Toronto, Ontario
June 19, 2015
As delivered
Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for that introduction. Thanks for the chance to be here. It’s wonderful to be back home in Toronto because this is where I’m from, even though home today for my family and for some of us who have traveled in from Durham region is the beautiful town of Ajax by the lake – the best waterfront in the GTA, everyone. So come on out with your bicycle or your roller-blades and enjoy it with us.
It’s also delightful to be here with so many of our friends and partners in delivering excellence in Canadian immigration. We’re a team in doing this. We’re renowned around the world as a country for putting immigration and citizenship issues at the centre of our economic life and of our national life across the board and so I’m honored to be your last speaker of this season and to be addressing these issues, because they are an area of strength for Canada.
Yes, there are frustrations, there are long applications, there are changes in policies and regulations that we’ll have to keep up with. There’s complexity and we have moved in many areas at break-neck speed, certainly by the standards of goverment, to try to ensure that Canada is at the cutting-edge, that Canada can really say that we’re the best at delivering these kinds of programs. I’m delighted to be able to share some of that experience with you, hear your questions and prepare for a summer which will have a different focus for those of us in elected office at the federal level, obviously. But where I know immigration, diversity and integration issues, as well as our citizenship that unites all of these programs together, will continue to be at the centre of our attention.
I’m particularly delighted to be at the Economic Club of Canada. Thank you for all the outreach you do and all the efforts you make to keep the economic and the national conversation so vital for us.
It is indeed a fitting day to be here as federal minister, as a Member of Parliament, because this will be the last day that Parliament sits as the 41st Parliament. It’s been well over four years since the last election. It’s been a record, in the last couple of decades, of really unprecedented achievements for Parliament, a record number of private member’s bills, a record number of pieces of government legislation, and I’m proud to say that it probably hasn’t been a Parliament for which – and even a series of parliaments since 2006 – for which immigration has been more central than it has been over these past nine years in Ottawa.
My only goal today is to convince you that we have been working in this government tirelessly to ensure that Canada has been and remains the most committed country in the world to attracting skills and talent that are known to be crucial to our economic future, to our prosperity and, indeed, to our future as a country. And we do that for all of Canada, we do it in particular for the GTA because this is the largest urban area by far in Canada and – as a natural consequence of that – it’s the top destination for the largest number of newcomers and immigrants coming to our country every year.
It’s six million people, as you know, if you take Toronto, Durham, PO and York, and closer to eight million if you include Halton and Hamilton, the big and growing towns and cities that are literally connected to this city of Toronto in such intimate ways. And we receive – just in the GTA – between 77,000-114,000 immigrants per year, sometimes as much as half of Canada’s overall intake. In recent years, maybe it’s a bit less than half and that’s without even calculating those that land in other parts of the country, and then migrate to Toronto because of the labor market or for family reasons, for education, etc.
And it’s not just a very large city with very large immigration numbers. I mean think of the rest of the world. There is no other country in the world that – of six or eight million people – that takes anywhere close to 100,000 or 120,00 immigrants, two thirds of them economic immigrants. We are unquestionably as well, I think, the most diverse city or urban area in the world.
I heard a speech by another Conservative politician, actually it was in a book by this politician, Boris Johnson, the mayor of the city of London. He’s just been re-elected and has gone back to the House of Commons. And he said proudly in his book that “London is the most diverse city in the world. We have in London, 24 or 28 ethnocultural groups with over 10,000 members just in the city of London.”
Well, he clearly hasn’t done his research very well. Because, if you look at the immigration statistics for Canada and our national diversity, there are close to 90 ethnocultural groups nationally. At least half of them would have over 20,000 people in the country and Toronto tends to have a third or a half of that diversity. So I think it’s safe to say, I don’t think his research has been done. We probably have 40 or 50 ethnocultural groups with over 10,000 members in Toronto. That’s twice the diversity of the city of London. It’s way beyond what L.A. or New York can boast, even with their incredible diversity, let alone small urban centres like Miami.
