Action on immigrant accreditation
The Gazette
Published: Saturday, February 18, 2006
For as long as anyone can remember, Montreal and Canada's other big cities have been hearing about immigrants with professional qualifications - doctors, engineers, veterinarians, nurses, land surveyors, and many more - who find themselves forced to work as cab drivers or dish washers.
As our columnist Janet Bagnall demonstrated last October with two vivid real-life family examples, this is no urban legend; it's a bitter reality for many newcomers to Canada. The situation is made worse for would-be migrants when our immigration authorities overseas assure them that professional qualification in Canada will be quick and painless.
For decades, federal and provincial governments have been smacking their fists into their open palms and vowing to really do something about this, right away. And for precisely as long, almost no real progress has been made.
More recently our leaders have been promising, also, to do something about Canada's need for more skilled labour, and about the growing importance of the "knowledge economy" in this era of demographic change.
These promises have become louder, if not better fulfilled, as the demand for accreditation testing for membership in Quebec's 45 professional orders has grown: from about 750 cases in the year 2000 to almost 4,000 last year.
Isn't it strange, then, that so little really changes when it comes to immigrant professionals? Privately, some elected leaders will say bluntly that some professional orders talk a good game but meanwhile drag their feet, being quietly reluctant to increase competition.
But now a group that speaks for Quebec's 310,000 professionals has made a concrete proposal to speed up the pace of progress toward accreditation for qualified immigrants. The drawback is that this group, the Conseil interprofessionnel du Quebec, says the steps it proposes will cost about $10 million, over "several years." It's calling on the Quebec government to budget the money.
It's true that accreditation isn't free. Assessment and testing do take time and money. When it comes to medical professionals, engineers, or for that matter veterinarians, not every country has standards as high as Canada's. Then there are language requirements, and more. Anyone who claims a certain level of professional ability and knowledge should be able to demonstrate it.
But when the Conseil interprofessionnel made its pitch to the provincial government, the response was tepid, predictable, and discouraging: Immigration Minister Lise Theriault accepted the council's position in principle, but added her department had not worked out cost estimates for the proposed stepped-up testing, nor tried to assess the feasibility of the plan.
Well, why not? This particular proposal might be new to the government, but why has nobody in our nicely paid (and immigrant-poor) civil service looked into backing up rhetoric with the kind of accelerated testing the Conseil proposes?
If the government can't be bothered to act on this problem, it should at least support the efforts of the Conseil interprofessionnel.
