immigration reforms this year, some of which were included in the 2008 budget, in order to head off a demographically induced labour crisis and to deal with more immediate needs for skilled labour. The changes would give future immigration ministers the authority to instruct their officers to prioritize applicants on the basis of their skills or occupations when necessary. It is not spelled out in the legislation, but presumably skilled workers would be fast-tracked based on the needs of employers in various parts of the country.
This seems, to a lay observer, like an eminently sensible approach, but it has created a political furore in Parliament. All three opposition parties are aghast. They don't like putting so much discretionary power in the hands of the minister.
Liberal Leader Stephane Dion has accused the government of replacing "an open door with closed arms.”
His deputy, Michael Ignatieff, has said: "The minister is ... just concentrating power in her own hands. The policy will legalize cherry-picking, allowing the minister to choose immigrants with unfettered and final discretion."
Arthur Sweetman, a labour economist and director of the school of public policy at Queen's University in Kingston, contends that the government needs to regain control of the system and that officers in the field do require administrative tools to deal effectively with the backlog.
But he parts company with the government on the demographic issue. The country simply cannot take in enough immigrants to solve the emerging labour shortage, Sweetman argues. Canada admits about 250,000 newcomers annually, less than one per cent of the population. Furthermore, because nearly a third are family class (parents or grandparents joining their offspring in Canada) their demographic profile is not all that different from the country as a whole.
But employers who can't find workers dismiss such arguments, and those of the opposition. "We're short of virtually every trade in the construction industry," says Philip Hockstein, president of the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association of British Columbia. "We're not able to complete projects as fast as we did in the past and that means it costs more money to build."
His members, about 1,000 in all, can't find the labour they need within the province, or elsewhere in the country for that matter. And they're not getting much help from the Immigration Department, according to Hockstein. "The existing system is completely and utterly broken, but the bureaucracy is reluctant to change," he says. "We need recruiters, not gatekeepers. The government has a human-resources function - to bring in the right people to meet the needs of the economy."
(D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)
