Maytree Conversations

The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) and RBC recognized top employers who are leading the way in integrating skilled immigrant talent in the Toronto Region labour market at the 6^th Annual Immigrant Success (IS) Awards on April 26, 2012.

The winners are:

Maxxam Analytics - Toronto Star Award for Excellence in Workplace Integration

Maxxam’s co-op program for skilled immigrants has evolved to become an essential recruitment strategy for their fluctuating client-driven work volumes and to address skill shortages in their field.

Huawei Technologies Canada - RBC Immigrant Advantage Award

When Huawei Canada established itself in Canada in 2008, they faced many challenges finding highly skilled talent they needed. Skilled immigrants were the solution.

Career Edge Organization’s Career Bridge Program - CBC Toronto Vision Award for Immigrant Inclusion

Career Edge Organization’s Career Bridge program has been connecting skilled immigrants with leading Canadian employers through paid internships since 2003. It’s a win-win for employers and immigrants.

Zuleika Sgro, Manager, Talent Management Services, Questrade - Canadian HR Reporter Individual Achievement Award

Zuleika Sgro is a champion for including skilled immigrant talent as an optimum strategy to match specialized skills with demonstrated skills shortages. And she has embedded this practice within her company, Questrade.

Watch video about one winner:

To learn more and watch these inspiring stories, visit www.isawards.ca.

While recent immigrants to Canada are more highly educated than previous cohorts and the Canadian-born, they earn lower wages and have more difficulties entering the labour market. At a time when we are competing in a global economy, Canada has clearly not leveraged this talent into innovation and productivity.

As we saw with the release of Canada’s Vital Signs 2010 earlier this week, recent immigrants with a university education had an unemployment rate that was 4.1 times higher (13.9%) that that of Canadian-born workers with a university degree (3.4%), according to 2009 data.

There is no doubt immigrants to Canada are unemployed and underemployed. About 65% who arrived in the 1990s experienced a low-income period, and about one-fifth had chronic low incomes. In the most recent recession, immigrants were disproportionally affected.  Many of the newly unemployed were immigrants who had taken jobs in the manufacturing sector because their skills and experience were not recognized in Canada. They now find themselves even further from their original career goals.

One of the main factors that explains the gap between employment rates for recent skilled immigrants and their Canadian-born counterparts is the lack of social and professional networks that new immigrants have in their new home.

Now that the economy is hopefully improving, this means that they have no access to the hidden job market, including job openings that are not advertised. Depending on where they worked and how long they’ve been in the country, recent immigrants may also lack an understanding of the Canadian workplace culture and find it hard to have their international qualifications recognized.

However, more and more community organizations and employers offer programs to overcome these deficits. In particular, mentoring has shown itself to be a proven strategy as it connects a skilled immigrant with an established Canadian professional in the same or related occupation.

It’s not just the mentee who benefits – it’s a two-way street. Mentees benefit by the expert advice and connections that mentors provide – it is their bridge to becoming Canadian professionals. Mentor benefit by developing their leadership and coaching skills in addition to enhancing their ability to lead diverse teams.

The success of mentoring is demonstrable. In a study of The Mentoring Partnership in Toronto, you can see the difference that mentoring made to the individuals who participated:

• Almost 80% of mentees found work;
• There was a 67% increase in income for the mentee; and
• 95% of all mentors said they would hire a skilled immigrant.

A mentoring program is also advantageous to the participating employers. Among other benefits, it:

• Helps identify hidden talent by bringing employers in touch with qualified candidates;
• Provides a learning opportunity for staff ; and
• Recognizes volunteerism and helps gain greater visibility in the community.

Employers can be an active part of this process by providing mentors in one or more cities across Canada. Mentoring programs for newcomers exist in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, London, Kitchener-Waterloo, Niagara, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. Visit the ALLIES website to learn more about getting involved with mentoring.

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Peter Paul is the project leader of ALLIES, a project jointly funded by Maytree and The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. ALLIES (Assisting Local Leaders with Immigrant Employment Strategies) supports local efforts in Canadian cities to successfully adapt and implement programs that further the suitable employment of skilled immigrants.

The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) has just published an open letter to the Government of Canada urging the Government to make mandatory the completion of the long form of the census, as has been the case for the last thirty-five years, and to do another Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants.

TRIEC writes that Canada must maintain its integral status as a public resource. The organization argues that the small percentage of the population opposed to completing the census is far outweighed by the many who stand to suffer if the data is not collected and analyzed properly.

