Canada Must Make it Easier for Essential Workers to Immigrate

Sen. Ratna Omidvar: I think the last six months have taught us that our immigration insights have been overly influenced by what I call our addiction to skilled workers. The last six months have shown us that essential workers are, in fact, the ones who kept us safe, secure and fed in many ways. And these are not the ones we seem to have paid any attention to. I’ve always believed that the economy functions in many different ways. It’s not made up of just one kind of labour, but many different kinds of components go into it.

So I think we have to understand immigration a little differently – not completely differently because immigration will always be an economic driver for our country, but now we also need to think of immigration as a health and safety driver of our society. And that is all caught up in the economy.

I’m talking about people at the bottom of the scale. I’m talking about migrant workers, of course; about personal care support workers, who are not given permanent jobs but go from site to site, possibly endangering themselves and their patients. I’m talking about the people who stock the shelves in grocery stores and continue to sell products to us. So all of this has brought into sharp relief, I believe, the need to have a serious rethink, and retool – if not transform – parts of our immigration program. In the main, I believe it works fairly well, [even though] there are issues on all sides. But we need to rethink immigration as one part of the strategy towards securing our health and security. We’ve actually never thought about immigration in that way.

FPR: Why do you think it is that we haven’t thought about it that way before now?

We’ve never had a crisis like this. And we’ve felt for so ever long that we are self-sufficient in health care, that our global supply chains will provide us with the equipment and the health paraphernalia that we need. The truth has been uncovered.

Sticking with immigration, the situation with migrant workers is particularly worrisome. I come at things mainly from a social justice and human rights perspective, but I also understand that the food security of Canadians is caught up when Canadian farmers are not able to get the labour. And let’s put this mirage that Canadians will work on farms aside. That myth has also been, I think, proven wrong – we actually need migrant labourers to work the farms. But should they be migrants, per se? Or can we conceive of a way – if we think of them as essential workers – to move them along a path to permanency [permanent residency] over time? No such path exists right now.

If we are looking at self-sufficiency, then migrant labourers are part of that self-sufficiency. And I know that there are concerns about housing standards and inspections. All of those can be improved, but it doesn’t get to the root of the problem, which is the limited rights of migrant workers, as they are migrants and not immigrants.

I’d like to see the government take a more clear-eyed look at moving migrant workers [to permanency], maybe over a two-step process. I know the policy concerns around this proposal are huge – and they’re not misplaced, by the way – that if migrant workers have a route to permanency, after [they secure permanent status] they will likely transition to another job. But many other people do that, too. And [by creating a path to permanency], we secure a future supply by ensuring that in successive years, people continue to come in to fill the backstop. And those migrant workers who come and become permanent will bring their families, who may require higher integration supports, but from our history, we know that there is a narrative: “Come to Canada. Work hard. Your children will succeed.” And so this would be a short-term and a long-term strategy.

It’s really important to create, or to find a stream within the [existing] immigration programs, for what I would call nonprofessional health-care workers. These are not picked for their university educations per se, but people who become workers in long-term care homes, and in homes like mine – I have a home-care worker for my mother and I know it took her forever to get a landing; it was a very complicated process. So maybe [we need to] get rid of this language of “high skilled” and “low skilled,” because we found out that what we really need in this crisis is not just the high-skilled workers, but also the others who keep us alive on a day-to-day basis.