Immigrants bypassing Toronto to follow money West, study finds

Source: the globeandmail.com Sept 4th 2008

MARINA JIMENEZ

September 4, 2008

A new study shows immigrants earn more money in Calgary, Regina and Saskatoon than they do in Toronto, a significant trend that could help explain why the city's share of immigrants is steadily declining.

While Toronto remains overwhelmingly the dominant hub for newcomers, its proportion of Canada's total annual immigrant intake dropped to nearly one-third in 2007 from half in 2001. In contrast, the numbers settling in western cities such as Calgary, Edmonton, Regina and Saskatoon have increased every year in the past five years.

"This represents a significant shift in immigration patterns," said Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies, which released the study on immigrant family income this week.

"We think of Alberta and Saskatchewan as a place for internal migration, but now the West is drawing immigrants as well."

Immigrants often settle where family members live, but are also drawn by economic opportunities. The oil and natural-gas booms in Alberta and Saskatchewan have led to huge labour demands and a rise in wages as business owners struggle to fill jobs.

In 2005, the average annual income for an immigrant family in Calgary was $102,118, which is $33,000 more than in Montreal, $22,000 more than in Vancouver and $12,000 more than in Toronto, according to the census data analyzed in Mr. Jedwab's paper.

The average income was $92,932 in Regina and $91,356 in Saskatoon. Between 2001 and 2005, Saskatchewan moved from the bottom three provinces to the top three in terms of average income for immigrant families, behind Alberta and Ontario.

The wage differential between non-immigrant families in Toronto - who earned on average $139,926 a year - and those born elsewhere was 55 per cent. In contrast, the gap narrows to 33 per cent in Calgary, where non-immigrant families earn on average $136,380, and 19 per cent in Edmonton.

In Regina and Saskatoon, non-immigrant families actually earn 1 per cent less on average than their immigrant counterparts. The income gap reflects social mobility. "People are asking the question, 'How am I doing as an individual, and how am I doing compared to others?' " Mr. Jedwab said.

For his study on family incomes, all foreign-born Canadians were considered immigrants. But more recent cohorts of arrivals show a similar trend. Their wages are substantially lower than for the overall immigrant population; however, they still fare much better economically in the West, as well as in some smaller Ontario cities such as Oshawa and Ottawa, than in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

For example, the average annual income for an immigrant family who settled in Calgary between 2001 and 2005 was $69,148. The only city where they earned more money was Sudbury, while in Toronto, the average annual family income was $57,239; in Vancouver $53,028; and in Montreal $45,435.

Ottawa's goal has always been to disperse immigrants more evenly across the country and avoid concentrating too many new arrivals in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. In 2007, cities outside the "MTV" received nearly one in three of Canada's total 236,000 newcomers.

This trend is healthy, said Myer Siemiatycki, a Ryerson University professor of immigration and settlement studies, although he noted that Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver still receive the lion's share of immigrants and Montreal has actually increased its share.

Well-educated newcomers may be faring better in smaller cities such as Regina because there is less competition for high-paying jobs. "Saskatchewan traditionally had problems attracting high-end talent," Prof. Siemiatycki noted.

As well, the economy is not as robust and dynamic in Toronto and Montreal as it has been in Alberta and, more recently, in Saskatchewan.

Ratna Omidvar, executive director of the Maytree Foundation, a charity that aims to reduce poverty and inequality in Canada, said Toronto is still a huge draw, as are surrounding cities such as Brampton and Mississauga.

"For sure, there are fewer immigrants coming to Toronto, but they are going to the outlying suburbs comprising the city region," she said.

*****

New Roots

Where new immigrants are finding work and putting down roots in Canadian cities.

The number of foreign permanent residents is rising in these communities:

Charlottetown: +50.2%

Halifax: +44.8%

Moncton: +74%

Edmonton: +52%

Calgary: +32%

Montreal: +36%

...while declining in these cities

Toronto: -20.8%

Vancouver: -1%

SOURCE: SHIFTING PATTERNS OF IMMIGRATION IN CANADA'S URBAN CENTRES BY JACK JEDWAB

Educated newcomers struggle to find work, study shows

OTTAWA

www.globeandmail.com

July 18, 2008 at 9:53 PM EDT

Some university-educated immigrants were less likely to be employed in 2007 than their Canadian-born counterparts, a new study shows.

