Nick Noorani Website

The beauty of professional networking is you never know when the seed you sow is going to take root and flourish.
Ask Toronto’s Melwyn D’Costa, who arrived from Mumbai, India, three years ago.
The advertising executive, with an MBA and 12 years of account management experience, had volunteered at the Institute of Communications and Advertising and helped run a group for foreign-trained advertising and marketing professionals.

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Small towns sometimes get a bad rap for being insular, unwelcoming and uninteresting, slanders that more often than not originate in big cities.
But living in a small town offers many advantages over big city life, including the obvious ones of lower house prices, lighter traffic and relatively less crime of the sort that plagues large metropolitan areas.
A new study suggests another positive, a surprising one for those who buy into the derogatory depiction of rural life. Visible minorities report that there is less ethnic and cultural tension in small towns than in big cities.

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The Conservatives won six new heavily ethnic ridings that were once Liberal strongholds, a trend they say proves their efforts to woo this vote have borne fruit.
They also came close to ousting Liberal incumbents in several ethnic constituencies in Vancouver and in the Greater Toronto Area, including Brampton Springdale and Brampton West, where the Liberals won by less than 2 per cent of the vote. In Vancouver South, Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh retained his seat by a mere 22 votes – compared with a 9,000-vote lead in 2006.
The Conservative party is touting this as a “major breakthrough,” noting that support for the Liberals among new Canadians is no longer guaranteed.
“We did extremely well among new Canadians and in cultural communities,” Jason Kenney, Conservative MP for Calgary Southeast and the Secretary of State for Multiculturalism, said in a telephone interview this week. “New Canadians have demonstrated their votes are not to be taken for granted, and that decades of false stereotyping by Liberals in immigrant communities is a barrier we have begun to overcome.”

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Immigration levels in the country will have to go up significantly for future economic growth, the Conference Board of Canada reports.
To meet long-term domestic labour market needs and to remain competitive in the global search for talent Canada will have to increase its number of immigrants from the existing 250,000 to 360,000 annually by 2025.
The report highlights what should be done to meet the country’s economic needs through immigration, including measures to allow the growing number of temporary foreign workers the option to become permanent residents. It also suggests increasing refugee intakes to maintain a well-balanced immigration system.

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Immigrants who have been through the system see danger in the radical changes the Conservative government is about to bring in, changing the way Canada chooses its newcomers.
They also describe a new reality not factored in: fierce competition from Canadians who are far better educated than a generation ago.
Full-time university undergraduate enrolment has grown from 69,000 students in the mid-1950s to over 600,000 today – when the population only doubled.
The changes to the system, which were legislated this summer, place a heavier empahsis on jobs skills.

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Tony Fang can hang hard numbers onto a decade of “brain surgeons driving taxis” stories and they prove, he says, that the immigrant dream doesn’t work anymore.
Fang, a professor of human resources management at York University, recently unveiled his evidence to CERIS, the Ontario migration research think-tank.
It used to be, he said, immigrants would work hard and do well. “It isn’t working anymore.”

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