So this city is not only doing well in terms of immigration and doing well economically because of immigration, because of a deliberate increase of recruitment-based immigration. We are a story of success for migration, for economic growth based on migration and for success based on economic freedom, and the freedom and prosperity for which we’re renowned. That is, in many ways, second to none and let’s just remind ourselves, you know, this is a story that goes back to a time before European and Asian immigration, it goes back to our aboriginal forebears, this was a centre of population for the Pickering culture as one of the pre-contact cultures of this area is known. I’ve been to a site in my own riding, close to the lands that were expropriated for an airport that was never built, where there are 50 long houses and I would just say there may have been 15,000 people living at one time and then exhausting the land, migrated. This was a densely populated area even before the Europeans came.
Then we got the fur trade, we were part of La Nouvelle France. We started to develop those transoceanic, in the first instance, transatlantic trading links which have been so critical to our success. Then, not too long before the War of 1812, we were a very small village and then a small town, burned down, invaded, occupied. You know, 200 years ago this month, Toronto was a few hundred people still recovering from a recent American occupation.
Reading about the battle of Waterloo, hoping that war was over and indeed it was over and we are fortunate to be one of the only countries in the world that has had 200 years of uninterrupted peace within the same borders, no civil war, no invasion, no revolution. Those are the kinds of conditions that immigrants generally are looking for and we started to be a destination for immigration basically from that time, from 1815 onwards. In the first half of the 19th century, Canada received its first million immigrants, its first group of immigrants numbering that many and then we moved onto Confederation, the national policy railways, the settlement of the west which had immigration again as its life blood.
Sir John A. Macdonald was his own minister of immigration and he was the first person to bring immigration levels in Canada up to the level of the 100,000 in a single year, which was unprecedented before then and still impressive given the size of Canada at that time. That brought us into the second half of the 19th century, our next two million immigrants. Then we went through a more difficult period, the World Wars, less immigration, less migration generally in the world, especially to Canada, but many people still came through Pier 21 and I’m sure there are people in this room who can trace their forebears to that.
This was before we hit the new heyday of immigration – starting in 1960 with the removal of bans and restrictions on immigration from any particular region of the world under the Diefenbaker government, and then the introduction of the point system under the Pearson government. We’ve had, from 1960 to 2005, about eight million immigrants from all parts of the world.
But even those amazing eras of immigration are surpassed by what has been happening since 2006. Around 2.5 million immigrants to Canada in only nine years and, this year, we will have up to 285,000 new immigrants, almost 65% of them economic immigrants, building on the highest sustained level of immigration in Canadian history, over 250,000 per year since 2006.
And what else has changed? Our retention levels. While we don’t measure them as well as we would like to, we don’t know as clearly who is leaving Canada as we know who is arriving, all the anecdotal evidence is that they have improved, that there is a brain gain, Canadians coming back and fewer immigrants moving on. There’s been a halo effect obviously for the Canadian economy, particularly after the 2008-2009 downturn, because of our relative stability, because banks like the Toronto-Dominion and four other of our largest banks and our financial system held up so much better under the stress of that huge crisis. And then, of course, the quality of life of our cities and our country remains very much in demand the world over.
So 260,000 to 285,000 this year in immigration, contrast that with the United States which, in 2005, was bringing in 1.2 million people, and this year will bring 990,000. So under four times what we’re bringing for a country that is nine times as big. The U.K. hit a peak of, I think, 450,000 economic migrants, not all of them becoming immigrants before the crisis. Now they’re well down to about the same level as us, but a country that, in population terms, is twice as big. Australia has reduced immigration in the last couple of years. Germany has very large levels, but smaller on a per capita basis than Canada.
So what has been the key to our success? Why is there public support for immigration and, obviously, an economic rationale that we all recognize. Well let me go through four of the core components of the answer to that question and, obviously, keeping in mind that doctoral dissertations are written on this issue, on these issues almost every week. First, it’s a question of families. We’re a country that doesn’t just recruit the economic immigrant, the skilled person or the person who is being persecuted and needs Canada’s protection for humanitarian reasons, we recruit their family and, well, the numbers have been high since 2006, generally for our immigration.
