The Time is Now: Rethinking Canada’s Immigration System in the Wake of the Pandemic

On December 1, 2020 Senator Omidvar relaunched her inquiry on the link between Canada’s past, present and future prosperity and its deep connection to immigration.

Hon. Ratna Omidvar: I realize, being the last speaker on the Order Paper, I have a responsibility because I stand between my colleagues and their well-earned rest. I promise to be both brief and engaging.

On February 4 of this year, I rose in this chamber to launch an inquiry on the link between prosperity and immigration. As I think back to that time, how much has changed in these short 10 months: how we live, how we behave, how we travel and also how we think. I come to this retabled inquiry with some fresh eyes and experiences. I want to link it, not just to our prosperity but now more and more to our health and safety.

The last time I spoke about this, I spoke to you about Canada’s long history of immigration, our robust immigration system and the contributions immigrants make to our economy. I also outlined some of the challenges that Canada faces, including racism and the barriers that immigrants face in working in their field of training, as well as in making sure that immigrants are spread across this vast country and not just in a few multicultural cities.

The pandemic, though, has brought a new question that deserves to be discussed, and that is the question of essential workers. Essential workers are everywhere. They work in long-term care homes as personal support workers, as grocery retail clerks and shelvers, as truck drivers, in meat-packing plants and on farms.

Every day they put their lives at risk so that our lives can carry on. Many of them we know are new Canadians, temporary foreign workers or asylum seekers. Too often, their status equates to unsafe working conditions, low pay and limited rights.

According to Statistics Canada, approximately 36% of nurse aides, orderlies and patient service associates are immigrants. The agriculture sector is also, as we now well know, highly dependent on temporary foreign workers, who account for 20% of total employment in the sector. Workers in these occupations, especially those working in long-term care facilities in Quebec and Ontario, have been at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19. We also know that seasonal agricultural workers have been particularly hard hit, with hundreds becoming infected over the summer.

Over the last three decades, Canada has focused on prioritizing high-skilled workers. They and their families make up the single largest cohort in our annual immigration plans. Over time, I believe we have developed an addiction to filling our labour market needs with those we believe have the fastest and best way to create wealth for themselves and for Canada. But it has proven to be tunnel vision of a kind, because it has prevented us from thinking of the labour market and its needs as a whole. Any economy will need workers at all ends of the scale, but we have left our unfilled low-skilled jobs to the vagaries of temporariness.

As we build back better or stronger, whatever the new language is, we would do well to scope out a multi-dimensional look and accept that any economy needs workers and talent at all ends of the scale. Canada will certainly need those with the education to compete in a knowledge economy as well as workers for the service industry, semi-professional health care and agriculture.

If we do indeed need essential workers, then let’s agree to treat them in an essential manner, with essential rights and essential pay. Let’s consider pathways to permanency for those who have long been denied this simply because they are low-skilled. I think we now accept the fact that low-skilled does not equate to low value.

There have, of course, been other unintended victims of this crisis. The high dependency of our post-secondary educational institutions on international foreign students has led to a financial crunch for our universities and colleges. The economies of whole towns rely on these students who contribute $22 billion to our economy and create 170,000 jobs. The Trump bump that we experienced in the last four years in terms of foreign students may well wane now because of the change in the system to the south of us, but we need to continue to put our best foot forward to ensure that international foreign students choose Canada not just for studies, but possibly for permanence. They are the veritable low-hanging fruit in this constellation.

The pandemic has also had a devastating impact on annual immigration landings. In my earlier speech, I laid out the reasons why it is critical for Canada to sustain and grow our numbers of landings for two reasons, which I believe are worth repeating.

First, as a stabilizer of our population and our economy, we need more people who will create more economic activity and, therefore, provide greater prosperity for all Canadians.

Second, the Canadian population is aging. This is a fact. The average age of the population is moving up as life expectancy increases, birth rates decline and the baby boomer generation ages. This also means that the number of workers supporting seniors is shrinking.

The delays in landings will result in a low number of 200,000 permanent residents landing in 2020 as opposed to the plan for 341,000. Again, this will contribute to other stresses in our economic stability and growth. As a result, the government has announced that Canada will increase its targets and welcome more than 1.2 million new immigrants over the next three years. Demographic modelling suggests that our population could reach 100 million at the turn of the century if Canada indeed meets these new immigration targets and then increases annual immigration by 20,000 from 2024 to 2026 and holds immigration levels at an average of 1.22% of the population from 2027 onwards.

But I am unsure whether we will meet these immigration targets in the short term unless we put some sacred cows out to pasture, such as aggressively landing those who are already in Canada: temporary visa holders, foreign students and, yes, maybe even asylum seekers.

Which brings me to my last point. In all this doom and gloom, there is a ray of light. Canadians have never been more open to and more appreciative of immigrants than now. They are less likely to think of asylum seekers and refugees as simply queue jumpers. The majority of Canadians continue to see immigrants as critical to the Canadian economy and do not feel that they take jobs away from other Canadians. So if ever there was a time to retool, reimagine and remake immigration, the time is now. It cannot be business as usual or business as it was before the pandemic.

I invite my colleagues to add their views to this inquiry so that we can indeed build back stronger. Thank you, colleagues.