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Editorial: Other side of migration
Our national number crunchers have reaffirmed Canada’s status as the world’s top people magnet with the latest demographic portrait of the country.
And we are not going to stop attracting the brightest and the best from around the world — especially the developing world — because the experts have told us that by 2030, Canada’s population growth will be almost entirely dependent on immigration.
We imported more than one million immigrants in the last five years making Canada home to 150 languages and people from more than 200 countries.
An estimated 6.2 million foreign-born people lived in Canada at the time of the 2006 census, representing about 20 per cent of the total population. That’s the highest proportion since 1931, when those born abroad accounted for just over 22 per cent.
Among Western nations that have major immigrant pull, Canada’s multicultural mosaic is now second only to Australia in size and shape.
Most of the newcomers to Canada came from China (14 per cent), while India was right behind at 12 per cent. Seven per cent came from the Philippines and five per cent from Pakistan.
Newcomers from Asia have made Chinese the third most common language now, with about one million speakers (324,000 in Vancouver). That’s an increase of 18.5 per cent between 2001 and 2006, compared to an increase of just 3.1 per cent for English speakers and 1.7 per cent for Francophones.
Punjabi speakers increased by 35.5 per cent in the same period, and immigrants from India now number about 350,000 nationwide (117,000 in Vancouver).
Great stuff!
We should all be patting ourselves on the back as these new immigrants have provided Canada with an antidote to its aging population and injected young blood into the anemic labor market.
But there is another side to this story.
The new immigration numbers also tell us that we are the planet’s top people poacher.
The health care sector is a place where this reality has become alarming.
The Philippines, one of the major source countries for Canada, is running out of doctors and nurses as we actively recruit from the impoverished Southeast Asian nation.
It is estimated that about 6,000 doctors in the Philippines are studying to become nurses so they can find higher-paying jobs abroad.
The country is facing a health care crisis as doctors working in government hospitals in the Philippines earning only about C$500 a month are lured to Canada where they can earn 10 times that amount working as nurses.
At the same time, over 40,000 nurses take the National Licensure exam yearly in the Philippines. About 15,000 of them leave each year to seek jobs overseas.
It’s a similar story in South Africa.
Canada has taken on 2,000 South African-trained physicians, about 500 of whom are registered to work in B.C.
This has cost South Africans millions of tax dollars and left many of the people who paid for this training without any kind of medical care.
Canada’s largest pharmacy chain, Shoppers Drug Mart, is currently under fire for unethically “poaching” pharmacists from impoverished AIDS-stricken South Africa with $100,000-salary baits.
Last year, South Africa had 1,746 pharmacists working in its public health system, which serves at least 31 million people. In Canada, we have 30,000 pharmacists serving the same number of people.
No other country has exported as many physicians as India. More than 40,000 practice in North America.
An untold number from South Asia have been lured by the prospects of a better life only to drive cabs and work as janitors while depriving their homelands of valuable medical expertise.
As B.C.’s Attorney General Wally Oppal, who just returned from a trade mission to India, likes to point out — one of the best places to have a heart attack in Vancouver is in a cab.
While we rejoice in creating a safe and prosperous microcosm of the global village, Canada needs to address with the same immigrant-intake vigor, some of the ethical issues related to attracting 250,000 newcomers per year.
Are we misleading them because many can’t find work in the fields in which they have been trained?
Are we taking away too many of the top minds from Asia and Africa to the detriment of those struggling economies?
What is the real motive behind companies recruiting overseas for workers for hotels, oil fields and farms?
Is it because we don’t have the people or is it because the companies want to keep a lid on wages?
Canada leads the world when it comes to luring people.
We must also lead the world when it comes to the ethics of attracting them.
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