Diane Francis Says Canada Needs a Silicon Valley

Diane Francis says Canada needs to do more create its own version of Silicon Valley in order to obtain the economic benefits that tech entrepreneurs can provide

A recent article in the blog of Diane Francis, an editor-at-large for the National Post, argues that Canada needs to create its own version of the American Silicon Valley, and commends Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) for taking a step in this direction with the creation of the Start-Up Visa.

Francis says that skilled entrepreneurs can provide the type of economic boost that a country cannot ignore:

Canada has been America’s farm team for centuries, providing brawn, brainpower and talent to feed its mighty industries. But the contest for talent has never been greater, notably for those technology entrepreneurs who are capable of invention, innovation and single-handedly replicating the GNP of small states.

She applauds Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s May visit to the U.S. to recruit technology workers facing H-1B problems, and argues that the Canadian government needs to do more campaigns like this.

With the CEOs of American technology giants lobbying for greater government action to attract foreign tech talent to the U.S., Congress won’t stand still Francis says, and will try to match Canada’s Start-Up Visa program.

The federal government should be looking to add to its efforts now, to match the inevitable response by the U.S. government.

Not only should Canada be recruiting foreign tech workers living in the U.S., it should also be encouraging immigration by Americans themselves, who could find Canada’s tech clusters, a midst world class urban centres enticing, she argues.

Francis notes that the Government of Canada has a $500 million Venture Capital Action Plan in the works, which will subsidize Canadian venture capital firms that invest in Canadian start-ups.

Government subsidies like these, Francis says, are alone not enough to create a “technology venture capitalist marketplace” however, and the federal government should also be scaling up the Start-Up Visa program and increasing tax breaks for entrepreneurs.

A focus on economic impact of immigration

Francis’ call to action on attracting foreign entrepreneurs is one of several in a series by influential Canadian individuals and prominent Canadian institutions urging the country to make a more concerted effort to extract economic benefits from immigration.

Other than pushing for more entrepreneur friendly immigration programs, the other area of immigration policy that pundits have repeatedly pressed the country to give more attention to has been building on Canada’s strengths as a destination for international students and increasing the foreign student population.

This has included calls to make it easier for international students already in Canada to become permanent residents.

The provincial governments have also called on the federal government to increase the role of the provinces in selecting new Canadians. They say that the Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs) allow them to select immigrants that meet their unique economic needs.

StatsCan Report Links Income to Life Expectancy

A new StatsCan report finds a clear relationship between income and health in Canada, with Canadians in the highest income quintile having the lowest risk of dying from multiple causes

A new report on the state of health in Canada by Statistics Canada finds a strong link between between life expectancy and income in the country.

The report uses data collected from 1991 to 2006 in a Canadian census study on mortality, and measures the age-standardized mortality rates (ASMRs) of Canadians in five income groups.

It found that individuals in the highest income quintile had the lowest risk of dying, and the risk increased progressively with each move down an income quintile.

The major causes of death that saw big differences between individuals with different levels of income were ischemic heart disease, cancers of the trachea, bronchus and lung, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

This suggests that a greater tendency among those in the lower income quintiles to engage high-risk behavior, in particular smoking, is a major cause of the differences in health outcomes.

A large difference was also seen in rate of death due to communicable diseases, with individuals in the lowest income quintile being 3.5 times more likely to die from HIV/AIDS than those in the highest.

Healthy immigrant effect

The link between income and health outcomes could explain the ‘healthy immigrant effect’, which is an observed phenomenon in which immigrants tend to arrive in Canada in a state of health that is better than members of the general population, but see a deterioration in their health in the years following their arrival.

As the income gap between recent immigrants and the general Canadian population has steadily increased since 1980, one result could be that the income-related health effects of immigration on new Canadians could have grown.

Income and population centres

The relevance of income to health is also worth considering when deciding where one should live in Canada.

Canadian census reports show that there is a sizeable personal income gap between rural and urban Canada, with urban areas having per capita incomes that are more than one fifth higher than rural districts.

The income gap between rural and urban Canada is paralleled by a life expectancy gap, with city-dwellers and those living within commuting distance of cities living longer than their rural counterparts.

Among Canadian cities, those with the highest median household income are Ottawa, the country’s capital, where it is $94,700, the Albertan metropolises of Calgary ($89,490) and Edmonton ($87,930), the capital city of Saskatchewan, Regina ($84,890), and Oshawa, Ontario ($82,270).

