McNaughton wants to double the number of immigrants allowed under OINP
With the unemployment rate falling for the fifth consecutive month, Canada added 31, 000 new jobs to the economy last month. Down to 6.7 per cent in October, the unemployment rate was the lowest it has been in the last 20 months. But there is still a long way to go to reach the pre-pandemic rate of 5.6 per cent in February last year.
While it appears the economy is headed in the right direction, some experts are saying ongoing labour shortages are slowing down Canada’s economic recovery. According to Nathan Janzen, senior economist at RBC, strong growth industries, like technical jobs, make it seem like there aren’t enough workers to fill the positions in hard-hit industries.
On the other hand, not a lot of workers came back to work in retail, food services and manufacturing after they’ve been laid off because of the pandemic. This suggests that not all industries have fully recovered. This could be good news for recent immigrants, meaning they may not face a lot of difficulties in their job-hunt.
High employment rate for very recent immigrants
The number of immigrants to Canada has increased in recent months, with Canada admitting 267,000 new permanent residents. Numbers say that very recent immigrants don’t struggle with finding jobs and the employment rate among this group remains high.
“Very recent immigrants” are those who have lived in Canada for five years or less, according to Statistics Canada. Compared to 2019, there were more recent immigrants this October, and they were more likely to be employed.
The employment rate among this group of immigrants was 71 per cent, which is almost 6 per cent higher than October 2019. On the other hand, the employment rate among Immigrants living in Canada for more than five years has gone down by 1 percent.
However, many immigrants still struggle with finding work, mainly because most of the employers ask for some Canadian work experience, especially in their professions. That particular issue is yet to be resolved in some provinces. Ontario is currently working on proposing a legislation that would eliminate the work experience requirement for Professional Licensing and would also make English-language testing requirements more standardized and fast-track application processing.
Ontario is also calling on the federal government to double the number of immigrants allowed under the Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program from 9,000 to 18,000. The program allows foreign skilled workers and international students to apply to the Ontario government to be nominated for permanent residency in the province. Labour Minister Monte McNaughton says that doubling the number of immigrants will help tackle the current job shortage.
A recent study by the Conference Board of Canada found that economic immigration programs tend to bring in highly educated and skilled immigrants to Canada, but the pandemic has shown that essential workers are also needed in the labour market.
“Canada’s economic immigration system has a strong focus on highly educated immigrants, but this does not always correspond with the labour demand in essential sectors,” said the study.
