Proceedings of the Subcommittee on Cities
Issue 3 - Evidence, May 6, 2009
OTTAWA, Wednesday, May 6, 2009
The Subcommittee on Cities of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 4:04 p.m. to examine and report on current social issues pertaining to Canada's largest cities.
Senator Art Eggleton (Chair) in the chair.
translation
The Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the Subcommittee on Cities. Today, we will be looking into the issues of poverty, housing and homelessness.
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Today's topic, in particular, is the impact of poverty on recent arrivals, immigrants, refugees, coming to Canada. We have three terrific witnesses.
From British Columbia, via video conference, we have Daniel Hiebert, professor of geography at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on public policy related to the issues of immigration and cultural diversity in Canada and internationally. Almost all of his work is done as part of the Metropolis Project, a network of research centres across Canada and internationally. Welcome, Professor Hiebert.
At the table, we have Damaris Rose, who is a professor at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique in Montreal. Her research interests include urban and social geography, intercity neighbourhoods, gentrification, social mix, housing policy, urban social policy, gender in the city, immigrant settlement and social integration. She is an expert on many things.
We also have Debbie Douglas, executive director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, based in my home city, Toronto. Ms. Douglas was recently recognized as a Woman of Distinction by the YWCA for her work with women in general and recent immigrants in particular.
Welcome to all three of you. Please try to keep your opening remarks down to around seven minutes or so. You are being watched on internal television, and this also gets broadcast on CPAC in the middle of the night. If you are having some problems sleeping, this is a good program to watch.
Debbie Douglas, Executive Director, Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants: Many of us at our age have insomnia. It is called energy surge.
Thank you for the opportunity to present to your committee. We want to also pay recognition to this committee for the efforts you are making in terms of poverty, housing and homelessness, particularly as it has to do with immigrants and refugees here in Canada.
Let me say from the outset that we are very much concerned about issues of intersectionality, and we are particularly paying attention to gender and racialized communities.
The Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, OCASI, was founded in 1978. We are the umbrella organization for immigrant- and refugee-serving agencies in Ontario. We are a registered charity. We have a volunteer board of directors that comes out of our member agencies and, at present, we have more than 220 member organizations across the province. We are the largest NGO in Canada.
To give you a bit of context about what we do, we attempt to tie our research and policy work to the work being done at the national level, Statistics Canada and other research bodies and community groups that you are familiar with, and they provide the context you need and that we work within.
The face of immigration to Canada has changed to the extent that members of racialized communities are among the majority of newcomers who have arrived over the last 15 years. Poverty among newcomers, particularly newcomers from racialized communities, has been increasing over the last 10 years to the point where many newcomer families and individuals may never be able to free themselves from this cycle for at least a generation or two.
Poverty in Canada, and particularly in Ontario, is highly racialized. Members of racialized communities are overrepresented among the poor, according to the Colour of Poverty Campaign, also called the Colour of Change Network in Ontario, of which OCASI is a founding member. While the poverty rate for the non-racialized or European groups fell by 28 per cent in Toronto between 1980 and 2000, it rose by 361 per cent among racialized groups, and that is from Grace-Edward Galabuzi at Ryerson University.
Thirty-two per cent of children who are coming out of poor families are from racialized communities, and 47 per cent of all recent immigrant families to Ontario are below the LICO, low income cut-off, and live in poverty, such as the Chinese, Blacks and Middle Easterners. Racism continues to produce and sustain systemic barriers to full social, economic and political participation of members of racialized communities in Canada. It has a pervasive impact on the lives of new immigrants and refugees. In the document that I handed out to you, it says ``newcomers,'' but I do not like that language. It is just pervasive and we have to pay attention to it.
I will try to spend a quick moment, because one of the things you asked me to do was to provide brief feedback on your document that I have here. We welcome many of the options outlined in your paper. We did a good analysis of it, particularly those options that seek to redress the imbalance in government programs around income security and the inequities in labour market integration and in housing.
We feel that the issues and options outlined demonstrate a lack of sensitivity to the insidious impact of racism, and a lack of understanding of the experience of newcomers, particularly racialized newcomers. The document does not have a race analysis, and that is problematic.
The paper appears to have rendered these populations invisible. It speaks as if the same circumstances exist for everyone within our country, and we know that is not true. For example, the paper notes that income support systems now in place for seniors are, for the most part, successful in increasing program take-up, which we are actually glad about because that is one of the things we have been paying attention to, as well as the level of support provided.
However, a major concern for many member agencies at OCASI is that newcomer seniors from countries that do not have a social security agreement with Canada have to wait 10 years to qualify. European countries and other countries in the global north and some in the global south — and I come from Grenada, which is one of the countries that has an agreement with Canada — are overrepresented among those that have agreements. My grandparents are fine, but that is not true for everyone else who looks like me.
People who come from China, India, Pakistan and Russia, which for the last 10 years have been among the top ten source countries for immigration, and seniors who are coming in, if you look at our selection policies around immigration, these are the people coming in on family reunification. The fact they have not been able to work within Canada and the fact that Canada does not have an agreement with those countries means they are not able to access our pension plans. That puts an undue burden on the families coming in.
One of the reasons family reunification — my staff hates the fact that I do this, but I will do it anyway — is important is because, when we bring our grandparents and parents in, they help to support our families economically. They are the people staying at home, looking after the kids and preventing us from yelling and screaming about the fact that we do not have a national child care program, as much as we should have one. They are the people who are able to add to our housing income.
We are looking at two and three families living in the same home, and we are not paying attention to it because it works for us as a country. That is not okay for our communities and our families.
We are a bit disturbed that your paper talks about the poverty level having fallen among seniors, but it is silent on women. It is silent, as I have already said, on racialized communities. It is silent on immigrants and refugees. We believe that, if we want to develop a truly effective and inclusive poverty reduction strategy, it must include a race and gender analysis. I do not know if you have been paying attention to Ontario, but provincial legislation passed just today dealing with anti-poverty strategies.
Let me talk about EI before you stop me. We welcome the five weeks of expansion that the Tories have granted, but it is not enough. EI eligibility, particularly for Ontario, is critical. We have lost our manufacturing base. We are moving to a knowledge economy. All of you as politicians speak to the knowledge economy, but we have to ensure that every Canadian has access. This means that, in the middle of this recession, we must ensure people do not lose their housing, we must ensure that when we talk about a stimulus package, we pay attention to things like employment insurance and that people are able to have a living wage while they try to retrain, obtain other jobs and get back into the economy. That is what we are about as a nation.
