A Commentary by Doug Draper
“They’ll go into this pool,” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenny was quoted saying in The Globe and Mail this January 2 of unemployed people in other parts of the world, “and then employers (in Canada) or my department and/or provinces will be able to fish out of that pool.”
Canada’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. ‘Citizenship Not for Sale?’ Not unless Kenney and his Harper Conservatives can find someone from another country that will work cheaper for their corporate bosses than one of our young Canadians.
“It’s like a dating site,” Kenny continued, as if to make it sound like all our loving nation of Canada wants to do is get up close and cozy with unemployed people in other countries on the planet – just to see if we can fix them up with a nice job here.
Well, isn’t that nice and how generous of us – and at the risk of sounding like I’ve got something against immigration, which I bloody well don’t coming from a family of immigrants – what about our own young people here who are looking for a job and a promising future? Don’t they deserve to have their place in this pool and be apart of this dating game too?
Canada, much like the United States, has an extraordinarily high unemployment rate among our younger citizens. The youth unemployment rate in Canada over this past year has remained stuck at close to 15 per cent, and those young people who have jobs are often not finding them in areas that match university and college degrees that they have gone into at least a couple of tens-of-thousands of dollars of debt for. Not to mention all of the obscenely over-priced college and university textbooks, and years wasted in lecture and seminar rooms that might have been better invested in starting a business of their own.
Why aren’t our colleges and universities preparing young people in this country for the skills they need for jobs in North America? The so-caled ‘skill shortage’ is a measure of their failure.
What in hell does all of that high-priced university and college education amount to if our federal government turns around and creates a dating pool for job seekers from other countries?
It’s been said in the mainstream Canadian media over and over again in recent years that there is a shortage of people with the skills employers need in this country today. If that is the case, where have our colleges and universities been in preparing young people in this country for the jobs that are in demand now and in the foreseeable future?
You keep hearing this rhetoric from our post-secondary institutions that they are providing young people with the skills they need for today’s world. Well how come we have such a skill shortage in this country then that we have to bypass our own younger generations and ‘fish’ outside the country for people to fill these jobs? And how come Harper and Kenney and company seem to have a better handle on what employers in Canada need on their work teams than our colleges and universities?
How come Kenney was willing to say this to The Globe and Mail this January 2 while, according to some statistics, about 25 per cent of young Canadians can’t find a job in the field they invested time and big money on? “They (meaning skilled workers from other countries) would arrive in Canada as permanent residents with prearranged jobs and literally be going to work at their skill level within a few days of arrival.”
Yet we can’t do that for our own young people here?
The news that Canada’s federal government is going to create a fishing pool for the country’s employers for skilled workers from other parts of the world is particularly hard to hear as I receive media releases from Niagara College and other colleges and universities, bragging about record or near-record numbers of students enrolling for courses on their campuses?
One might well ask, what are these students enrolling in; courses in dead languages like Latin or a dead vocation like journalism? Because if I get the message from our federal government straight, our colleges and universities sure aren’t preparing our young people for the skills they need to fill employer needs in Canada today.
(Niagara At Large invites you to wade in on this issue. It is an important one, especially for younger people who are shelling out huge bucks to go to college and university on the promise that there might be a decent job at the end of the road. Please Note that we only post comments from individuals who dare to share their first and last name with their thoughts.)
Niagara At Large 
You could always ask local MP Rick Dykstra, as he is the Parliamentary assistant to Mr. Kenney. But then, of course, you would expect a reply that was singing from the Harper songbook, so that will not happen. Mr. D., to my knowledge, never says anything off the page.
A short reply from NAL – It is now common knowledge in media circles that an interview with any Harper MPP on matters that range from the most serious to ones that are relatively trivial cannot commence beyond any point of nothingness unitl that MPP has received his or her talking points from the Prime Minister’s Office. Given that, why waste time interviewing the MPP? Go straight to the PM’s office and ask for the talking notes. Doug Draper
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I receive media releases from Niagara College and other colleges and universities, bragging about record or near-record numbers of students enrolling for courses on their campuses?