Statistics Canada said university-educated immigrants between the ages of 25 and 45, who arrived in Canada in the past five years, had a more difficult time finding work than native-born Canadians.

Native-born Canadians holding a university degree had an employment rate of 90.7 per cent. The study found that immigrants who were educated in Western countries were more likely to find work than those educated elsewhere. Immigrants' employment rates varied depending on their country of origin:

United States: 77.8 per cent

Europe: 73.8 per cent

Asia: 65.5 per cent

Latin America: 59.7 per cent

Africa: 50.9 per cent

But even immigrants who received their degree at a Canadian university had lower employment rates than native-born Canadians.

Between 2002 and 2007, about 28,000 core-working-age immigrants received a degree in Canada. Despite their Canadian education, their employment rate in 2007 was 75.3 per cent – lower than the 90.7 per cent average among their Canadian- born, university-educated counterparts.

The study also found that the employment gap between degree-holding immigrants and the Canadian-born narrowed the longer an immigrant has been in Canada. University-educated immigrants who have been in Canada for more than a decade had employment rates comparable to native-born Canadians, Statistics Canada says.

Studies have shown that it is often difficult for newcomers to Canada to find work because of language barriers and their foreign credentials not being recognized. The study found immigrants with Canadian degrees in Ontario and B.C. had employment rates similar to those of Canadian-born graduates, regardless of their landing period. The Canadian Press

Saskatchewan - Not just a breadbasket

Canada

Not just a breadbasket

Jun 5th 2008 | ALLAN, SASKATCHEWAN
From The Economist print edition

Saskatchewan becomes the new Alberta

THINK of Saskatchewan, and if you can place the western Canadian province on a map you might conjure up a vision of an endless prairie of wheat, so flat that the locals joke that “you can watch your dog running away from you for hours”. Now think again: Saskatchewan boasts the fastest economic growth rate of any Canadian province not just because of wheat but a rich mix of other farm crops as well as potash, uranium, oil and natural gas, all of which are enjoying record prices. PotashCorp, a fertiliser company based in Saskatoon, has become one of the biggest companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange by market capitalisation.

“We don't use the word boom, because it is immediately followed by that other word,” says Brad Wall, the provincial premier, whose centre-right Saskatchewan Party ousted a left-wing government last November. Such caution stems from history. The province was settled before the first world war by European farmers, lured to the area by free land and the mendacious promise of an “agreeable” climate (winters can feature temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius, and summers 40 degrees). In 1931 Saskatchewan was the third most populous province in Canada, behind only Ontario and Quebec. Depression and drought then ushered in eight decades of decline.

More recently, Saskatchewan has been overshadowed by neighbouring Alberta, where oil and gas have created Canada's richest province. Now, thanks to its export boom, Saskatchewan too has become a “have” province, which in Canadian parlance means that it no longer qualifies for federal handouts for certain social services. Canada's economy contracted in the first three months of this year (mainly because of the impact of the American slowdown on Ontario's industry). But Saskatchewan's job market is so tight that officials are visiting Ontario this month to try to persuade laid-off carworkers to move west. Migrants and returning residents have nudged Saskatchewan's population back over 1m—a far cry from predictions of 10m made a century ago, but seen as a milestone nonetheless.

Prosperity is not without its problems. The price of an average two-storey house in Saskatoon jumped 57% last year, while wage demands are astronomical too. The nurses' union rejected a 35% increase over four years. Aboriginal groups, who make up 14% of the population, complain they are not getting an equal share. Farmers grumble about the high fuel and fertiliser prices that are helping to make the province rich. As always, they worry about sudden changes in the price of their crops, or bad weather. “This year I could earn C$300,000 ($296,000) or I could lose C$300,000,” says Lyle Funk, who has a large farm in the centre of the province.