Immigration is about nation-building. It is not about temporary workers. It is not about people coming in to fill part-time, temporary or contingent work. It is about nation-building. It is about who we are as a country. It is about how we move forward. It is about how we compete in the global economy.
If we look at our immigration selection process, those are the kinds of things we ask for. The same people who are highly educated and who have years of experience are the ones who are poor. That is a problem. We cannot speak about getting out of this recession without paying attention to issues of race, to what is happening to women, and to what is happening to racialized communities. I am not only talking about racialized communities as dealing with issues of immigration status, but I am also talking about Canadian-born Black people, 200 years later, in Nova Scotia. We have to pay attention to what is happening in our country.
We cannot be successful as a country without looking at what we are doing when we talk about economic strategy. We cannot talk about not looking at having a national child care strategy. We cannot speak about not having a national housing strategy.
We have over 60,000 people in Ontario who are waiting for housing, and we cannot even begin to talk about housing strategy in Canada because of our immigration policies. Those things interact with each other.
Two- and three-bedroom apartments do not do it, and they certainly do not do it in Toronto when you have families here who have eight and nine kids. Not only do we have to look at built spaces, we also have to look at social spaces.
When we talk as a national government — and this is your responsibility — you have to begin to wrap your head around those issues. I will stop there. I look forward to having a question-and-answer session with you.
The Chair: We definitely will be doing that. Thank you very much.
Daniel Hiebert, Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia: I hope the technical issues are resolved and that you can all hear me. I was told that the volume was not loud enough; please interrupt me if you need to.
The Chair: I think we are okay, but I suggest to my colleagues that they put on their earpieces in case they need it.
Mr. Hiebert: It is a pleasure and a privilege to speak with you today. I will be as brief as I possibly can.
I want to begin with one remark to emphasize the point about the diversity of immigrants coming to Canada. As I am sure everyone on the subcommittee knows, immigrants come through a variety of different admission categories and from different source areas. Some will be racial minorities; others are not.
Immigrants come with different pre-migration socio-economic characteristics, with different family structures and different social networks. They come with different access to global networks of capital.
Some of the immigrants who are coming to Canada have very strong expectations of sending remittances to their home countries, and really suffer from the kind of financial burden that places upon them in Canada. Of course, it is important to say that immigrants come with different capabilities in the two official languages of Canada. This has a huge impact upon their ability to find housing, work, et cetera.
Finally, immigrants come to Canada with different legal statuses. Here I refer to the growing tendency to see temporary migrants in Canada, and the growing interest in creating stepwise immigration systems. Someone might come in one year as an international student to a Canadian university; two years later, they get a visa to work in Canada; and another year or two later, through the Canadian experience class, they become an immigrant to Canada. We have to acknowledge this new stepwise process, and the fact that temporary migrants to Canada may end up staying in Canada their entire lifetime.
The point I was trying to make out of that diversity is that not only do we have a lot of immigrant diversity of who is coming here, there are different circuits of migration that bring people to the major cities of Canada. You are investigating issues in the largest cities across the country. I will speak briefly about the three main immigrant reception centres of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, and emphasize the point that different types of immigrants come to these cities.
It is very difficult to make any kind of uniform national policies when you have very different profiles of people coming to these cities, under different circumstances, living in different housing situations, and so on. Just as a quick example, Montreal has a much larger number of refugees than Vancouver. Vancouver has a much larger number of business-class immigrants than any other city in Canada, and so on. Please keep in mind, as you conduct your deliberations, to be cognizant of the variety of people that are coming to Canada.
For my second point, I will offer a few thoughts on the relationship between immigrants and refugees and low income or poverty in Canadian cities. I am sure everyone on the committee knows the most obvious point — Ms. Douglas just spoke about it at length — which is that immigrants and refugees have lower incomes and higher rates of low income or poverty than the Canadian born. We can then expect there to be a large challenge of immigrant poverty in Canadian cities.
However, I want to draw your attention to a few countervailing facts that are quite interesting and important. First, despite what I just said, it turns out that immigrants achieve a very high rate of home ownership quite quickly after arriving in Canada. This is something that we need to understand, and I will speak a little more about it in a moment.
The second point is that immigrants and refugees are actually under-represented in the absolute homeless population of Canada — that is, the people who are literally living on the streets, living in shelters and so on. That is quite an interesting phenomenon to try to understand: the relationship is between low income for the immigrant population and the small number in absolute homelessness. I think it has a lot to do with social capital within immigrant communities and a huge amount of mutual assistance within these communities.
Finally, a third thing that I think is important to emphasize is that immigrants use social assistance quite rarely in Canada. I will give you a statistic that shocked me, and I have been working in this area for over 10 years.
In British Columbia, 3.5 per cent of the population claimed on their 2005 tax form that they received social assistance. Within the immigrant community, that is the non-Canadian-born community, that was 1.5 per cent. This is an extraordinary statistic when we realize that this is a group with low average incomes, and yet they are receiving very low rates of social assistance. We should think long and hard about what that means.
This reflection on the relationship between poverty and immigration leads to a few general points. The first is we have to acknowledge the spectrum of immigrant economic outcomes, and it is a very wide one.
The second is that, for most immigrants, their housing situation improves dramatically over time, but there is another fraction of the immigrant and refugee population that does not participate in this improvement of the housing situation. We have to think about what kinds of programs would be helpful for that group of people.
The third point is that, for those who are improving their housing situation, a trade-off is being exercised. For the most part, immigrants are trading off crowding and affordability problems on the one hand for building equity on the other hand. They have a very high investment in housing, but that investment is made through bulking up the number of people per housing unit and stretching the budget as far as it can possibly go.
Finally, I will say that the activities of immigrants in the housing markets of Canada's large cities have an enormous impact on the shape and on the nature of those housing markets. To give you one example, let me for a moment take the focus off the main cities of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, and talk about Winnipeg. In Winnipeg, immigrants have an important role in the housing market that tends to have a negative influence on the availability of housing for Aboriginal persons, something we ought to be thinking about.
I had prepared remarks on another topic, which I will skip over now. However, if members of the committee are interested in hearing about it, please ask a question later. We need to acknowledge the fact that immigrant poverty is becoming a concentrated form of poverty within Canadian cities. More and more, we are seeing the rise of minority enclave areas in the inner suburbs of Canadian cities. If you like, I will speak at some length about that issue.
I will skip over now to what I think is perhaps the most important thing to say, and that is to give a few concrete suggestions on where we ought to be going.
I want to compliment the Senate subcommittee on cities for what I see as a really thought-provoking and helpful report from June 2008. I particularly like the suggestions that are made around remedies for the situation of immigrants and housing. I simply would like to add to that list. I want to subtract nothing from it, but add a couple of points.