Canadian Foreign Service Workers Union Offers Binding Arbitration

Treasury Board President Tony Clement, who is responsible for protecting Canadians from a growing federal debt burden and tax load, has until Tuesday to accept PAFSO’s offer to enter into binding arbitration to end the pay dispute (Government of Canada)

The Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO) has offered to enter into binding arbitration with the federal government to end the strike of its members and with it, the disruption to permanent residency and visa issuance.

PAFSO is giving the government until Tuesday to accept the offer before it is rescinded. Treasury Board President Tony Clement must decide whether to accept the deal, which would give a third party arbitrator final say as to what the new compensation scheme for Canada’s foreign services will be, or stick with the government’s current proposal.

The strike is delaying the processing of visa applications, which has elicited warnings from various groups, including the Tourism Industry Association of Canada and Nova Scotia’s premier, that the continuation of the strike will cost the Canadian economy by reducing the number of tourists and international students that land in Canada.

The federal government is aware of the damage the strike is doing but says the offer it has already proposed is fair because foreign service officers receive a special foreign allowance that makes up for their salaries being lower than that of other public servants.

The government also says that foreign service jobs are highly sought after in Canada which indicates the compensation offered is sufficient.

PAFSO has responded that the foreign allowance is not a special benefit to foreign service officers, as all Canadian public servants working overseas receive it, regardless of their division.

This, according to the foreign service officers union, makes the government’s proposed compensation scheme, which would give a foreign service officer on the level-2 pay scale at the maximum experience-grade $87,000 per year, unfair, as it would still be $11,000 less than what a comparatively experienced public servant in the commerce division would receive.

The government has been reluctant to increase its offer however, saying that the PAFSO strike is an attempt to ‘blackmail’ Canada by withholding a vital service.

Clement has said that a more generous offer would be unfair to Canadians who would have to foot the bill, a suggestion that the government believes the compensation offered is adequate for attracting qualified individuals to fill the foreign service positions.

Study Suggests Immigration Between U.S.-Canada Becoming Less Lop-sided

Citizenship and Immigration Canada commissioned a billboard in Silicon Valley in April to promote Canada to the region’s high-tech workers. More American immigration to Canada is reducing Canada’s U.S. bound brain drain (Government of Canada)

Canada has long suffered a brain drain to the U.S. as more skilled workers immigrate from Canada to the U.S. than vice versa, but that gap is starting to close according to a new study.

As reported by a story in Yahoo News, an Association for Canadian Studies study found that the ratio of U.S. bound Canadians to Canada-bound Americans has decreased from 4-1 to 2-1 over the span of a decade:

Last year, a total of 20,138 people traded their maple leaves for stars and stripes – a drop from the peak of 29,138 in 2005.
Meantime, 11,216 people left Uncle Sam for Queen Elizabeth in 2008, more than double the 5,828 who came to Canada in 2000.

There seems to be an inconsistency between the data provided by this study and Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC)’s own data, which shows only 8,219 Americans becoming Canadian permanent residents in 2008, which could be due to a different methodology used in this study.

CIC has been seeking to attract more U.S. based workers to Canada recently. Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney visited Silicon Valley in April to promote Canada to Americans and foreign nationals working in the U.S. with an H-1B visa.

Nova Scotia Premier to Press for End to Diplomat Strike Citing Visa Delays

Nova Scotia Premier Darrel Dexter says Atlantic Canada is being harmed economically by the strike of foreign service officers (Government of Nova Scotia)

Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter says the strike by Canadian foreign service officers is hurting Canadian provinces by delaying the processing of student visas.

International students studying in Canada provide a significant economic boost to communities across the country, including several in Nova Scotia, through the spending money they bring with them.

A report done last year by University of British Columbia President Stephen Toope for the Canadian Council of Chief Executives found that international students contribute $6.5 billion a year to the Canadian economy.

Dexter warned that this could be jeopardized by the foreign service officers strike, as universities in the U.S. will be more appealing to students wishing to study abroad if they are unable to get their Canadian student visas quickly:

“If you’ve got five universities on your radar and two of them are in Canada and three are in the United States and you get your visa into the United States in three days then when you are trying to plan for the future if you have to wait two months before you know if you’re even going to get a student visa it makes it a heck of a lot more likely you are you going to choose one of the three options in the U.S.”