Mr Wall wants to use the commodity windfall to build more infrastructure and fund more research and development. The government plans a clean-coal power station in the south-east of the province, for example. All very well but prosperity has dulled the interest in diversification, says Doug Elliott, who publishes an economic newsletter. “We're still in the business of drilling holes in the ground and taking things out of it that are processed elsewhere,” he says.

Others are more optimistic. The bust, when it comes, may not be as deep or as long as previous farm slumps because biofuels now link grain and energy prices, says Richard Gray, an economist at the University of Saskatchewan. Canola (rapeseed), used in biodiesel, is an important local crop. Those runaway dogs might soon run into a few more people.

Saskatoon grapples with boomtown pains

Source: www.globeandmail.com

DAVID HUTTON

July 3, 2008

After a lifetime in Alberta, Don Evernden sold off his charter aviation business and moved to Saskatchewan, drawn by the kind of economic boom he has witnessed in his home province.

Mr. Evernden, 73, bought a farm last year northwest of Saskatoon, cashing in on the growing agriculture sector, and went looking for another opportunity.

The investment that caught his eye was McNab Park, a rundown former military base bordering the Saskatoon airport where old barracks have been used for decades as low-income housing for about 400 people. Some city officials consider the neighbourhood an "eyesore" at the gateway to the city and have longed to redevelop it. Mr. Evernden had the same idea when he bought the land in January for $17-million.

His plans, however, have pitted him against the area's residents, in a struggle that has become a symbol of the tension created by the rapid growth of the city.

"We believe in this project," Mr. Evernden says. "It just might take longer than we first expected."

The unprecedented boom in the commodities Saskatchewan produces, ranging from oil and gas to uranium, potash and agricultural crops, is forcing local business to adjust.

Michael Grace, the president of Kingsmere Capital Corp., a local investment firm, says Saskatoon has many strengths but has been caught off guard by the pace of growth and is spinning its wheels to catch up. The challenges facing investors are the labour and housing shortages. Major companies have been reticent to relocate to the city because there's a lack of housing for their employees, which has slowed investment, he said.

On the other hand, local businesses find themselves delivering an unfamiliar pitch to potential hires, notes David Williams, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan's Edwards School of Business. No longer do they trumpet the region's cheap housing and cost of living; instead, they are talking up what a great place it is to relocate to and invest in real estate.

"We're a humble people here and we're not used to all this attention. We're all looking at each other and thinking 'how did this happen?' "

It may just be getting started. There's a building boom in houses and condominiums, industrial traffic crowds the streets, old, rundown apartment buildings are being rebuilt into big-city condos, and the population of 208,000 is growing at a rate not seen in a century. Cranes and traffic jams, once rare, are now part of everyday life.

Mr. Evernden plans to turn McNab Park into a high-end business park. He believes the development will attract major hotel chains and some of the country's big resource players who are looking to gain proximity to an expanding airport, he says.

The intense growth, however, is creating many of the problems that still plague Alberta, where the inflow of workers and money sent the housing market climbing to record highs, and made it nearly impossible to find affordable accommodation, even on a good wage.

"The high prices are eating into the working poor," Mr. Williams said. "It's the people who are working two or three part-time jobs who have seen their rents skyrocket that are being hurt."

In Saskatoon, housing prices were up more than 50 per cent last year alone, a leap on top of a market that had already been ticking up. The city's industrial vacancy rate is below 2 per cent for the first time in its history, while construction costs have more than doubled in the past three years. The industrial market continues to grow, with the number of building permits rising 64 per cent last year.

Many of the city's poor are struggling to find housing, and shortages of labour and materials have caused major construction delays and cost overruns. Contractors from as far away as Detroit have had to fly in their own work crews.

"We think we've learned from Alberta's experience before us," said senior city planner Alan Wallace. "But what we've learned is that it's impossible to keep up. You're basically reacting continuously."