The first is a specific issue but nevertheless an important one. I find it a great tragedy that our government-assisted refugee program requires that the people who are brought to Canada repay the cost of their transportation. That means in practice that a family that comes from another country and has settled in a Canadian city is given a very large bill six months after they arrive. They have a very large debt. This debt must be paid out of social assistance, because this is before these people have had a chance to find a job or to integrate economically in Canadian society. This puts a tremendous burden on the households, and the lifestyles, of our government-assisted refugees. I wish your committee could do something to convince the Government of Canada that this is wrong-headed policy. It puts these people at too big a disadvantage.
The second point I would make is that we have to acknowledge that, increasingly, Canada is choosing to bring refugees from protracted refugee situations, people who have tremendous challenges. It will take a long time for these people to integrate fully into Canadian society. We ought to be adjusting our social programs and housing programs to take that into consideration. When Canada chose in 2002 to do the right thing, which is to emphasize need in terms of the selection of overseas refugees to be brought to Canadian cities over adaptability, they did not increase the budget for social integration of that population, and this was a public policy mistake that ought to be rectified.
On this particular note, I will make one last comment, which is that immigrant settlement organizations do a wonderful job of helping immigrants. It is a great thing that Canada has put a program in place that transfers money from the federal Government of Canada to these organizations or through provinces to these organizations. This is great. However, this committee needs to aware of the fact that when that money is transferred to these organizations, they are given a list of the main things they are supposed to do to help immigrants settle in Canada. Housing does not appear on that list. It is not one of the core competencies or one of the core settlement forms of assistance that immigrant settlement organizations are required to give to immigrants who come to Canada. Anything this committee could do to put housing on that list would be a major improvement and a great goal for this committee.
Thank you for listening, and I am happy to engage in a Q and A session later.
Damaris Rose, Professor, Urban and Social Geography, Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Centre Urbanisation Culture Société: Good afternoon. I do apologize. I have lost my voice, so I may not get through this, but I will try.
I am pleased and honoured to have been invited to address this panel, and I will address my remarks more narrowly to housing issues. I have looked quickly at your report, not in as much depth as I would like. I would not want to contradict anything in there about housing but would add perhaps a little more depth on certain points, make a few further suggestions, and perhaps take a more dynamic perspective in thinking about how immigrants' housing circumstances need change over time from initial settlement to a few years into the process.
I am an urban and social geographer and a professor of urban studies at the INRS, Institut national de la recherche scientifique, in Montreal, which is a university research and graduate teaching institution affiliated with the University of Quebec network. I am also the coordinator of the ``Housing, Neighbourhood and Urban Environment'' research domain of the Quebec Metropolis Centre, which is one of the five Metropolis Project Centres of Excellence — one located in each region of Canada — funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a consortium of federal partners. Dr. Hiebert and Ms. Douglas are respectively involved in their centres in Ontario and B.C., and we all network frequently. Our goal is to develop, support and disseminate policy-relevant research and foster networking about immigration and cities. Our network links up academics, government stakeholders at all levels, and community organizations. My remarks today will draw on recent research done under the auspices of the Metropolis network, including comparative work I have been involved in with Mr. Hiebert and Valerie Preston at York University, who is also a geographer, on the housing situation of immigrants in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
I want to echo what Mr. Hiebert said about the importance of understanding differences between cities in terms of different housing markets and housing stock, as well as different mixes of immigrants. For instance, the crowding issue that Mr. Hiebert was talking about does not present itself in the same way in Montreal because of different housing stock which raises objective constraints. There are important nuances we need to understand between different cities.
In particular, I want to mention to you that a key source of information from which to get a dynamic perspective on what is happening to immigrants from the arrival stage to a few years after settlement is the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada. It is valuable because it followed a cohort of immigrants through from their arrival as landed immigrants in 2000-2001 and interviewed them at approximately the six-month, two-year and four-year benchmark. In comparative work with Dr. Hiebert and Dr. Preston, we looked at the situation after six months, and Dr. Hiebert and Pablo Mendez went on to look at all three waves of the survey, and I am sure he will be able to answer further questions about that, but I will mention some of the information that you can get from that survey, which we call the LSIC.
First of all, finding housing on arrival to Canada. It goes without saying that finding suitable housing without having to compromise other essentials in the household budget is one of the first priorities of newcomers. The capacity to improve one's housing situation over time, adjust to changing family needs and choose the kind of neighbourhood one wants to live in are all crucial indicators of a welcoming climate of settlement and important signifiers that a successful integration experience is underway. Those of us focusing specifically on housing issues for immigrants recognize that low income is at the heart of the matter. Your committee is familiar with the processes leading to low rates of labour force participation in the early months of settlement, as well as precarious employment or under- employment relative to professional credentials and high levels of education. However, newcomers in low income may face even greater barriers to accessing affordable housing than other low-income groups. Let us think about their process of finding housing.
The vast majority of newcomers to Canada's major cities already have a social network of family and/or friends in Canada when they arrive, even refugees, and they make use of this network to help them find housing. On the plus side, this is good news in the sense that most newcomers can quickly access short-term support from their community. However, it is short-term support, much of the time, from people who often do not have many resources, and they give what they can.
There is a down side of having this social capital, to use the jargon. When newcomers experience difficulties in finding housing, which according to the LSIC happens about 30 per cent of the time, they mostly turn to friends and acquaintances for information to help resolve their problems. In this way, depending on who the friends and acquaintances are or if they are also recent immigrants in a precarious situation, they may not know much themselves about the housing market and may not be able to give people accurate information about their housing options, rights and responsibilities. Specialized settlement agencies that have housing assistance as part of their mandate, or that give housing assistance whether or not it is part of their mandate, are better placed to give accurate and complete information to newcomers. Yet, settlement agencies feel frustrated sometimes because they feel they are only reaching a minority of the people who have housing needs and do not come to them but instead get their information in informal ways. The existing research shows that people who have contacts with such agencies at an early stage in the process of finding stable and affordable housing tend to lead to better outcomes.
Because our housing system is complex and opaque, people do not know their rights or responsibilities. Terminology is totally obscure to people not from here.
I am an immigrant myself, and I had no idea what first and last month's rent meant. I was on a student visa when I first came to Canada as a graduate student. I did not understand that concept. It was very bizarre. There are things we take for granted that need to be explained.
Settlement agencies can also help newcomers become more aware of their rights but also their responsibilities in the landlord and tenant process. They can help them discover different neighbourhoods in the city and open up their housing choices. Some settlement agencies in Montreal maintain databases of rental vacancies that have sympathetic landlords. This is what I consider a best practice and can lead to more housing choices and access to better quality dwellings.