Family reunification has gone through a particular renaissance – 600,000 families have come to Canada since 2006 through immigration. We will welcome another 70,000 permanent residents in the family class just this year. In addition to those high numbers in rates of permanent residents for family members, we put in place an Action Plan for Faster Family Reunification which is, through a backlog for parents and grandparents, bringing about 75,000 parents and grandparents in only three years and, on top of that, we’re offering a super visa which requires the sponsoring children to pay for health insurance. That has brought in another 50,000 parents and grandparents in the past three years.
And so the rates of family reunification are unprecedented and there is no other country in the world that offers a large scale program for parents and grandparents to join their children here. So our commitment to families is stronger and broader than really anyone else in our peer group.
But, as you bring in families, we also have to ensure integrity and, for all of us involved in immigration, I think there’s a recognition that while the family principle is central, there are also those who try to target the family program with various forms of abuse that can be extremely dangerous – marriages of convenience, which is a very serious issue, marriage fraud, and human smuggling masquerading as family reunification.
Yesterday the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act received royal assent. What will that bill do? It ensures that forced marriage in Canada is under the Criminal Code and that it is considered unacceptable under our immigration system. All of those involved in denying young people the right to choose each other, with free and enlightened consent, and anyone who is actively and knowingly involved in arranging a forced marriage will now be committing a criminal act. This is not common in our immigration system, but we know of hundreds of cases and, when we extrapolate from those case studies to the political system, we can safely say that there have been thousands of cases in recent decades in Canada and, of course, one is too many. This is against a backdrop of hundreds of millions of women and girls around the world who are forced into marriage before adulthood in almost every region of the world on a grand scale.
So family is central, but families only thrive because of economic success. And economic immigration has never been more central to the logic of this program, of this tradition that we have in Canada. We know that Canada would simply stop growing, certainly in terms of our population, probably to some degree in terms of our GDP growth rate, if we did not have immigration. It’s an engine of growth and immigrants are in demand in every part of the country and in some sectors and in some skilled areas, obviously in very acute demand.
We also know that economic immigrations happens where there are free markets, where there is expanding opportunity, where investments in trade are growing and so our economic immigration is linked to all the economic policies we have across the country – to keep taxes low, to train a workforce that is second to none, to make strategic investments in the competitiveness of the sectors that we know are Canada’s forte and must be supported to ensure the jobs of the future. We also invest in an international system that will continue to favor the expansion and opening of markets and investment to Canada and from Canada into profitable investments around the world.
That’s why we have to stand up to Vladimir Putin. He’s bad for business, certainly in Russia, but in all of Europe and, indeed, in the world when borders are changed by force, markets disapprove and sometimes they can tumble. Similarly, the threat of terrorism in Iraq and Syria which has already caused devastation in those two countries, can threaten almost any part of the world. Civil aviation, terrorist attacks against civilians – it needs to be addressed if we’re to move our economic agenda forward. There cannot, as the Prime Minister is fond to say, there cannot be prosperity without security and our security is not one only at home where we need to keep ourselves safe, our streets safe, Canadians safe, but also abroad because we depend on this international system.
So what has been the story of our economic immigration? Well, we inherited a lot of backlogs. They’ve been painstakingly eliminated over nine years. We have to feed our economic immigration with other forms of temporary migration. We’ve invested, in recent years, in much better infrastructure to deliver visitor visas around the world faster, in larger quantities. Especially in enormous growing markets like China, India, Brazil, Mexico. And last year, we saw about a 10% increase in the number of visas issued, in addition to a new phenomenon – 90% of the visitor visas we give out now around the world are ten-year multiple entry visas – one third of them were issued in China last year.
So we’re empowering our visitors, business people, tourists, family members and others not just to come once and then go back and pay the fee again, but to come multiple times a year and not to have to come back to us in our visa application centres or our missions abroad for a decade.
We’re also feeding the immigration system by pursuing an international education strategy. We aim to have 450,000 foreign students in Canada by 2022, that’s against about 150,000 nine or ten years ago. So we’re, in effect, tripling the number in a little over 15 years, certainly less than two decades, and we’re well on course.
We don’t have the final numbers for late last year, but we’re well over 300,000. We issued or renewed 212,000 international study permits in 2014 and look again at the number for China –54,300 Chinese students came in 2013. In 2014, it was 62,200 in one year from one country, at all levels, primary and secondary.
