Robin Levinson

The federal government will have to work with the provinces if it wants to shorten the time it takes to recognize foreign credentials, a parliamentary committee heard on Tuesday.

Devinder Shory, the Conservative MP for Calgary Northeast, provided a first-hand account of the difficulties immigrants face gaining acceptance of their foreign credentials. Shory moved to Canada in 1989 with a law degree from India, but drove cabs and owned small businesses until he was finally called to the bar in Alberta in 1998.

“We get all kinds of professional candidates into Canada but unfortunately because of the conditions they go through rough and tough times,” Shory said.

According to Statistics Canada, only 24 per cent of employed immigrants with foreign university degrees were working in a regulated occupation that matched their field of study, compared to 62 per cent of Canadians.

Leaders from various professional associations testified before the committee on the need for more foreign-trained workers. Christine Nielsen, of the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science, said that in a few years the need for lab technicians will outweigh the supply of qualified Canadian professionals.

The committee is trying to find ways to make it easier for foreign-trained workers to have their skills recognized so that they can join the work force. The problem is, most professional accreditation is done at the provincial level. Provinces have authority over labour and education issues, and so the federal government would have to work with them in order to change current policies, said Rob Walsh, legal counsel to the committee.

Different provinces may judge foreign credentials for the same job differently, making moving between provinces an issue for immigrants, Walsh said. Under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, mobility rights are guaranteed for citizens. Immigrants can apply to become citizens after living in Canada for three years.

While the federal government controls immigration, it has agreements with certain provinces, like Quebec and Ontario, to run their own nominee programs. Such programs give immigration preference to people selected by the province. The committee said it might try and leverage these provincial nominee agreements in order to get the provinces to fast-track foreign credentials.

During the past election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a campaign promise to speed up the process and provide money for immigrants who need skills training.

But ultimately it’s up to the provinces, Walsh told the committee. Walsh said the best way to get the provinces on board with the federal government’s plan for foreign credential recognition is to use persuasion, not leverage. “The keyword is agreement,” he said.

A mother of two, Valerie Edwards often had trouble paying for the dentist. “It was hard enough to get the kids dental cleanings. You know I used to go to Algonquin or the La Cite College, it wasn’t always a good experience.” Then Edwards heard about a program, Healthy Smiles Ontario, which provides dental coverage for children of low-income families who don’t have dental insurance. Since October 2010, it has provided regular dental cleaning, oral surgery, and fillings to 775 children in Ottawa alone.

“It helped us a lot for sure, because they really needed cleanings and it’s really stressful not being able to get them dental care,” says Edwards.

Now, the Ottawa Board of Health wants to extend dental benefits to include the parents of children already enrolled in Healthy Smiles. Nancy Kennedy, the program manager for the Dental Health division of the Ottawa Public Health Department, sees a real need for better adult dental care. She hopes that parents not eligible for other forms of dental coverage will be able to use the same plan that their kids already do.

“We’re finding a gap in services with low-income adults. So there’s an opportunity for this new program to be able to get easy access to the parents,” says Kennedy.

Although the program is run through municipal health departments, funding comes from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. That’s why the Ottawa Public Health Department is asking the Ministry to extend benefits to the families of the children already in the program.

Kennedy has seen first-hand that waiting until a patient has an infected tooth is a waste of health care resources. “Our experience with working with adults on Ontario Works is that when you can’t provide preventive care, you only deal with problems.”

Dr. Ian McConnachie is a pediatric dentist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and a former president of the Ontario Dental Association. He says that the lack of preventative dental care for low-income adults is a serious oversight in health care in the province.

“It’s absolutely essential that the government does extend some type of core oral health program to adults.”

McConnachie explains that including adults in Healthy Smiles Ontario will reduce costs to the Province overall. In addition to the expense of emergency extractions and oral surgery, a number of studies have tied poor oral health to higher risk for heart disease. McConnachie takes it a step further and suggests that poor oral health can even have a negative effect on a person’s job prospects:

“Many of these people, if they had an improved level of oral health, not only would it improve their overall health and their overall quality of life, but it would improve their employability because the appearance of these disastrous mouths is certainly a deterrent for them being able to find employment.”

Despite high hopes for the program, Kennedy isn’t holding her breath for a response from the Ministry just yet. “Nothing will happen quickly because it’s a big process with a big impact.”