Newcomers also need better access to government-sponsored sources of information about the housing market and the housing system, information that is not too general but is pertinent for their province and city. Having such information before arrival would help forewarn people about tight local housing markets and help them learn more about how the Canadian housing system works. Settlement service workers also need good information about local housing markets as well as about social and affordable housing programs, which have become very complicated.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has recently developed an interesting online web tool along these lines, and I put the link in the written version of the brief. This initiative is currently in pilot project form, and it surely deserves more financial support for development, maintenance and even publicizing its existence. I have heard there is still no date for official launching of this site plus a publicity campaign. Most people do not know it is there.
Better information will not, however, overcome more systemic barriers to finding suitable and affordable housing. Lack of employment and low income make it difficult to deal with this requirement for first and last month's rent, which exists in most provinces other than Quebec. Newcomers to Quebec are better off in that situation.
Especially in the early months after arrival, landlords' demands for references or a guarantor to co-sign the lease create further barriers. These factors contribute to immigrant concentrations in poorly-maintained housing for which there is less market demand.
According to the LSIC survey data that we analyzed in our comparative project, six months after their arrival in Canada, at least half of new immigrant renters in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver were spending 50 per cent or more of their income on housing. This 50-per-cent threshold is considered by specialists to be an indication of extreme vulnerability because other essentials in the household budget have to be cut to cover housing costs. There is an increased risk of eviction and homelessness if unexpected additional expenses mean that the rent goes unpaid.
I do not know if anyone here has seen the NFB film, Family Motel, which is a fictionalized account of the housing misadventures of a not-so-recent immigrant family here in Ottawa. Basically what happens is they lose their home because she is taking up so much of the household budget sending remittances all the time and she falls behind in her rent. There is a whole saga that goes along with that. It was made by the National Film Board of Canada, and it won an award in Montreal for best film about diversity issues last year.
Sharing accommodation with unrelated people, sometimes to the point of crowding, is a tactic to reduce housing costs, and it is more common among refugees. One policy option could be to increase beyond the current one-month period the government-funded housing assistance to newly arrived refugees without other means of shelter. Another option would be to consider creating transitional social housing for refugees in housing markets that have chronically low vacancy rates for rental housing.
With respect to progress in the housing system over time, I will go quickly through this part. Following the participants in the LSIC through to the four-year time point after arrival is something that was done by my colleague, Dr. Hiebert, along with Mr. Mendez who wrote a very nice working paper about this last year. It helps us see the overall progress made as well as which groups still face particular housing problems. Dr. Hiebert has mentioned that a surprisingly high proportion of immigrants become homeowners after only four years.
I would like to, however, insert a little note of caution here concerning this success story. It has been reported in case study research and by settlement agency workers that some newcomers are propelled into home ownership prematurely relative to their economic circumstances because it is so hard to find rental housing once you have a family with children.
The problems of finding rental housing suitable for large families were mentioned in your June 2008 report, and Ms. Douglas just mentioned it again today. I want to mention that, in Montreal, it is not even a question of large families. The rental vacancy rate has been low for the past 10 years, even for two-bedroom apartments in the low- to mid-price range. Settlement workers report receiving new clients who have been in Canada a few years already, and whose housing problems only begin once they start a family or have a second child because there is not enough housing stock suitable for even medium-sized families. Also, there is discrimination with landlords who do not want to rent to families with children because they are afraid that the little old lady who lives downstairs will get upset, and for racialized families it could be worse.
The graph I have included in the brief shows how drastically the Montreal rental market has changed in terms of vacancy rates. It is astonishing. Montreal is no longer a rental market with high vacancy rates. There is other data available I did not put in here which breaks down the most recent information by price. When you start looking at two- bedroom units or more in the low- to medium-price range, the vacancy rate goes down to something absolutely negligible.
I will not talk about how affordability changes over time using information available from Dr. Hiebert's and Mr. Mendez's report. I put a table in this paper, but if you want to ask questions now, it would be best to address them to Dr. Hiebert.
In terms of intercity variations, one thing that does not vary much between Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, which surprised us initially, is that after four years in Canada, there is not a lot of variation of affordability for immigrants between the three major housing markets. Toronto and Vancouver have become quite similar after four years. Montreal's rents have increased greatly, whereas immigrants to Montreal, even after four years, have more modest incomes compared to their peers in Toronto and Vancouver. There is a convergence between the three cities on that. However, Montreal ranks different because, unlike Toronto and Vancouver, only one-fifth of immigrants to Montreal become homeowners after four years.
The way I see this is that Montreal's recent immigrants have a huge stake in what happens to the private rental housing market in Montreal because most will be staying in that rental housing market for a long time.
I would say to you as a federal committee that federal government policies in the area of rental housing, especially of the Rental Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program, which comes up for renewal next year, will be crucial for what happens to the housing quality for Montreal's immigrant communities because they depend so much on private rental housing in the existing stock. We have a big problem with housing quality in Montreal, and it will get worse without those grants renewed.
Finally, with respect to census data, unfortunately, we do not yet have special compilations of 2006 data which would enable us to provide you with a detailed breakdown of the housing situation of recent immigrants to Canada by various other variables. We are still waiting for that data.
In the meantime, I put into the paper a written version of the 2001 data, which shows that there are significant numbers of owners as well as renters who are spending very high proportions of their income on housing costs. It will be important to follow this through for 2006. I hope we will get the data in a few months, and we will try to analyze it as quickly as possible.
I have just a couple of points about social housing. Ms. Douglas has referred to the question of long waiting lists. Let us think about recent immigrants who try to get social housing. Access to low-rent social housing is sought by immigrants just as for non-immigrants when their problems of low income persist over time due to labour market exclusion, precarious low-paid work or when their family circumstances change so suddenly that there is only one earner or no earners in the family. Becoming a lone parent is an unexpected but quite frequent experience in many immigrant communities due to all kinds of factors, and that can really throw a loop into people's housing affordability circumstances. They experience severe affordability and suitability problems due to larger-than-average size.
How long needy immigrant households have to wait varies from one province to the next because not all provinces have the same criteria for who gets priority in the social housing waiting lists. Some provinces give priority to extreme need, so large homeless families will move up the list quicker. Other provinces try to balance core need with length of time on the waiting lists in the interests of fairness to people who have been waiting a long time and trying to get social mix in housing developments. We cannot generalize about how long needy immigrant households have to wait. It also depends on the nature of the housing stock, what size of housing units the housing authority has and when they become available. It becomes quite complicated.