For Mr. Evernden's Calgary-based project management team, this has meant a public battle with McNab Park's 400 tenants, many of whom see their neighbourhood disappearing and have nowhere to go in a rental market that still lacks low-income options.

City councillor Pat Lorje says the McNab Park development has become a symbol of the people being left behind as the rest of the city moves forward.

"We are creating the conditions for an incredible amount of social unrest. They're shutting down the equivalent of a small town," she said. "It's going to be difficult for these people to find accommodation let alone afford accommodation."

Mr. Evernden's group has come up with one solution to the housing problems created by his plans for McNab Park. It has teamed up with a local developer, Innovative Assets Inc., that is literally moving many of the neighbourhood's rundown houses and apartment buildings across the city, then refurbishing them in their new locale.

Ms. Lorje said the city is implementing several affordable housing initiatives and working with the province to implement measures to help keep up with the growth. The city has struck what it calls a "future growth team" to come up with a strategy to cope with the boom.

The province, for its part, has moved to ease the labour shortage by beginning to develop programs to encourage aboriginal people to train for the skilled trades, where demand is soaring. It has reached arrangements with countries such as the Philippines to recruit workers for areas of high demand.

It has also invested $400-million more in infrastructure than it did last year, pouring money into roads, schools and hospitals, drawing a lesson from the experience in Alberta, where such facilities were overwhelmed.

Student wins big with plastic-bag plan

Seventeen-year-old Ontarian finds bacteria are the key to fast-tracking the breakdown of polyethylene

Source: www.globeandmail.com

KRISTINE OWRAM

The Canadian Press

July 2, 2008

As jurisdictions across Canada take action to ban the use of landfill-clogging plastic bags, which can take up to 1,000 years to decompose, an Ontario high-school student has discovered a way to break down the pesky plastic in a matter of months.

Daniel Burd, a 17-year-old student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, took home in May the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa for his project. The prize earned him $10,000, as well as several other awards and entrance scholarships to various universities equalling tens of thousands of dollars.

But Mr. Burd, who will start Grade 12 in the fall, is modest about his idea, saying it literally hit him on the head one day.

"At home I have to do chores if I follow my mom's instructions," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Waterloo, Ont. "Each time I open the closet where we keep our cleaning supplies and things like that, the plastic bags are on the top shelf and they always fall down like an avalanche onto my head.

"One day I just got so tired of it and I began to research it to find out what other people are doing with these plastic bags, and through my research I found out that we're not doing too much."

Mr. Burd discovered that approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide each year. Billions of these end up in the oceans, where they are ingested by animals that often die as a result.

He also learned that plastic bags can take anywhere between 20 and 1,000 years to decompose - numbers in which he found unlikely inspiration.

His hypothesis was that if plastic bags do eventually break down, it should be possible to isolate and concentrate the micro-organism responsible for the decomposition, thus speeding up the process.

To test his hypothesis, Mr. Burd took a few soil samples from a local landfill and mixed them with polyethylene, the substance used to make plastic bags, as well as a solution to encourage bacterial growth. After concentrating the solution several times and incubating it for 12 weeks, he took the resulting bacterial culture and tested it on strips of polyethylene.

After six weeks, the strips had lost more than 17 per cent of their weight, compared with a set of control strips.

Mr. Burd concluded that a combination of two types of bacteria - Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas - was most effective at breaking down the polyethylene. After isolating these two bacteria, combining them with some sodium acetate and incubating the solution at 37 degrees, he was able to degrade the plastic by 43 per cent in six weeks. He figures the solution would entirely break down plastic bags in a matter of three months.

Mr. Burd said his findings could have a real impact on the amount of garbage that ends up in landfills - or as litter in our oceans and on our streets. He envisions what he calls "recycling stations" for plastic bags, which would essentially act as large composters.

"It's like a container with constant temperatures and conditions in which you would have your liquid solution, your microbes and your plastic bags," he said.

Mr. Burd said he plans to keep working on his project to further reduce the time it takes to decompose the plastic bags, and he's thinking big when it comes to the future.

