Employing skilled immigrants to fill gaps will be key to Canada’s post-COVID recovery
Every year, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of them highly skilled, choose to make Canada their home. Far too often, however, skilled newcomers struggle to find work in their professions. They face significant financial and regulatory barriers that prevent them from fully integrating into the Canadian labour market and the sectors where their skills, training and experience are desperately needed.
Canadians obviously want to know that the various professionals they encounter are fully qualified. But raising certification barriers too high affects real people and their families and puts a damper on the Canadian economy. So it is good that new Ontario legislation may help speed up licencing for skilled newcomers — though it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
I recently met Moez, a trained pharmacist who immigrated from India in 2015. Despite working two jobs packaging orders at restaurants in Calgary he was not able to afford the cost of re-licensing to practice pharmacy in Canada. Relicensing costs for internationally trained pharmacists range from $9,000 to $25,000, depending on the province and the requirements to be fulfilled.
Such stories are common among immigrants. We’ve all heard of or met internationally-trained doctors, nurses or engineers who make a living driving taxis because they can’t get the certifications they need to work here — even though we are facing severe labour shortages in critical sectors such as health care as Canadian-born boomers retire. Job vacancies reached a record high in Canada in the third quarter of 2021, with 118,000, one-fifth of the total, reported in the health-care and social assistance sector. Employing skilled immigrants to fill these gaps will be key to Canada’s post-COVID recovery.
The good news is that recent legislation in Ontario amending The Fair Access to Regulated Professions and Compulsory Trades Act will significantly reduce licensing barriers for skilled newcomers.
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