Category — Immigration

Three key initiatives to support immigrant communities in Vancouver should continue under a new council, according to recommendations of Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Working Group on Immigration.

In its final report of this term, the round table group of community immigration experts urged Robertson to continue the city’s mentorship program for new immigrants, as well as a groundbreaking study of the impact of temporary foreign worker programs.

The report also urges continuation of the enormously successful Dialogues project, which has senior government funding, to encourage new relationships between immigrant and ethnic communities with Vancouver’s First Nations.

The working group’s report was circulated to councillors earlier this week. I was honoured to co-chair the group with Prof. Dan Hiebert of UBC.

The economic downturn is exacting a higher toll on immigrants than other Canadians, according to this new analysis, as immigrant levels of unemployment rise and wages stagnate.

The findings suggest that cities like Surrey, Burnaby and Vancouver, with their high share of recent immigrants, may find their economic recoveries lagging as well.

With Alberta’s booming tar sands projects poised to drive the number of temporary foreign workers over 100,000, the province’s labour federation is demanding answers in the death of two Chinese construction workers more than four years ago.

The case highlights the vulnerability of temporary foreign workers to exploitation and abuse. BC employs more than 60,000 TFWs and has recorded its own cases of extreme mistreatment. (The impact of the expanding TFW program on Vancouver has been a focus of the Mayor’s Working Group on Immigration.)

Gil MacGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, has been in the forefront of the provincial effort to ensure safety and dignity for temporary foreign workers in the province. He was instrumental in winning provincially-funded help centres for TFWs, a measure BC has refused to implement.

But MacGowan warned last month that the province’s failure, four years later, to prosecute anyone for the workplace death of the two workers was a warning sign of lack of provincial commitment to protect this growing workforce. [Read more →]

As interest and concern rise about BC’s growing reliance on temporary foreign workers, this new research paper by the BC Business Council reveals an important fact: the number of “temporary” foreign workers in the province now exceeds the number permitted to arrive in a given year because the terms of stay are now longer.

With the extension of permits to two years for some lower-skilled categories, BCBC found, “the stock of temporary workers has expanded so that there are now 100,000 more TFWs residing in Canada than are permitted to enter each year. . .

“The stock of foreign workers in BC now sits at around around 70,000.” At least half of those reside in Greater Vancouver and the majority in Vancouver itself.

From the city’s perspective, this means a growing population of workers needing services and support, a matter Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Working Group on Immigration has been assessing.

Only abut 15 percent of BC’s temporary workers in 2008 were in the managerial and professional categories. The rest were skilled and technical, intermediate or unskilled. For a surprising 43.7 percent, the skill level was “not stated.”

Despite the economic downturn, BCBC expects demand for TFWs to continue, especially in the regions. “The program is driven by employer demand, and is designed to fill identified labour shortages where no suitable Canadian workers or permanent residents are available (or prepared to do the work available).”