“According to two indexes released this week, Canadian employers are steadily increasing recruitment. The Monster Employment Index showed that online recruitment in the second-quarter of this year was at its highest level since 2008. The Association of Canadian Search, Employment and Staffing Services (ACSESS) also showed that increased employment opportunities has brought the Canadian employment industry to near pre-recession levels.” –canadavisa.com
As a current job-seeker, I was interested to come across this new website that the Government of Canada has launched to identify the job sectors currently hiring and which will likely be hiring in the near future.
The website is aimed at those interested in immigrating to Canada as a tool to help them understand the Canadian labour market. For example, in a sidebar “Job Seekers” one can select “Job Titles and Descriptions” with a link to the National Occupational Classification (NOC) system to help them understand how their current occupation is transferable to Canada. It provides an overview of regulated versus unregulated occupations with useful links and examples.
The website also provides pages to look for available positions by occupation or location, info about wages, job and skill requirements, education and training, required licenses or certification, and future prospects.
Alberta wants temporary foreign workers to stay in Canada
“Employers spend those few years training the employees and would benefit greatly from allowing temporary foreign workers to settle in Canada permanently, instead of having to train new employees.”
It makes sense: Alberta employers need the workforce, so why send away those temporary foreign workers who have already done the work of settling and integrating into their new communities for the past four years? Why not let them stay and continue to contribute as they have been doing.
Excellent opinion piece Imagine the Other by John Ralston Saul:
“Yet even when the message at the heart of our commentaries is friendly to newcomers, there is an underlying concern that our carefully woven particularity might come apart…
But this concern with our possible fragility is odd in a society which invites the equivalent of one percent of [the Canadian] population to join us every year. This one percent puts us on the international cutting edge of social creativity. And eighty-five percent of those immigrants become citizens within five years…
So we really are out on the cutting edge when it comes to social construction, which is very exciting. We need to think of ourselves accurately as doing something exciting; a society creating new concepts of human fellowship.”
This gives me goosebumps! Follow the link to read the article; there are too many wonderful paragraphs to quote here…okay one more:
“Citizenship means that the newcomer will be deeply changed. But so will the established citizen. Everyone will be faced with the need to deal with difference. That need to deal with the other obliges all of us to open up, to be more imaginative and hopefully more generous as humans.”
This past Tuesday Statistics Canada released the publication Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report: “These chapters provide a comprehensive statistical portrait of the female population in general, senior women, immigrant women, women who are members of a visible minority, and Aboriginal women.”
Females have held a slight majority over males in Canada for three decades. The 2006 census data showed that 20% of Canadian women are immigrants, some of whom are newcomers and some who may already be citizens. “Between 2001 and 2006, the number of immigrant females increased 14%, four times faster than among non-immigrant ones.”
Of the 5.1 million individuals who defined themselves as visible minority, just over half were females. Stats Can predicts, “If current immigration patterns continue, Canada’s female visible minority population could reach 6.6 million or roughly 31% of the total female population by 2031.”
Recently the conservative government has reduced the number of economic immigrants (who do not already have a job offer) who can apply to the federal skilled worker, federal Immigrant Investor and federal Entrepreneur programs. Multiculturalism Minister Kenney announced the changes as a step in improving the backlog of federal skilled worker applications, stating that reduced numbers of applications will reduce wait times for processing and visas. The federal skilled worker program accepted 20,000 applications in 2010 and this number has been cut in half to 10,000 for 2011 with a 500 cap under the 29 priority applications.
On the heels of this announced change was the announcement that the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) has been bolstered to accept 40,000 applicants under this program, which is only slightly up from the 36,428 accepted in 2010. It’s a part of the continuing shift of the conservative government to move the selection of immigrants from federal hands to the provinces and territories, which David Cohen explains in his June blogpost began in 2006.
The Citizenship and Immigration Canada news release explains: “Traditionally, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver have attracted a disproportionate share of skilled immigrants coming to Canada. However, the top three provinces for provincial nominees are Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Thanks in large part to the provincial/territorial nominee programs, 26% of economic immigrants accepted as permanent residents of Canada are now destined for provinces or territories other than Ontario, British Columbia or Quebec, compared to just 11% in 1997.”
The PNP provides Saskatchewan the opportunity to bring in the skilled workers required. From what I hear in my short time in Saskatoon, there have been large numbers of engineers brought in for the mining companies now expanding rapidly in this city. How do Saskatchwanians feel about the increased number of immigrants that have been and will continue to enter the province? I, for one, am very excited about the increased diversity Saskatchewan has and will continue to experience in our communities.
I have decided to try my hand at blogging. First, I want to start by thanking my husband Rhett for getting me started. He’s been blogging for years and it was his suggestion that I start a site. He has set up the site and manages the back end—thanks Rhett! It really pays to marry a geek.
I finished my Master of Arts in Sociology at the University of Calgary this spring. My master’s thesis is on a bridge-to-work program for immigrant women; the program is part of the Enhanced Language Training stream funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, which joins with Alberta Employment and Immigration in Alberta to fund such programs.
The participants receive professional-level English training, skills training specific to their field, workplace culture training and an unpaid work placement from which to gain real experience and hopefully gain a Canadian reference. By observing the classroom and interviewing the staff and participants I was able to examine what kind of work the staff and participants do in the program. The staff selected students, developed curriculum, facilitated the material, set up ways to measure and display the effectiveness of the program to funders and collaborated with community partners to set up work placements. The program participants were invited to do work to prepare themselves for the labour market. They learned not only the job-seeking skills required to find a job, but they were taught about Canadian workplace culture so that they could integrate into the workplace effectively in order to keep the job and move up within their field. If you’re interested in more, you can read my thesis: Empowerment and Conformity: An Ethnography of a Bridge-to-Work Program for Immigrant Women.
My interest in immigration, multiculturalism, and employment will guide what I intend to post about on this blog. Multiculturalism is certainly not a straight-forward business that is easy to ‘enforce’ but it is a guide for how our society is to operate and I believe it is a noble ideal to aim for. Canadian Multiculturalism Day is on June 27th of each year. The linked-to website explains the purpose of having this annual celebratory day, which I think is a good summation of why I am proud to be Canadian and explains my interest in working with immigrants: It ”is an opportunity to celebrate our diversity and our commitment to democracy, equality and mutual respect and to appreciate the contributions of the various multicultural groups and communities to Canadian society.”