Strike action by the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO) is affecting the processing of visa applications in 12 foreign missions, including those in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Jakarta, Bangkok, Washington, Delhi, Chandigarh, Bogota, and Sao Paolo.

The premier says the provinces should urge the federal government to escalate the labour dispute in order to resolve it, which most likely would lead to a court ordered end to the strike.

Canada to Get New Immigration Minister, Chris Alexander

Chris Alexander, who started his career in 1993 as a foreign services officer stationed in Russia, will replace Jason Kenney to become the new Citizenship and Immigration Minister (Government of Canada)

The federal government announced a major cabinet shuffle on Monday which will see Jason Kenney, the current Citizenship and Immigration Minister, move to the Department of Employment and Social Development, which will be the new name for the Department of Human Resources and Skills Development (HRSDC).

Chris Alexander, who is currently the MP for the district of Ajax-Pickering, will become the new Citizenship and Immigration Minister. Alexander has never held a Minister position before, but has spent 18 years as a Canadian diplomat where he had proximity to Canada’s foreign visa missions.

During Kenney’s tenure as Immigration Minister, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) saw major reforms in immigration procedures and rules, that attempted to better match selected immigrants with skills in demand in the Canadian economy, reduce the backlog in the Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP), and reduce the processing times of applications.

Kenney also pushed to reduce fraud and abuse of Canada’s immigration and refugee programs through various reforms including new marriage sponsorship rules and expedited deportation of bogus asylum claimants from E.U. countries.

Centre for Immigration Policy Reform’s Collacott Criticizes “Passports of Convenience” in Vancouver Sun Article

Martin Collacott, a former Canadian diplomat and advocate of immigration reform, says passports of convenience could end up costing Canadians (Brian from Toronto)

A new story in the Vancouver Sun looks at the issue of recent immigrants obtaining Canadian citizenship and then returning to their home countries.

The phenomenon, which it calls ‘passports of convenience’, has critics and defenders within Canada, with a prominent figure from each side interviewed for the article:

The Sun articles elicited opposing perspectives from Yuen Pau Woo, head of the Asia Pacific Foundation, and Martin Collacott, a former Canadian diplomat and key figure at the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform, who is also a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.

Collacott says that those who get citizenship and then live abroad pose a risk of incurring an economic cost for Canada, because they don’t contribute to Canada’s tax base but are eligible for Canadian health care and Old Age Security benefits when they retire.

The cost, in the way of taxes, for Canadians to support one individual from the age of 65 to 85 is $350,000 according to Collacott, and this amounts to a very big subsidy for those Canadians who work abroad for most of their life and then return to Canada for retirement.

Collacott also argues that it’s fair to place higher expectations on Canadians who immigrated to the country to work in the country than on those born in Canada:

“While it’s fair to state there should be as few distinctions as possible between Canadian-born and naturalized citizens, it is also perfectly reasonable for us to expect that, of the many millions around the world who would like to move here, we have the right to expect that those to whom we grant this privilege should demonstrate a real attachment to their new homeland and not choose to move away as soon as they obtain a Canadian passport.”

These criticisms are motivated by reports of a subset of immigrants coming to Canada with a plan to stay in the country long enough to get citizenship, a period which they sometimes refer to as immigration prison, and then immediately move back once they have acquired Canadian citizenship.

There might be little that the federal government could do about this type of gaming of immigration rules however, as the Canadian Charter of Rights guarantees all citizens equal rights and privileges, which precludes additional residency requirements being placed on naturalized Canadians.

Canada Has The Best Reputation In The World According To New Survey

Canadians at a parade in Vancouver. Canada has ranked first in the world in the last three RepTrak global surveys on country reputations (CICS News)

A new study on national reputations, called RepTrak, finds Canada has the best reputation of any country in the world. It’s the third year in a row that Canada has taken the top stop in the annual survey.

RepTrak, which is conducted by the Reputation Institute, surveyed more than 27,000 people from G8 countries to create its rankings. Explaining the results, the Reputation Institute’s Fernando Prado said Canada had done an effective job of communicating its strengths:

“Canada’s results confirm that it is only possible to maintain a strong reputation in the long-term when a country has the ability to transmit its leadership globally in each of the three key criteria: an effective government, an advanced economy, and an appealing environment.”