And why is this relevant to immigration? Because our immigrants are increasingly those who have studied and worked in Canada already. Because our economy is linked to the rest of the world, because we have temporary foreign workers, because we have those who have received work permits under our International Mobility Program, because we have students who want to stay here and continue, it’s natural that we should recruit them when they’re willing to be immigrants. Some of them are this afternoon and we have developed the Provincial Nominee Program, the Canadian Experience Class, which didn’t exist before 2008 for precisely that purpose.
The reform of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, some of you may have questions about it, our efforts to put Canadians and immigrants and permanent residents first in the job market, has also had the effect of refocusing all of our efforts on permanent immigration. We’re not a country that wants to have an underclass or a second class of workers who are tied to only one employer, where they are in a massive scale, who don’t have the same rights as immigrants or citizens – we’ve never been that way. Many other countries have that model. Our reforms will ensure that we’re only taking temporary foreign workers when Canadians or immigrants aren’t available to do the job and that temporary foreign workers are welcome to make the transition to immigration in the vast majority of cases.
Obviously, we’re also recruiting much more actively for language skills. Every study of economic immigration shows that those who arrive with middle or advanced language skills in English or French or both do much better. And then – the crowning achievement of our economic immigration program so far as a country, and I’ve been very proud to be part of this in my time as minister – has been the launch of Express Entry on January 1st. There are 35,000 to 40,000 candidates already in the pool. They tell us who they are, they tell us what their language skills are, the younger among us, anyone under my age gets points for their age..at my age, you stop getting them. They tell us what their education is, they tell us what their work experience is. They’re ranked and sorted on the basis of the points that we’ve always had for 50 years and then the best ones get an invitation.
And, so far, over 11,000 have been invited. Many of them have some study experience in Canada. The average age is younger than we’ve seen previously, for obvious reasons. And the education, the talent, the work experience of these people is phenomenal, really unprecedented in the history of Canadian immigration and they come from all over the world. Why is it working well? You have to establish a profile online if you want to start the process. It’s recruitment-based. We’re going after you, because you’ve outranked others or because an employer has found you and offered you a job and employers have a role. Through Job Bank, they can see who is the pool, they can see who is coming through Express Entry and offer them jobs sooner rather than later, in many cases, before new immigrants actually land in the country.
So it’s a new world for employers in the room across the GTA and Canada. And there’s a very important message that I don’t think has been fully brought home to everyone and that is – if you can’t find a Canadian to do a job in any skilled trade, professional, or managerial category and you’ve advertised and there’s no Canadian available, you can come to us, not to my department, but to Pierre Poilievre’s Employment and Social Development Canada and apply for a Labor Market Impact Assessment. Yes, it’s a long form, but you can get that LMIA for free and then recruit someone through Express Entry to come as an immigrant.
We want immigrants to come with jobs offers – especially when Canadians are not available – as often as possible and we want them to come, if at all possible, as permanent immigrants, not as temporary foreign workers. It’s better for them, it’s better for their employers, it’s better for all of us.
Let me give you an example of a few of these people. Emma Hughes, I met her at Union Station a few weeks ago, is a successful candidate from Ireland who applied under the federal skilled worker. She’s now a junior research and development scientist for EcoSynthetix in Burlington. She’s a chemist, very talented, could have gone to five or six different countries, but came to Canada because of permanent residence and because we processed her application in weeks – not months.
Frank Zhao and Anita Zheng are also among some of the first PRs under Express Entry. Both applied under the Canadian Experience Class. Frank came to Canada from China as an international student in 2003, graduated from Mohawk College in business accounting in 2010, today he’s a certified bookkeeper at Wing on New Group Canada, in Markham. Anita also graduated in Canada, in her case from Humber College in supply chain management. Today, she’s a dispatch logistician at DMA Logistics in Mississauga. Both were international students from China, which shows that this is and remains one of the key pathways for economic immigrants.
