Quote:
Originally Posted by Bownesian
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.
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I think this is the most viable theory relative to the OP. The fact is that skilled worker decline is frightening and legitmate solutions have to be conceived and mandated at the federal level. Imagine the inflation which would occur in the trade industries if labor resources were unable to meet metropolitan demand.
I do think that an incentive offered by the govt to canadians to have more children works only if other social subsidies are provided along with free post secondary education to alleviate the burden of affording an education as a parent. It works, because the costs of raising a family in this part of the world with a high cost of living is difficult to maintain and smaller families are more manageable. People are time impovrished in this country and if subsidies (sounds far left) were provided to give more time and allow them to keep more of their money; this would be incentive enough for families to return to a traditional one income family. Truth of the matter, that is going to happen. I see inflation and the changing economy demanding more industriousness from NAmericans leaving us lacking both temporally and financially lacking to combat this issue.
Also, I am deeply troubled when I come across genuinely good people who have several academic qualifications in their native land, yet here they are expected to pursue the same education, only in english, to transfer their skills.
Yet one critique I have of this excerpt is the blame you lay on Canada for unethical selection practices of focusing on MD and other highly skilled workers. I believe the same thing is happening with our current health care system as well: Brain Drain. What doctors want to make a paltry sum when there is far more lucrative incentives offered by the privatized health care system of the US? Does it become Professional International musical chairs?