As has been pointed out by statisticians, people who volunteer are not necessarily representative of the population as a whole. Aboriginal people, recent immigrants, and the poor are also less likely to fill in the long form.

TRIEC fears that the data generated going forward will not accurately capture the well-being of immigrants. The long form responses represent Canada’s best data on immigrant groups.

Read the open letter from TRIEC to the Government of Canada.

Read open letters from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, Canadian Association for Business Economics and Canadian Institute of Planners.

Read opposition articles from C.D. Howe Institute, Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.

Read coverage from Macleans and Financial Post.

TRIEC also urges the Government to carry out another longitudinal survey of immigrants, which underscores how well, or badly, newcomers are doing. As a country that relies on immigration for population and labour force growth, the health and well-being of immigrant groups determines how well we all do.

The successful integration of immigrants is not simply a matter of individual efforts by newcomers to Toronto. It must be accompanied by the city’s will to make social cohesion a priority by engaging a range of stakeholders, and it requires action from many players. In other words, inclusion is a two way street.

In a cosmopolitan city like Toronto – where our residents speak more than 100 languages and come from 200 distinct ethnic groups – the integration of immigrants is critical. Toronto continues to be a city of choice for many newcomers to Canada with 49 per cent of our city’s population comprised of immigrants.

In light of our aging population and our declining birth rate, we’ll rely more and more on immigrants as a key resource for building and strengthening our city and country. By 2011, Canada will rely 100 per cent on immigration for our net labour market growth; by 2026, our net population growth will be derived from immigration.

Based on these imminent realities, we need to continue to effectively integrate new immigrants into our communities, especially if they choose Toronto as their home.

This is why Maytree incubates ideas and collaborates with many stakeholders on local practical solutions for immigrant integration. This is also why we are communicating and partnering with national and international organizations on solutions that work.

We know these initiatives have made a meaningful and tangible impact on Toronto. And they are gaining traction in diverse urban centres across Canada and abroad – many communities are looking to Toronto to lead by example.

A few key highlights:

Since the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council was launched in 2003 by Maytree and the Toronto City Summit Alliance, a range of successful projects have helped skilled immigrants integrate smoothly into the Greater Toronto Region labour market.

Now through the ALLIES project, a partnership with The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, cities across Canada are learning from – and adapting – the TRIEC model to set up their own, locally-led, immigrant employment councils. In Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Ottawa, Montreal, Waterloo Region, Niagara, London, Fredericton, Moncton and Halifax, a strong civic movement is building to ensure immigrants can put their international skills, education and experience to good use.

Toronto’s story of immigrant integration has also garnered the interest of civic leaders and policy makers from outside of Canada, from Sweden to Singapore to Spain.

The Mentoring Partnership is another successful program founded in Toronto in 2004. It has helped over 5,000 skilled immigrants navigate the local job market with guidance from volunteer mentors in similar professions.  Eighty three percent of mentees said their mentoring relationship made a positive difference to their job search.

Over 50 corporate partners from the private and public sector have been actively engaged in the program as a means to nurture their staff’s leadership capacity and to build cross-cultural competence in an increasingly diverse workforce.

Through a recently launched national initiative, urban cities across Canada – and as far away as Auckland, New Zealand – have implemented their own mentoring programs for skilled immigrants as well.

DiverseCity, another project launched by Maytree and the Toronto City Summit Alliance, supports and develops up-and-coming leaders from under-represented ethnic and racial groups to address their low numbers in senior leadership positions in the Greater Toronto Area. Other communities across the country are interested in learning how to ensure that institutions are governed by qualified leaders who are more reflective of their population.

Cities of Migration, also a Toronto-based project, is the first international initiative to connect communities in Canada, the United States and around the globe on issues of migration and immigrant integration. With existing partners in Germany, Spain, the UK and New Zealand, the project just began a new collaboration with The National League of Cities to exchange key learnings about successful integration strategies.

While Maytree has had a hand in shaping these projects and solutions, we have not developed these ideas alone. It is only with the vision, energy and innovation of key players including employers, educators, community agencies, media, civic leaders and government, that Toronto has moved the marker on immigrant integration.

This collaborative approach is yet another reason why communities around the world are looking to Toronto for inspiration.

Indeed there is still much work to be done in Toronto, but we have made measurable and marked progress.

For that, our city should be proud.

(This post first appeared on the Toronto Star blog “Your City, My City“).