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Originally Posted by octothorp
I'd like to see a much more sophisticated temporary worker program. In an ideal situation, we bring workers over, spend a bit of time and money educating them, place them, encourage them to continue connections to their native country and make it difficult for them to achieve immigration status, and then send them home after five, ten or twenty-year terms. They get all the money they'll likely need to retire in their home country if their good with their savings (and the program can help with that), they bring skills and ideas home with them, and we get workers who won't be a drain on our system when they cease being useful as workers.
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Personally, I think we should change our immigration criteria. Right now, the system is geared towards highly educated professionals - doctors, engineers, lawyers, Ph.D.s but our domestic professional associations have higher standards for those positions than in the typical immigrant's home country. (In my professional field I have met M.Sc. Geology holders who lack the skills to do the work that a B.Sc. Canadian grad is qualified to do.) This leads to the stereotypical story of doctors driving a cab or whatnot because they can't get a spot to update their credentials.
What I would propose is to seek out skilled workers whose skills are more easily transferrable like welders, plumbers, carpenters and whatnot. While there is still an education requirement in those trades to be certified in the Canadian code, the apprenticeship system is already in place for workers to hit the ground running. It would be much easier to have a tradesman/woman challenge the exams in those trades (after a shortened period perhaps) than to transfer the training of a doctor whose education would not have included the technology and pharmaceutical options available in Canada, and who would need to be retrained basically from scratch to be able to work within the immensely complex Canadian health care system, not to mention the ethical consequences of removing local doctors from the countries that paid to educate them.
I wonder if the guest worker program couldn't be a way to get a back door to this result. You bring in a skilled worker that some industry somewhere actually needs and then after they have been in the country for long enough, they could apply to become a landed immigrant and from there become a full citizen.