The social housing part of the Canadian housing system has become more complex over the years. In some provinces, including the one I live in, it has become an extraordinary patchwork of programs with different eligibility requirements, different subsidy structures and multiple waiting lists, so that the housing committees that give advice to both immigrants and non-immigrants do not understand the system. It is very complicated.
This may be reinforcing the difficulty of getting information and navigating the system, especially when, in addition to finding information about the programs, the terminology becomes complicated.
Finally, social and subsidized affordable housing could play more of a role as a short- or medium-term option for newcomers who are on a positive trajectory, but it could take time.
I have already referred to the idea of short-term transitional housing, perhaps for refugees, but co-ops and non- profits can be purpose-built for families with children, an option for quality, affordable housing that could appeal to immigrant families, perhaps not forever, but for a number of years. If they are in a co-op or non-profit, they can save over time and perhaps eventually move into home ownership, freeing up a unit for another family.
The Chair: You will all have the opportunity to provide us with more information in the course of our dialogue, which will start now.
Thank you for your input. You have given us valuable information to digest. You have all touched on the Issues and Options paper. It is exactly that. It is not positions of the committee but things we heard from people who spoke to the committee up to the time we wrote the paper. It does not include everything we can possibly do — that is why we continue to have more hearings, but it was everything that we heard from the various participants up to that point in time
You have provided statistical information on the fact that recent immigrants are overrepresented among people in poverty, which our own research has revealed. You have verified that and told us why you think that is the case.
I will begin by asking each of you a question on a different subject.
Mr. Hiebert, I believe that you were going to talk about concentration in certain neighbourhoods in urban areas, or place-based poverty, although I do not know if you want to use that phrase. Could you tell me about your concern?
Mr. Hiebert: Thank you for asking.
I will start with a brand new statistics from the 2006 census, and I think it will give a sense of the issue. An international measure that is being used more and more to understand the nature of neighbourhoods in metropolitan areas is the proportion of the neighbourhoods or, in the case of the census, tracts, where we find more than 70 per cent of the population being in a visible minority group.
The committee might be surprised to learn that the 2001 census showed that, in Toronto and Vancouver, the percentage of visible minority people who lived in those kinds of neighbourhoods was 6 per cent to 8 per cent.
In 2006, it was about 27 per cent. This is an extraordinarily rapid process of change. Now, nearly 30 per cent of all members of visible minority communities in Vancouver and Toronto live in neighbourhoods where visible minorities make up 70 per cent or more of the population. That will give you a sense scale.
Montreal is nowhere near that figure, and nor are any other cities in Canada. It is a Toronto and Vancouver phenomenon to find that degree of ethno-cultural concentration of minority communities.
The media has become very interested in this issue, and I would say there is an unfortunate tendency in the media to portray these areas as places that are set apart from the rest of Canadian society, however one wants to define that term. These are often portrayed as areas of deep poverty, areas of dysfunctional families, areas of high crime activity and so on.
This is most unfortunate. The reality that we need to understand is that most minority enclaves in Canadian cities are highly socioeconomically and ethno-culturally diverse. They may have large populations of a particular group. They may have a lot of Chinese-Canadians, Indo-Canadians, et cetera, but beyond that there is a great variety of other people. There is an unfortunate tendency in our media to portray minority enclaves as problems when, in fact, most of them are not problems at all.
On the other hand, there are some visibility minority neighbourhoods in most of the large cities of Canada that are associated with very high rates of poverty and very high rates of stigmatization from the outside, and the residents of those areas bear a triple burden — they are immigrants, they are visible minorities, and they are associated with dysfunctional neighbourhoods.
The trick in public policy is to understand that that is a small problem but, nevertheless, a real problem, and not to paint all minority areas with the same brush.
The Chair: Ms. Douglas, you mentioned the Issues and Options paper with respect to racism. A previous presentation is noted in the book on that very subject, and option No. 53, which came out of that, is ongoing support for Canada's action plan against racism.
Could you comment on where you think that action plan functions well or does not function well, or whether it needs to be strengthened or overhauled?
Ms. Douglas: Thank you for that question. I was trying to figure out a place to raise this, given the UN anti-racism Durban review conference and our position as a country, in terms of not attending, and the fact that we are calling our anti-racism action plan ``Welcoming Communities.'' Through multiculturalism, $17 million or $18 million has been assigned to it, and multiculturalism is part of citizenship and immigration, which is a good idea.
However, I do not think that we have taken seriously the fact that, as a country, we need to address issues of racism. We have to be able to struggle with the whole tension that exists, for example, between First Nations Aboriginal communities and issues of immigration.
We have a very real problem of anti-Black racism in this country. We have apologized as a country to various people, but we have yet to just say that, historically, we have had racism, that racism continues to exist, that as a people we need to make this front and centre, and that as a government we need to be proactive in our public education.
I could not care less which political party you come from to tell the truth. As a country, we have to grapple with this. I do not think we have done anything since 2001 when we signed on to the Durban review conference. As a country, we have not done anything to make a measurable difference on issues of race and racism in this country.
The Chair: Would you like to comment on Mr. Hiebert's comments?
Ms. Douglas: I wanted to speak about the enclave issue. One of my throwaway lines is that Rosedale is also an enclave filled with rich white folks. I agree with Professor Hiebert that we must not minimize what is happening in poor racialized communities, but we cannot demonize them. That is what I am hearing from Professor Hiebert. I want everyone around the table to be clear. Professor Hiebert is nodding and we are watching him nod.
Mr. Hiebert: Usually, I do not like it when people put words into my mouth, but when they are the right words, I have no problem. I would like to make a quick comment on what Ms. Douglas said.
We, at the Metropolis Centre in Vancouver, will be releasing an interesting study of the labour market of Toronto soon. An economist has done a series of paired resumes that were sent to employers in Toronto. I will not say anything more about that report now because it will be released next week, except to say that the results are shocking.
Ms. Douglas: I have seen it.
Mr. Hiebert: The results very much support what Ms. Douglas has said.
The Chair: Let me go to Ms. Rose now. You have talked about the housing situation in Montreal and Quebec and the many challenges that people face. Many of these people become homeless or near homeless. Near homeless are those couch surfing, staying with friends, doubling up, et cetera. We know about single individuals who find themselves in that condition, or even lone mothers, but not as much perhaps about recent immigrant populations. They frequently involve a whole family, not only the mother and father, but children as well.
Can you tell us about the pathways in and out of homelessness for that population?
Ms. Rose: There is very little research from Montreal on the question of immigrant homelessness. It is something we hope to be able to generate research on. The Quebec provincial government had a general parliamentary commission on homelessness last year. One of my colleagues had her students go through all the briefs and there was basically nothing about immigrant homelessness included. Therefore, we have realized that this is something on which more research is needed.
