Sean Fraser: 'Unacceptable' that immigrant surgeons are working as taxi drivers

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said changes to Canada's immigration program next year will help hospitals, builders and other employers address chronic labour shortages as opposed to focusing mainly on highly skilled workers.

Fraser revealed that he plans to introduce new selection tools later this month while introducing Canada's new immigration plan, under which the government aims to accept in a record 1.45 million newcomers in the next three years. The Budget Implementation Act was adopted in the House of Commons in June of this year.

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Fraser said in an interview that this is a completely different approach than what has been done in the past, which simply did a draw for the highest scoring people in the system regardless of which sector they were going to work in.

Fraser and future ministers will be able to use the new selection tools to find immigrants to fill jobs. Fraser said he can now look at applications to address the shortfalls of French language teachers, nurses, and carpenters in Ontario.

Statistics Canada said that employers went into the summer with a record one million job vacancies.

The governor of the Bank of Canada said earlier this month that if Canada had a larger labour pool, he wouldn't have needed to raise interest rates so much. The shortage puts upward pressure on wages and makes companies less able to keep up with demand.

Volume is not the problem. Technology companies are generally complimentary of the immigration efforts of the government. Non-tech immigrants who make it to Canada struggle to have their skills recognized by professional associations which hurts productivity because workers are blocked from meeting their full potential.

Both problems will be resolved by Fraser.

The idea of surgeons working as taxi drivers is not acceptable. Talented people who have arrived in Canada but aren't able to contribute at their full potential is frustrating to me.

Home builders are in high demand and are one of the professions most in need of workers. The Ontario government wants to build 1.5 million homes by 2031.

The strain an influx of people would put on cities that are already short of housing stock is an argument against higher immigration levels. Increased targets should align with infrastructure plans to make sure that the necessary services are in place to welcome everyone.

Fraser believes that by recruiting more construction workers, he can help accelerate the building of more homes.

The minister didn't want to "broadcast decisions" that the government hasn't formally disclosed, when he was asked about specific plans on the roadmap that links immigration to Canada's housing growth.

A survey conducted by Leger and the Association of Canadian Studies on 1,537 Canadians two weeks after the release of the government's immigration plan said about 75% were either positive or neutral about immigration.

According to a survey conducted before the new immigration plan was released, 85 percent of respondents felt that welcoming newcomers would lead to economic benefit, which is the highest number recorded in 30 years.

Fraser, who has seen schools and mental health units close down in his home province of Nova Scotia, thinks most Canadians support immigration.

Fraser said that he had seen many different polls that indicated different outcomes. Despite the fact that we need to watch closely things like housing and the capacity of our public services, we also need to be live to the fact that there are very real and severe economic and demographic consequences to not growing our population.

Fraser said that technology firms were also in need of more labour. Fraser said that there isn't a tech company that has access to all of the talent that they need to grow.

If Canada doesn't pursue growth through immigration, there will be just three workers for every retiree, a number that's likely to decline.

The number of retirements impacting the labour pools has been overstated, according to a professor at the University of Waterloo. Immigration is an effective way to keep the wage pace from getting out of hand and causing a wage-price spiral.

There is an urgent need to embrace immigration at a macro level. The cost of not filling those vacancies is huge for the Canadian economy.

The email address is nkarim@postmedia.