Express Entry is also working well in Vancouver, it’s working everywhere, but I’ve also met some of the successful candidates there. Thanikachalam Ananthakrishnan from India, from Chennai, and Miss Zoe Cremin from Ireland. Thanika was accepted under the Federal Skilled Worker Program and is now a front end engineer at a clothing manufacturing business. He’s basically the guy that does the software for Indochino, one of Canada’s most successful online retailers. They started online, they’re developing stores now. They’re in North America, they’re in Asia. They would not be able to do that without the talent of a software engineer of this new immigrant’s quality who had worked for Amazon and, again, his application was processed in weeks – not years, as in the past. Miss Cremin is a software engineer at Sycle.net Technologies, a software management company based in Vancouver.
So, in addition to those offerings through Express Entry, we have a Start-up Visa for entrepreneurs, the only one of its kind in the entire world. The first two Start-up Visas were awarded in July 2014. We’ve since had 14 successful applications, from Fredericton to Vancouver and the biggest crop so far has been in Toronto. This is an opportunity the world over to do a deal with a Canadian angel, venture capital partner or incubator and literally to receive permanent residence on the strength of that deal, which may or may not include an investment.
We also have an Immigrant Investor Venture Capital Program. In short, we’re trying to innovate our immigration programs and, in cooperation with our provincial and territorial partners, ensure that we not only have large-scale immigration, we not only have economic immigration that meets employers’ needs, but we’re using the immigration system to attract the talent that has the ideas for tomorrow’s ventures, for tomorrow’s sectors, for tomorrow’s industries. We want to make it easier for those on the cutting-edge for whole new industries to come to Canada. We know what an asset a flexible and faster immigration system is on all of those fronts and the feedback – obviously from our venture capital community and from all of our advanced manufacturing and high-tech communities in response to these improvements – has been overwhelmingly positive.
Companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google and others, European companies, Asian companies, are interested in having hubs and training facilities in Canada, in part because they know that they can get their people here using our programs which are modern, which have been updated recently – which is not the case in many of our peer countries.
This does not stop us from being incredibly generous still to refugees. I don’t know if my friend Chantal Delage has had a chance to read the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ report from yesterday, but there’s some amazing news there for Canada. We continue to have a strong asylum system focused on countries where there’s real persecution, no longer taking large numbers of asylum claimants from the European Union or Mexico or other safe countries, but we remain at the forefront of international efforts to resettle refugees who are the most in need of our protection.
There are 60 million people who are refugees, internally displaced asylum seekers who are stateless in today’s world. It’s much more than ever before since the end of WWII. The United States resettled over 70,000 refugees last year. Good on them. They’ve always been in first place on this, but the No. 2 country was Canada – 12,300, which is much more than the U.S. on a per capita basis – about 1,000 ahead of Australia, the third most important country, and about 10,000 ahead of any other country for the resettlement of refugees. Sweden was fourth with about 2,000.
The bottom line is not enough countries are doing this, helping those with high medical needs, those fearing for their very lives in refugee camps in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Turkey. We can’t take them all, obviously. The world needs to respond there, but resettlement is one of the solutions and I’m very proud that we have a commitment to resettle 40,000 Iraqi and Syrian refugees over a number of years, which is without precedent in the world today.
And why does all of this work? Because immigrants aren’t just invited to Canada by a welcoming population, they aren’t just quickly appreciated parts of the community in Toronto and across the country, they aren’t just hard-working entrepreneurs, skilled workers, members of the workforce, a really talented workforce across the country in all fields – they are expected to go on to become citizens. And there is no country in the world that sees over 85% of its immigrants go on to become citizens.
It’s not easy, there’s a knowledge test, there’s a language test, there’s a residency requirement. We want people to have that sense of connection to Canada, to buy into our laws, to buy into our institutions, even if they want to change them by democratic means, but it’s an astonishing achievement. And I think one statistic in the UNHCR report yesterday that sums up what is great about Canadian immigration is exactly on this front.
Of all of the refugees last year, in 2014 around the world who were recorded to have become citizens of their new countries of residence, the countries that took them and gave them protection – and there were 27 of countries around the world – in Canada, 88% of them became citizens. There is no other country that is generous the way we are, that is committed the way we are and I know it’s because of the commitment of many of you in this room and 35 million of us across the country. So thank you for that and I’m open to your questions.