There is little evidence of literal ``houselessness'' by immigrant families with children in Montreal. They seem to find other solutions. For example, it is very different from the situation in Ottawa that I referred to earlier.
Over the past year or two, more refugees and refugee claimants are turning up in shelters. I know Toronto and Vancouver have been dealing with this for a long time, but it is a new phenomenon for Montreal. Shelters are set up for the traditional homeless population that has a whole host of other problems, which refugees and refugee claimants do not have at the moment they arrive. However, if immigrants stay homeless for a while, they may develop some of those problems.
The media has reported an additional problem in that homeless shelters in Montreal are not set up to deal with people who do not speak either French or English. That is a brand new problem. There is not any research in Montreal that would address the question of pathways in or out of homelessness.
People have researched that for other cities. Our colleague Fran Klodawsky from Carleton University in Ottawa spoke to this committee last year. Perhaps she will be able to give you more information about pathways in and out of homelessness for this population.
The form that hidden homelessness is taking in Montreal is with people living in very poor-quality housing. We have a concentration of poor immigrants living in low-rise walk-up apartments built under tax incentives programs of the post-war years. Buildings have not been maintained. Sometimes, rent is fairly cheap, but sometimes it is not. This is very poor-quality housing.
A City of Montreal commission on racism a few years ago explicitly mentioned the racialized nature of this problem in the inner city regarding poor-quality housing. This was an issue facing these immigrants more than other groups in the population. This included Côte-des-Neiges, but it was also in other parts of the city.
The city has been actively working on this in conjunction with other levels of government. Recently, in a housing complex where the city had been following and trying to pursue the landlord for many years, the city finally expropriated it from the landlord and it has been demolished. The city will build a mixed-income housing project called Place l'Acadie and Place Henri-Bourassa. People have been temporarily re-housed and all are being offered housing in the new units or adjacent units. It is a problem that has been recognized and targeted for action in Montreal.
Are there enough resources to deal with all of the poor-quality housing? No, but the City of Montreal has had a special team working on these micro-pockets of low income and ultra poor-quality housing for a long time with a team of people going after those landlords.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Cordy: Thank you to the three of you for being here today. I would like to return to the issue of seniors living in poverty, in particular, immigrant seniors.
In Ms. Douglas' presentation, you said that the percentage of seniors living in poverty is going down, which is a positive thing. However, when we look more closely at the statistics, we see that seniors living in poverty are unattached seniors — women particularly — immigrants and seniors who have adult children living with them for one reason or another.
We have agreements with over 50 countries, which is good for the immigrants who come from those countries. However, you are right; we are now receiving large numbers of immigrants in Canada from some of those countries with whom we do not have agreements such as Pakistan, China and India. These seniors end up with no social programs in Canada.
As you correctly noted, seniors coming in under the family program are the responsibility of their sponsors for 10 years. You can become a Canadian citizen within three years. Therefore, you can be a senior who is a Canadian citizen and who is still being sponsored. Since you are still being sponsored, you are not eligible for the programs.
Two other honourable senators around the table were also members of a committee that studied the issue of aging. One of our recommendations was that it should uniformly be three years.
Ten years is a long time when you are 75 years old. It is a long time when you are 15 years old. Have you come up with any other solutions so that we could, in fact, be helping senior immigrants who are coming in so that, if they are from a country that does not have an agreement with Canada, they will be helped out by the Canadian government?
Ms. Douglas: Our take on this is the same as around EI in that I may not have worked in Canada for 50 years, but my children have certainly worked if I have come in as a senior under family reunification. They have paid into the system.
If I am able to become a Canadian citizen after three years, it then disqualifies me for everything — not only the pension plan but immigration services; Citizenship and Immigration Canada does not support citizens in terms of their programs. Therefore, the majority of my member agencies are not allowed to provide services to Canadian citizens, whether they have first-year citizenship needs or whether they need settlement services. Once you become a citizen, you are not eligible for citizenship and immigration programming.
As the executive director of OCASI, and I think I can confidently say as Ontario, we find that problematic. We certainly find it problematic that seniors are not able to access our pension plan when it is needed.
One of the things we have not had a chance to speak about today is the fact that more and more we are seeing seniors who are abused. I was hoping there would be someone here from the abused women's council. Not only are we seeing the cohort where children are moving back in with their elderly parent and they are not able to access CPP or whatever the pension program is, but some of them are also being abused. However, they cannot access services.
Three years will be great; if you can become a Canadian citizen after three years, then you should be able to access all of our programs.
The Chair: Does anyone else want to respond on this?
Senator Cordy: Our committee certainly agreed with that.
You spoke about changes to employment insurance. In fact, you said we should have a review. We know in government that reviews can take a very long time.
In view of the current economic situation, not just in Canada but in the world, are there immediate changes that should be made?
Why are immigrants not eligible for EI? What immediate changes can we make? I would agree that we should study the whole issue but, if we do that, it could be a 10-year study.
Ms. Douglas: We do not need to study it. We need to do a brief rethink. I am looking at Professor Hiebert out of the corner of my eye because this is something he has been thinking about.
We need to do a rethink in terms of employment insurance and our equalization payments across the country because that is the problem; our problem is differential treatment based on ``have'' and ``have-not'' provinces. That has shifted hugely within the last five years. We absolutely appreciate the extension of five weeks, but only 30 per cent of Ontarians qualify for EI, and that is a problem.
Our manufacturing sector is dead. Alberta is even worse off than we are. Quebec is fourth in the country in terms of EI. I love my colleagues from Newfoundland, but 99 per cent of them get EI.
An Hon. Senator: Are eligible for EI.
Ms. Douglas: It is a huge problem in Central Canada as well.
The Chair: Let us keep to the topic of recent immigrants. EI is a big issue around here. We all know the general statistics. The topic today deals with recent immigrants. You can talk to EI, but talk to it in that regard.
Ms. Douglas: Our problem with immigrants, particularly in Ontario, is that not only are most immigrants, particularly women, in contingent work — so they are not qualifying, so that 30 per cent usually does not include immigrants — but immigrants are not even qualifying for the retraining dollars. You know that we have the new labour market development agreement between Ontario and the federal government. We are trying to negotiate with the federal government to examine what can be done around this issue in this economic downturn.
The Chair: Is there anyone else who wants to comment on Senator Cordy's question?
Ms. Rose: I would like to get back to the question of seniors, which is not something I am an expert on. However, I think Ms. Douglas was talking about the contributory pension plans, the agreements.