Doug your statement above is true the colleges are full yet many of those students have been solicited by ontario government representatives in south east asia. I spent several years at Mohawk and was startled by the ratio of foreign to Ontario people enrolled in Mohawk and I have been told the other Ontario Community College’s student ratios are similar.
I believe that Ontario Community Colleges once built for the enhancement of our own people’s education background are NOW nothing more than for profit institutions where few degree type professors teach. In fact many of the “Instructors” (Instructors can be good and some horribly bad i’;ve seen both) use the colleges as a second job and one finds them taking time off during a semester to fulfill obligations of a primary source. THIS HAPPENS I’ve seen and was a student of these people and they couldn’t care less.
This CORPORATE Conservative government’s main ploy is to break the UNIONS and have, possibly in collusion with some corporate entities, set up this pool to lower wages without any concern for the young Canadians they relegate and leave behind
This is not a singular incident perpetueted by this sham of a government for they have shown themselves to be a dictatorial gang who will do anything to hold onto power the G20 was evidence of this. as is the Election tamping they are constantly being investigated for.
The German Government in conjunction with their corporate partners have recently vowed to increase the educational opportunities of “THEIR” people Yet our Canadian government in compliance with Corporate (Not All) Canada feel it is “RIGHT” to rob the assets of other countries by enlisting educated experts from countries like Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden to name a few Thankfully most of these country’s educated and proud people deem to stay home.
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From my writings appearing in Niagara At Large surely no one can question my committment to refugees. My wife’s family were refugees and I am a first generation Canadian as my parents were immigrants. Notwithstanding, no job should go to anyone who is not a landed immigrant or a current citizen before all reasonable efforts — and I mean all including some retraining if needed — have been made to provide the opportunity to a Canadian. Nor should Canadian students be denied entry into college or university anywhere in Canada to allow a foreign student to have a place ahead of them regardless of home much more foreign students may pay.
Allowing foreign workers to take jobs that should rightly go to Canadian young people — of any age! 🙂 — is, I believe, often a ploy to keep wages down and to make cheap labour available to employers. It will be our younger citizens, not foreign workers, who in their time will be underwriting the costs of health care and the like for those most senior. Withour good jobs they will hard-pressed to do so, and doing so will be difficult as it is even with well-paying jobs.
Denying our young people real opportunities to work and to work for good wages when they become qualified is “cutting our own throats” in the long run. Doing so may serve corporate greed for higher profits but do little to open doors for students entering the workforce.
Canada has an important role to play in making a place for those who are true refugees whenever and wherever we can. We do not need to make places for other foreign workers to have jobs here unless we have made every effort to provide those opportunities to our own — even when they do need to undertake more training.
That being said, we must also encourage our young people to pay their dues — just as I and millions like me before them — with “MacJobs” and other entry-level jobs that will start them on the road to becoming more employable workers with constantly improving skills. Unfortunately, many who graduate colleges and universities expect to start at or near the top. The most serious and dilligent are prepared to roll up their sleeves, get a starting job, and work their way up!
In any case: Canadians first!!
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Could it be that by keeping unemployment at record highs one keeps employment costs at record lows. Unless of course you are a unionized public sector service worker.
In my opinion, a morotorium on importing foreign workers should be established until the current unemployment levels have been halved at the very least. You can not flood a market with cheap labour and expect the productivity of a nation to increase as a result.
By the way, I have witnessed first hand how the fed takes care of immigrants at the expense of its citizens. A casestudy – About 10 years ago many immigrants had their wages subsidized by the fed so that a company could hire skilled foriegn labor for half the price of a citizen of this country. What happened? Skilled Canadians were denied employment and their taxes paid for the subsidization of these imported skilled workers that ultimately took their jobs. I can not imagine how those university and college grads with experience felt when they couldn’t get a job in their chosen practice because of the reverse discriminatory practices of previous and present governments.
Man do we need NEW LEADERSHIP in this country….
Again sadly just sayin……..
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