Kenney’s break with this pattern has been one of tone as much as substance: while he talks up the importance of economic immigration, he’s cultivated his own strong ties with ethnic groups and maintained family-class immigration targets at or near previous levels. Bill C-50, however, allows Kenney to move with a freedom his Liberal predecessors would have envied, fast-tracking applicants in 38 high-demand occupations—from petroleum engineers to hotel managers—while effectively shutting off the tap from parts of the world awash in family-class applications. Caribbean, Latin American and African candidates appear to have been hit hardest. Canadian-based parents who apply to the immigration post in Nairobi to bring over their children are told they must wait three years, nearly double the projected wait in 2006. In Guatemala, the delay is up 63 per cent during the same period, to 23 months, while wait times for Asian and Pacific countries have grown only marginally.
The sense of unequal treatment rankles people like Jessica Thomas, a 29-year-old Barbudan-Canadian who lives in Toronto. Four years ago, she married a man from Barbuda here in Toronto and became pregnant. But after her husband, Nicholas, returned a few weeks later to the tiny Caribbean island to care for his ailing father, he found he couldn’t get back; evidently, officials suspected the marriage was a sham. Thomas was infuriated (“Who spends $40,000 on a sham wedding?”), not least by the contempt she says the couple encountered at Canada’s high commission in Trinidad. “I’ve found them very rude,” she says, pointedly noting that top positions at the mission appear to be occupied by Asians, Indians and white people. “Maybe they look at people who come from the Caribbean and live off the system. Well, we’re not in that category.”
It’s the sort of ill will that is worth it only if the government can point to tangible results. For the Tories, that’s no slam dunk. Despite the new emphasis on economic immigration, a StatsCan study released in February showed that less than one in four newcomers are finding work in the occupations they’d trained for, while immigrants in general are less likely to be employed than native-born Canadians. It is now trite for politicians to bemoan the professional barriers stopping skilled workers from finding jobs in their field—the proverbial cab driver with a Ph.D. But little has been done to remedy the problem.
Meantime, the de-emphasis on family unification may be driving away the very people the government is trying to recruit. Jim Karygiannis, a Liberal MP representing the ethnically diverse riding of Scarborough-Agincourt, says he’s been hearing from skilled workers and business-class migrants frustrated by the government’s policy of consigning sponsorship applications for parents and grandparents to the bottom of the pile. “A lot of immigrant families want to have the parents or grandparents here to help raise the kids,” he says. “If they can’t do that, they say, ‘Thank you very much but I’m gone.’ ” This is no small concern, given the benefits Canada has gained from immigrants who had upwardly mobile children. (In addition to its ethnic breakdown, last summer’s memo quotes studies concluding that second-generation immigrant youth are on the whole more likely to get high school diplomas, university degrees and high-skill jobs than kids of native-born Canadians.)
All of which exposes the government to criticism that it is turning its back on—if not discriminating against—the sort of people who helped build the country. “I don’t think family reunification exists in [this government’s] vocabulary,” says Judy Sgro, a Liberal MP who served as immigration minister in 2004. Luin Goldring, a York University professor who has studied the difficulties faced by Caribbean and Latin American immigrants, questions “the whole business of looking at people as economic units.” “It divides the person into their economic role and social role,” she says, when studies have shown that all classes of immigrants integrate more smoothly if they establish strong family support networks.
Yet even critics like Sgro acknowledge the need to “get it right” as Canada enters the post-baby-boom economic era, with a birth rate of 1.66 and a host of entitlement programs and pensions to pay for. It is no less a challenge than the one government faced at the turn of the century, when it set out to settle the West, observes Alan Simmons, the author of a forthcoming history on immigration to Canada. But now, as a free-trading nation in a knowledge economy, he says, we would “like to recruit only the perfect designer immigrants,” and that means leaning on the narrow band of countries that have them in surplus. It also means pinching the flow from countries where the education system is lacking, or money is scarce.
It’s a far cry from our fondest self-image as a haven for the lowly, who yearn for a better life. Years ago, during a cross-country train trip, Maclean’s journalist Rae Corelli summoned a romantic image of Canada’s French and English founders leaving “a key under the mat for dreamers from other lands.” The key is still there, of course. But as we weigh an uncertain future, we’re getting a lot more picky about whom we invite to use it.
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