I want to mention something else. The federal old age pension is reduced pro rata for people who do not have 40 years in Canada since getting their landed immigrant status. This will even affect me, although I am not poor.
Forty years is a long time. You have to immigrate to Canada at the age of 25 in order to get the full whack of the federal plan.
Mr. Hiebert: I would comment if the question could be extended to issues of social assistance, but if not, I can wait until later.
The Chair: If it involves recent immigrants, come right in. We will consider it extended.
Mr. Hiebert: I wanted to point out that all the same eligibility issues that are being raised about employment insurance and pensions also affect the social assistance system. Newcomers have a hard time accessing social assistance, partly because of family sponsorship issues, partly because skilled workers are not expected to receive social assistance once they come to Canada, et cetera.
Therefore, we see these perplexing and troubling statistics where people with much lower average incomes than Canadian-born people have much lower rates of social assistance utilization at the same time.
Senator Martin: I am always appreciative of the insights and the information that you provide to give us a broader picture of this topic.
I will speak largely from personal experience in terms of being new to a country and watching my parents go through the challenges of raising three children. I am also thinking about some of the work that I have done in the Vancouver area.
My view of what is happening in Vancouver and B.C. is, I will say, more optimistic. That is not to say that I am ignoring the fact that we always need more funding and that homelessness is an issue we must always be talking about.
However, my experience in Vancouver and British Columbia, in the Lower Mainland, where we have always had strong representation of many groups and diversity, seems to be different from the other cities. Cities are very different. I wanted to highlight some of those positives, as well as maybe present some ideas and ask you to give some feedback on that.
Mr. Hiebert, would you say that, in your research, you find Vancouver or the Metro Vancouver/B.C./Lower Mainland area doing some things that may be different from the other places because of where it is situated and whatnot?
Mr. Hiebert: I am happy to speak to that. I would say you are quite right: The situation is different.
It comes back to the first comment I made about the differences between the various metropolitan regions. First, there is a kind of convergence happening in the metropolitan region of Vancouver. We have immigrant groups who might not be better off financially in terms of income, but they have access to greater wealth through international networks. Interesting is the East Asian community, i.e. Chinese-Canadians. This group has quite low income in Vancouver but has favourable housing circumstances. This group brings money with them when they come to Canada and they invest it in housing. We see far fewer housing problems for that group, even though their incomes tend to be quite low. It is an interesting convergence.
Second, in Greater Vancouver, the municipal governments and non-government organizations work together productively. One of the exemplars that can be replicated throughout the rest of the country is called the City of Vancouver Mayor's Task Force on Immigration, which has been operating since 2005. It is a productive relationship and includes the non-governmental organizations, academics and people who represent the political groups of immigrants, et cetera. It has established, for example, a charter for welcoming immigrants to Vancouver that will require city services to be offered in many languages to serve the immigrant communities of Vancouver. It is a very coordinated effort to bring equity and make newcomers to Vancouver feel welcome.
The statistics on experience of discrimination are lower in Vancouver than they are in other major centres of Canada. Also, statistics on public opinion about immigration are more favourable, as are the statistics on the acceptance of multiculturalism as a concept, in Greater Vancouver than in the other parts of Canada. All these lead to interesting hypotheses about why this might be the case.
Senator Martin: You have hit upon a couple of key points, one being language. That is probably one of the central problems that all immigrants will face. If we are able to provide the right language to groups of people so they can access available resources, we will solve many of the initial problems. That is where immigration settlement and family service providers can come into play.
For instance, if we use Vancouver as a model, S.U.C.C.E.S.S. was born out of the Chinese-Canadian community; PICS — Progressive Intercultural Community Services Society — was born out of the South Asian-Canadian community; the Multicultural Helping House Society was born out of the Filipino community; and the Centre of Integration for African Immigrants was born out of an African community group that speaks French.
Community groups that face some of the greater challenges you spoke about do not necessarily have that community network. The Korean community is in the transitional stage of setting up something like a successor with the multicultural component. All of these organizations say that they have received more funding, and that empowers them to work with their community groups in the language that is needed and to address the cultural needs of their community. They have people who speak other languages as well, because it is for everyone.
The partnership with the provincial government and the municipalities should be discussed for the rest of Canada. Every city is different but language is a key point. We say that it takes a village to raise a child but it takes a whole community to take care of the others. Would the witnesses care to comment?
Mr. Hiebert: We need to talk about the challenges but we also have to acknowledge some of the positive things that are happening.
In the year 2005-06, approximately $20 million was dedicated in British Columbia to the B.C. Settlement and Adaptation Program, BCSAP. In the year 2008-09, it will be $70 million. There has been a massive increase in the amount of money dedicated to settlement services. It is improving the level of language training of newcomers who come to British Columbia and all manner of orientation services available to them.
Unfortunately, this added investment is happening at a time of an economic downturn, so we will not be able to see the direct positive benefits as easily as we might have if the economy were on a constant footing. I look forward to the kinds of improvements we will see in the settlement experience because of the massive investment that has been made by the Canadian government and, through it, the British Columbia government, in settlement and orientation services.
Ms. Douglas: Our MP around the table signed off on the Canada-Ontario agreement and we increased our national budget settlement to $1.25 billion. Quite a bit of that came to Ontario but we also increased the national budget. Of course, Quebec gets increased dollars whether their population of immigrants goes up or down.
I have some concern because, in terms of the $70 million you talked about in B.C., the provincial government tends to roll it into general revenues and treat settlement like roads and pavement. We are not seeing the $70 million, but it is not because of the economic downturn. It is because of the way it is treated. We are having that conversation in Ontario.
The Chair: We are not into a debate, I might add, but I will let Mr. Hiebert respond.
Mr. Hiebert: The $70 million is a real figure and discounts whatever other uses the transfer of money from the federal government to the provincial government might take. The $70 million is the actual amount spent on settlement services in British Columbia, up from $20 million just two or three years ago.
The Chair: Ms. Rose, would you like to respond to Senator Martin's comments?
Ms. Rose: I am not the right person to give information about the settlement services budget but Stephan Reichhold, the coordinator of the umbrella organization that regroups all the immigrant settlement service organizations in Quebec, could talk about that. There is always controversy about how one interprets those statistics. Speaking diplomatically, there seems to be leakage. Settlement organizations have not noted any particular improvement in the situation. On a small scale, many innovative things are happening, such as pilot projects to make it easier for newcomers to gain Canadian experience and work with networks of business organizations. They all add up to something important.
Senator Martin: The key solutions beyond the policy solutions that we talked about are accountability, coordinated effort and a good community network.