"To do that, it would be necessary to do more work in the laboratory with sequencing and things like that, and then after that, you can take it to the patent level," he said. He acknowledges his discovery is a "very big step," but says there's a lot more work to do before it's marketable.

Toronto's schools fail to overcome barriers

www.thestar.com

Louise Brown
Education Reporter
http://www3.thestar.com/static/PDF/080613_school_achieve.pdf

A startling demographic snapshot of students across Canada's largest school board shows the system is failing to help children overcome roadblocks of culture, race, poverty and family background.

The ambitious personal student survey of achievement, to be made public next week, is a call to action for the Toronto District School Board to try to reduce these barriers over the next five years, says director of education Gerry Connelly.

"It confirms our belief that the status quo for too many of our students is not working," said Connelly in a covering letter for the 55-page report, which shows boys lag behind girls in almost everything including math, that teens born in Mexico tend to fail more Grade 9 courses than classmates born in India, and that students whose first language is English are less likely to pass Ontario's compulsory Grade 10 literacy test than those who speak Hindi or Serbian.

The report, a copy of which was obtained by the Star, was distributed recently to all principals, and Connelly pledged in her note "we will continue to work together to raise the bar and close the gaps in student achievement.

"I am bringing an action plan to address the underachievement of marginalized students that will specify targets and actions to break this cycle over the next five years."

The board's landmark 2006-2007 survey of 105,000 students from Grade 7 to 12 was launched in a bid to pinpoint specifically which students need help in particular areas.

But this first analysis puts local numbers on what educators have known for years – that how children do in school has very much to do with their family background; how rich they are, how many parents they live with, what value their culture tends to place on formal learning, whether they have survived war or are grappling with personal issues.

The differences pose a staggering challenge to schools wanting to give all kids an equal chance.

At a board committee meeting next Thursday, staff will unveil a sweeping new plan aimed at helping students over some of these demographic roadblocks through changes that could range from curriculum and teaching staff to extra free help for certain groups.

Among some of the gaps it will try to address:

Grade 9 students who identify as gay somehow do worse at geography than those who say they are straight – although both do about the same on the literacy test the next year;

Children of single fathers are more likely to do worse at Grade 8 science than children of single mothers – and both do worse than classmates who live with two parents.

Among the 4,800 black students in Grades 7 and 8, the 400 born in Africa are more likely to earn at least a B in math than those born in the Caribbean or Canada.

While board officials are not talking until they put the finishing touches on this blueprint, leading Canadian researchers in the minefield of demographics and learning warn these numbers can be more complex than they seem.

"This isn't some sort of horse race – we do this kind of research in the interest of equity because we know kids from different countries can come to school with different degrees of preparedness, depending on the dominant values of their culture," said Vancouver researcher Bruce Garnett, who has just completed his doctorate in the achievement of immigrant students.

"It's dangerous to use this kind of data to make genetic assumptions. The differences often reflect economic status or the school system in the country you came from."

Experts warn many factors can be knotted together.

Are students who speak Hindi, India's national language, for example, better at the Grade 10 literacy test because they are more likely to live with two professional parents and have studied at an English-language school back in India?

Do African-born black students do better because they are more likely to live with both parents, as research from Princeton University suggests, than blacks born in North America or the Caribbean? Living with both parents is known to boost the chances of school success.

Can children from war zones, who may have had little experience with school at all, expect to keep step with students grounded in the often rigorous schools of eastern Europe or Asia?

"Demographic data can send you down the wrong path if you're not careful, and often what seem like racial differences end up being linked to poverty," said researcher Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins University's Centre for Social Organization of Schools.

"At a system-wide level it can be helpful to pinpoint which groups need help, but when you get down to the individual classroom and say all African-American boys need help, well, some will and some won't, and some white girls will need help too, so it becomes more important to track individual students by attendance and grades rather than demographic profile."

Most scholars warn against comparing groups; they say the data is best used as a baseline to track how each group improves over time.

