Unions and Immigration

The Canadian government plans to increase the number of immigrants in the coming year for both humanitarian reasons and employment needs. With our flourishing economy, we need more workers at both the low and high ends of the labour spectrum. While our immigration system is meeting most of our needs, anecdotal evidence would indicate that it is not meeting the needs of the immigrants in many cases.

It seems that the expectations of the immigrants coming to Canada often do not match the reality of our labour and professional markets. On the surface, this may seems like a problem that needs personal adjustment by the immigrant as they upgrade their education or language skills to find a slot for themselves in our workplaces. However, the problem goes much deeper than this. The recent riots in France are an indication of the depth of this problem, and it is not a problem unique to France. The violence in an area of Toronto may be an indirect result of our immigration system.

Somewhere in the bureaucratic back offices of our Federal and Provincial governments quotas are established for the numbers and skill levels of the people we want to attract to our country. We need so many semi-skilled labourers, a certain number of professional people and some entrepreneurs with their chequebooks. Quotas are set by gender, country of origin, etc and then the numbers are crunched. A Canadian immigration clerk in say, New Delhi, then goes through his or her list of applicants, and without prejudice or bribes, meets the quota.

However, the credentials presented in India are often not regarded with having the same value when the immigrant arrives in Canada. Although we may be short some thousands of medical doctors in this country, a doctor with a degree from an Indian university may find that he or she is not considered qualified to work in our country. There seems to be some idea that their university degrees are not equal to ours, when in fact, they may be not only equivalent, but can be better than degrees offered by some Canadian or North American universities.

Why do we have well-educated, qualified immigrants working in jobs that are far below their skill levels? When we are in dire need of health care workers, all the way from pharmacists to nurses to doctors, why are we not using these people? The answer likely lies in the unions, although the medicos prefer to call their union an association. When you insult a qualified doctor who has many years of practice by insisting that they again serve years as an intern, one might suspect that a little prejudice is creeping into the system. Or is it simply that our doctors prefer more regular hours and wish to pass on the more onerous work of internships to others?

There may be a higher moral ground by the CMA in that they do not wish to raid other countries of their doctors, but in the meantime, many in the great unwashed public cannot find a personal doctor. Immigrant engineers often find the same prejudices in trying to present their engineering papers to a society that believes only a steel ring from a Quebec engineering disaster qualifies one to think in terms of things mechanical. The people in the East and Far East have been building structures long before the West came alive in the eras of the Greeks and Romans. Some of the greatest physicians in the middle ages lived in the Middle East. Perhaps if our professional unions opened their closed shops, we would all benefit from the skills of our immigrants.

However, the problem goes deeper. What happens to a professional person who is forced to take a job far below their previous station in life? What happens to their self-respect, and worse, what happens to them in the eyes of their children? How much does this stifle the ambition of the children when they see their well-educated and skilled parents knocked down by Canadian society and educational values?

At the other end of the spectrum, semi-skilled workers are often forced to take wages at the minimum level, work extra hours or shifts, without benefits, by their enterprising task-masters. These workers have little choice but to accept whatever work they can, knowing that if they do not tote that bale, another immigrant is waiting in line for the job. In so many cases, there is no union to stop the labour abuses since these people are often part-time workers in non-union shops. They may be working in small businesses that depend on the low wages to make a profit, or they may be working in a sweatshop that takes advantage of the desperate person trying to support a family by holding down more than one low-paying job.

It could be that the unions cannot get into these shops or do not want to, for the dues may never pay for the hours of work the stewards would face in trying to obtain rights and benefits. But the parent that is working extra shifts or holding down two or three jobs is not at home for their family. What chance do the children have of normal family life? What values do they pick up from seeing their parents or parent working themselves to exhaustion just to survive? What do they see in their future? Are they the ones who will turn to drugs or prostitution, to what they think will be a quick way out of that life? Are they the discouraged ones who turn to burning cars in France or shooting people in Toronto?

Surely, not all immigrants run into these problems, but there is enough anecdotal information in the media and from associates to suggest we have a flawed system. Whether the problems starts with the bureaucrats in our foreign offices, and ends with our lack of unions for the semi-skilled or the barrier of associations (unions) at the professional level, it is a problem our politicians need to address. Immigrants ought to see life in Canada as one of expectations, not exploitation. They should know which to expect before they arrive on our shores. After all, we do have expectations of them.