Nick Noorani Website

I see them everywhere. The huddled masses. Staying close to their own ethnic groups. Speaking in their own languages and staying away from “others.” They hover outside schools twisting their fingers, nervous that someone might talk to them! I hear so many stories of Canadians who reach out to these immigrants, inviting their children over for a party or a playdate and their friendliness is looked on with such suspicion that it could almost be considered rude!

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Bhagwan Lobana knows too well how harsh the labour market is.
Last April, after nearly two years in Canada, the 50-year-old Punjabi finally found a job that he was proud of. Mr. Lobana, an experienced chemist who graduated top of his masters’ class in 1982, was hired at Acuren, a materials-testing and engineering company. But in November, he was laid off when business slowed because of the recession.

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Grocery giant Loblaw Cos. Ltd. has scooped up T&T Supermarket Inc., Canada’s largest Asian supermarket chain, in a bid to capitalize on Canada’s burgeoning demand for international food.
“The ethnic market opportunity in Canada is vast,” Allan Leighton, Loblaw president, told analysts during a conference call yesterday to discuss the retailer’s second-quarter fiscal results.
“Today we have a relatively small share. Our objective is to be the No. 1 player….
“There is a huge amount of learning we can get from [T&T] in terms of [product] ranges and sourcing, and it should help our core stores, too.”

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The issue is two pronged:
1. Immigrants need to have English/French speaking/writing/reading skills as part of their qualification. I didn’t need ESL classes and I know so many immigrants who do not require this either. The fact is that these skills are more for families of immigrants (wives, kids etc) and refugees. Wonder how the people who do these courses fare in Canada from a success parameter.
2. When an immigrant has to work two jobs to make ends meet, how is he/she going to have the time to go to school? It is a Catch 22 situation. And so because they need to make ends meet they stay in dead end jobs and Canada loses on the true earning capability of the immigrant.
Totally agree on the integration part. We at the Canadian Immigrant magazine have been helping immigrants do so for the past five years!

News item follows:

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Look at homelessness this way: not by considering what will happen to those people who line up outside emergency shelters each night, but from the point of view of refugees and immigrants to Canada.
Each year for the past several Canada has received 250,000 immigrants and a pile of refugees on top of that. Their desire to find a home and the benefits that brings to their lives are no different than the street people that have been so much in the news.
Between 2001 and 2005, the federal government spent $15 million for a unique study which looked at the experience of 12,000 of those immigrants and refugees.

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This Canada Day is a very poignant one for me. I can no longer claim to be a recent newcomer — I’ve been in this country for more than 10 years now. Nor can I claim that this is my first Canada Day as a citizen — that milestone occurred last year. I am a Canadian through and through — at least that’s how I see it.

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