"We know these differences in achievement are not due to native intelligence; Africans are as smart as Asian students who are as smart as anyone else – the country of origin simply does not determine intelligence," said Prof. Lee Gunderson of the University of British Columbia, who has written several books on immigrant students.

"If your family has come from a refugee camp where they were worried about survival, about being murdered, about where the next meal was coming from, you bring a very different focus than a child whose family has been socialized into believing that books are important, that education is important, that becoming a doctor or lawyer is important," said Gunderson, who has written a teachers' guide on how to teach immigrants using more visual aids, more clear vocabulary and even translation.

In the United States, where school boards have been tracking racial data for decades to try to break these same cycles, there is a body of theory on why some groups do better than others, said Garnett.

One school of thought suggests immigrants who come to North America voluntarily have higher hopes and expectations of schools here – and therefore put in more effort – than so-called "conquered" or "colonized" immigrants such as First Nations children or the African-American descendents of slaves, whose skepticism about the fairness of the school system may cause many to feel simply resigned to failure.

While some theories skirt dangerously close to stereotypes, Garnett warns, there are some cultures whose dominant values seem to fuel academic success more than others.

"At the end of the day, the Confucian values of diligence, obedience and industriousness lead many Chinese families to send their kids to get more schooling after the school day ends, and more school is a predictor of success."

Yet no matter what a child`s cultural background or family income or or what language they speak, if Canada is to be truly inclusive, our schools should be able to help all children overcome these barriers, said Gunderson.

And with nearly half of Canadians now born in another country, according to the 2006 Census, every teacher should receive training in how to teach immigrant students.

"For Christ's sake, we can put a man on the moon and a robot on Mars – surely we can figure out how to design lessons in a way that can be understood by children of all backgrounds."

Ontario proposes changes to get foreign doctors working sooner

CARLY WEEKS - www.globeandmail.com

June 7, 2008

TORONTO -- The Ontario government announced yesterday it plans to lift restrictions on foreign-trained doctors and to fast-track applications to help them start practising as soon as they enter Canada.

The move is designed to reduce the province's critical shortage of physicians and is part of a plan that Health Minister George Smitherman said will make Ontario the country's leader in integrating foreign-trained doctors.

But critics said the push to bring more foreign doctors to Canada won't help physicians who already live here and are stuck doing odd jobs. One medical association also criticized the changes as a flawed and potentially immoral approach.

"I think we have to seriously look at the ethics," said Karl Stobbe, president of the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada. "We lure them over here and a lot of times the countries we're taking them from ... have a bigger problem than we have and we're actually making their problem worse."

Under the proposed changes, doctors licensed in the United States and Commonwealth countries, as well as the other provinces, would be eligible to begin practising in Ontario without having to go through onerous assessments and evaluation periods. That would bring Ontario in line with other provinces, such as Alberta and British Columbia, which already have programs to tap into the talented pool of foreign doctors whose training is equivalent to Canadian requirements.

The province will also create a new "transitional licence" that would eliminate the need for foreign-trained physicians to wait years before being allowed to practise. The changes would let foreign specialists whose credentials differ substantially from Canadian requirements practise in a supervised setting. The transitional licence would last between two and five years, during which the doctors would be responsible for undergoing training to meet Canadian requirements.

"This is a total change in the way we do things," said Laurel Broten, parliamentary assistant to the Health Minister and author of the government's new report on reducing barriers to foreign doctors.

The government also intends to improve its ability to quickly assess internationally trained doctors in order to determine what type of training or language education they would need to work in Canada.

Mr. Smitherman said it's impossible to say how many new doctors this program could generate because it focuses on streamlining the registration process for foreign-trained physicians, not adding spots for medical residents.

"It's not about simply creating more residency positions," Mr. Smitherman said. "This is about transitioning those specialists into opportunities without having to go through residency, and they would be supervised by existing physicians in those environments."

Although the changes may offer some help to doctors who want to move to Canada, Conservative health critic Elizabeth Witmer criticized the government for failing to create more residency positions to help foreign-trained doctors who already live in Canada and are stuck in dead-end jobs.