“A country’s reputation is its personal calling card,” said the President and CEO of the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC), Michele McKenzie.

She added, “We’re not just inviting the world to visit us; we’re capitalizing on our positive reputation to open new doors and create new opportunities for Canada, such as the impact of the business events travel sector on our economy.”

The different components of reputation measured in the survey were levels of trust, esteem, admiration and respect, and perceptions of 16 attributes of a country, including whether it is a safe place to visit, a beautiful country, has friendly and welcoming residents, has progressive social and economic policies, and is run by an effective government.

Canada scored 76.6 out of 100, followed by Sweden (76.5), Switzerland (76.3), Australia (76.1), and Norway (74.1). The lowest scoring countries were Russia (36.7), Nigeria (34.0), Pakistan (28.8), Iran (22.6), and Iraq (21.2).

This survey found many non-G8 countries had improving reputations, led by Singapore, Taiwan, Peru, Brazil, South Korea, Poland and the Ukraine, which as a group saw an average increase of 5.3 points in their reputation score from 2009 to 2013, which helped them gain ground against the five top countries, which had a smaller 3.5 point increase in their score over the same time frame.

The Reputation Institute says the survey shows a correlation between country reputations and the economic situation of countries, which explains the faster rate of improvement in the reputation of developing countries.

New Quebec Immigration Rules Announced

Quebec Immigration, which runs the Quebec Skilled Worker Program (QSWP) and the Quebec Immigrant Investor Program (QIIP), two of Canada’s most popular immigration programs, announced this week that changes will be coming to its immigration rules and procedures (Jenny Poole)

Quebec Immigration, which runs two of the most popular Canadian immigration programs, announced on Wednesday that changes will be coming to its immigration rules and procedures.

The new rules will affect Quebec skilled worker, investor, business people, and self-employed immigrant applicants, and will be instated in stages from August 1, 2013 to March 31, 2014.

The maximum number of applications that will be accepted through the Quebec Skilled Worker Program will be 20,000 for the one year quota period.

Furthermore, the level of French language proficiency a Quebec skilled worker applicant needs to attain to obtain points in the language criteria will be increased, with the Advanced Intermediate proficiency becoming the minimum level that will grant points, which is three levels higher than Low Beginner, the previous minimum point-granting level.

The eligible areas of education and vocational training for the skilled worker program are also being changed, with the new list not as of yet announced.

Investors

The maximum number of Quebec Immigrant Investor Program (QIIP) applications that will be accepted for the one year quota period will be 1,750, with a maximum of 1,200 applications per country.

The application must be received by Quebec Immigration between August 1 and 16, 2013, and can be sent only by regular mail.

The applications will be reviewed by an order determined by a random draw, which will remove any advantage in trying to be the first to have one’s application submitted.

Businesspeople and self-employed workers

500 applications under the businesspeople and self-employment category will be accepted for the one year quota period.

As with the skilled worker category, the advanced intermediate level in French language proficiency will become the new minimum threshold for obtaining language points. The new weighting will affect both principal applicants and their spouses in the Entrepreneur stream, while only affecting principal applicants in the Self-Employed stream.

Canada Border Services Agency to Use Electronic Bracelets in Place of Detention

A satellite used in the Global Positioning System. Electronic bracelets with GPS tracking will be used by the federal government in place of long-term detention of high-risk asylum claimants

The federal government will use electronic tracking bracelets in place of detention for asylum claimants and illegal immigrants who pose a high risk of evading deportation orders, according to a recent report by the Globe and Mail.

Ottawa served notice this week that it plans to sign a contract with the U.K. firm Buddi Ltd., used by police forces there to track criminals through electronic bracelet devices that the British media have dubbed “Chav Nav” tags. The technology provides real-time tracking using the same space-based Global Positioning System that drivers rely upon for in-car navigation.

The decision comes a little less than a year after a parliamentary committee on public safety and national security presented its findings on the effectiveness, cost efficiency, and feasibility of using electronic supervision in the correctional and immigration setting.

That report concluded that electronic supervision would likely improve the federal government’s enforcement of removal orders for failed asylum claimants, which is something it has struggled with in recent years.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board see electronic tracking as potentially a more humane alternative to holding high-risk asylum claimants in long-term detention.