Nobody said it was easy - no one ever said it would be this hard...

Jobs scarce in Canada for skilled foreigners

I wrote about this a few weeks back, but checking out one of my RSS feeds, this article caught my eye. From the Indian Express, it talks about the lack of professional work for qualified immigrants.

"About 25 per cent of recent immigrants with a university degree are working at jobs that require only a high school diploma or less, government data show. Over the last decade, the country has attracted 200,000 to 250,000 immigrants a year—measured as a percentage of the population, that is triple the rate in the US."

What was especially interesting to me was the comment in the article by Joe Volpe:

“We have an arcane infrastructure of professional organisations that essentially mitigate against the immediate integration of these highly skilled immigrants,” Joe Volpe, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, conceded in an interview. “It’s a shame we have a shortage of doctors, and yet we have thousands of foreign trained medical doctors and we don’t recognise their credentials,” he said. “We haven’t found an easy way of assessing their qualifications.”

I wonder if Canada will get brave and instead of looking at ways of legislating for the recognition, perhaps legislate "against" those, like the professional organizations alluded to above that work to block the integration of immigrants into professional life in Canada.

And why does assessing their qualifications have to be "easy"? Why can't it simply be fair. Certainly no one want doctors who aren't qualified to practice in Canada, but just as certainly, given the wait times of up to two or more years, something could be done to allow new immigrants who are waiting to gather the informations or take the tests required to illustrate that they were capable of practicing in Canada.

No one said your job would be easy, Joe - but I have faith you can do it!