You talked about how women and men face the challenges of being new to the country differently. Perhaps an important focus could be to have groups that address the needs of women.
Ms. Douglas: Absolutely. I was glad that you raised the subject of what we in Ontario call ethno-specific organizations. Yes, women's experience of settlement is different from men's experience of settlement, which is not surprising. It is not an immigration issue; it is a gender issue. We need to ensure that we have specific services geared toward immigrant women and that they are the writers of their own journey through settlement and integration.
Senator Keon: It is very interesting and distressing listening to this. Immigrants have been such a tremendous asset to Canada over the years. It seemed to me, although I have not been intimately involved, that the problems being confronted now by recent immigrants are huge compared to what they used to be. What has gone wrong?
There was a time when the system seemed to work smoothly and immigrants were such a tremendous asset. They came into the country and they were contributing within a short period of time. They were tremendously successful. We have many immigrants who are some of our leading citizens, and now it seems to be such a problem. Why is that?
Mr. Hiebert: It is a huge question. There are dozens and dozens of studies on this in Canada because it is so important. I will give you a few of the key findings.
The first is to make note of the fact that the nature of the Canadian economy has changed a great deal since the time you are speaking about. Immigrants integrated into the economy more rapidly in the 1970s and even into the early 1980s than we are seeing now.
Part of the reason is that the economy now is a knowledge economy, which privileges communications ability. It is absolutely clear that English and French communication is a requirement now for any good job in this country. You can get a lot of bad jobs without speaking these languages well, but you cannot get many good jobs without speaking these languages well. That is the first point.
The second point is we have become global in terms of our immigrant source regions — from where people are coming to Canada. Going global means we are bringing in an increasing proportion of people who do not speak English or French when they come to Canada, especially those that are not selected by the point system.
Ms. Douglas will make sure to add this point, so I will make it right now. An increasing proportion of immigrants coming to Canada are people of colour. Whatever discrimination and racism exists in the labour market, they will face it first.
Finally, it is important to reiterate what is already in your good report from last year. We have seen devolution of social programs in Canada that are designed to help people who are vulnerable. Immigrants are vulnerable. They bear the brunt of whatever kinds of social policy changes we make in this country. I will start there. I am sure others will fill in more details.
Ms. Douglas: We have seen a change in demographics in terms of where immigrants are coming from. The one thing I will add to the comments made by Mr. Hiebert is we are also seeing more educated immigrants coming into the country.
I disagree around the language issue, particularly around our point system. The fact that they are doing poorly as opposed to 20 years ago is a problem. The only answer for that is because of what part of the world they come from. It has to be an issue of race. We cannot get away from that fact in terms of Canada's immigration policy.
They are coming from Asia, from Southeast Asia, from South Asia, from Africa. They are coming in with English language skills; they are coming in highly educated. They are coming in with years and years of experience, and they are not doing as well in spite of the knowledge economy.
India is booming. China is one of our new world economies. Why are they not doing well in Canada? That is what we have to grapple with if we are going to talk about immigration as our future as a country.
Let me leave that answer because everyone expects me to answer the race question. That is my answer to the race question.
The Chair: There is this issue of credentials as well.
Ms. Douglas: That is where I am going.
The Chair: How do you see that as having changed? We will add that on to Senator Keon's question.
Ms. Douglas: We have paid attention to it. We have ensured that we have enough resources. What we have not done a good job of is educating our employers about international credentials.
I think that we are really going to have to grapple with the idea that we need to look at incentives. We need to look at issues like employment equity, but we also need to look at incentives beyond that. I can never remember what those programs are called, where someone goes in and they get six months' worth of work and the employer hires you or does not hire you.
Mr. Hiebert: Internships?
Ms. Douglas: Yes. We have to look beyond that. We have to be able to say to employers that immigration is our future. As a government and as a country, this is what your write-off is. If you hire immigrants, we are going to pay attention to contract compliance. We do it with the industry anyway. In Ottawa, we have a national employment equity program. We do not have provincial programs and that is a problem.
We have to see what is working for us and then just extrapolate it across the country. It means that we are going to have to take a huge breath and say, yes, we are going to have to give some money to some employers in the private sector.
The Chair: Before I go to Ms. Rose, let me say, in terms of this credential issue, there is the Canadian experience, but there is also the question of the professional organizations — whether they are physicians or engineers or whatever, getting by that particular route to get the credentials they need to do the professional work they did in their original country.
Ms. Rose: It is being worked on with those professional organizations, certainly in Ontario and Quebec, and no doubt elsewhere.
Perhaps it would be good to look at some of those employers who have been recognized for being exemplary employers in terms of diversity issues. Some of those are public and some are private. Those are employers who, rather than seeing lack of Canadian experience as something that is a negative part of the job applicants' CV, see the international experience and the multilingualism as something that can add to the development of that enterprise — how that can be an extremely positive aspect.
Ms. Douglas: They recognize globalization.
The Chair: We changed the question a little bit since we started with you, Mr. Hiebert. Do you have anything to add or have you covered it?
Mr. Hiebert: I would only add one thing, which is that we have entered a period of economic downturn. We are continuing to have relatively high numbers of immigrants coming to Canada. There is an obvious kind of consequence that will happen.
We saw this in the early 1990s, when we saw what many analysts now call ``economic scarring'' of the cohort of immigrants who came in during an economic recession in the early 1990s. We all ought to be very concerned about this. We ought to think about the best ways forward.
We are very possibly going to see another cohort of immigrants coming in this part of the decade that will experience extremely tight labour markets, very big economic challenges and this worries me.
The Chair: We are finished with questions around here but we will give you some quick closing comments.
Ms. Rose: I have a quick addition. On the gender aspect of economic integration, immigrant women in Montreal — not necessarily recent immigrant women but women — have been especially affected by the total decimation of the textile and clothing industry, especially since 1995. No one is looking at what is happening to those women.
We have to think about the fact that both globalization and the recession affect men and women differently because of the segmentation of the labour market. Within that, we need to think about what happens to immigrant men and immigrant women. I wanted to underline some of those initial remarks you made about having to look more intensely at gender issues and how they intersect with issues of poverty among immigrants.
The Chair: If that is it, this draws our meeting to a close.
I would ask the committee members to stay. In a couple minutes, we will start an in camera session to make some revisions to our schedule.
I thank all three of you again for participating in this and giving some of the input that will help lead to our final recommendations.
Our schedule now is to attempt to get through our hearings by the end of June. Over the summer, we will write the report with the recommendations. It will be out sometime in the fall.
Mr. Hiebert: It was a privilege to be able to address these issues.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
(The committee adjourned.)