[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Wednesday, April 26, 1995
.1622 
[English]
The Chairman: Order.
The quorum is one member from the opposition. We have a distinguished member, so we'll start.
Mr. Meyer Burstein (Director General, Strategic Research and Analysis, Department of Citizenship and Immigration): Mr. Chairman, this is our first opportunity to tell you about some of the things we do. We thought we would come down here and introduce you to some of the people who conduct the research. It's an education for us, too, because it's an opportunity to see the sort of things that interest you.
If you don't mind, I will introduce some of the people. Craig Dougherty is a researcher. Derrick Thomas. Paula Bennett is in charge of the social and cultural research area. Elizabeth Ruddick is responsible for economic and demographic research, which is more on-topic for what we're doing today; and Claude Langlois.
All three of the gentlemen have worked on areas that are relevant to the material we are going to be looking at today.
The Chairman: Are you the senior researcher for the whole department?
Mr. Burstein: Yes. My title is Director General, Strategic Research and Analysis Branch. It doesn't mean that I know more, but I have people who work for me who know.
.1625
The first thing I'd like to say is that all of us are committed to sound research: the department is committed to research and the minister is committed to research. I've been working at this for maybe ten years, and I find that we get more of a hearing on the sort of work that we do than we ever have in the past.
It is interesting. I think it's important when we come around to looking at the actual book that one of the problems is trying to address some of the important questions around immigration. There is really a dearth of knowledge. Immigration has become an important public policy issue quite recently, and the allocation of brain power, data, and all of those things you need to address these questions hasn't quite kept up.
If this were a committee on labour market issues - and at one time you used to look at both issues - there'd be all sorts of things you could do. When you're looking at immigration, you have to understand that it's only in the last ten years or so that people have begun to do this kind of work. Diminishing Returns exposes you to some of those people. If you're going to continue to take evidence, there are some other people we could suggest to you who have a perspective you would find interesting and whom you might want to interview.
The Chairman: We would welcome your suggestions. If you have a francophone, that would be useful as well.
Mr. Burstein: Yes, of course.
I know that you want to focus on the book Diminishing Returns. My take on this was that you would rather focus on the conclusions and the policy implications from the book than on the methodology. We're prepared to do both. If you want to talk about the methodology, we can discuss this with you too. We have some views concerning the methodology itself that we can share with you but we'll be guided by you on this.
The Chairman: I wouldn't put too much emphasis on our focus on the book; I think we want to be focused on the truth.
Mr. Burstein: We find ourselves in an odd situation. In some cases the conclusions support some of our own conclusions but we find the methodology really strange. We have friends but we're not sure if we should count them as being in the same camp or not. I'll just say that.
I'll be guided by you but my plan of attack is this. I thought I'd begin by identifying the main strategic directions in which the department has moved so that we keep it within a policy-relevant sphere. I'll point to the evidence on which the department based itself when it moved forward, then I'll turn it over to Elizabeth and have her make some remarks around the specific text itself. At that time we'll open it up and have more of a discussion. If that is agreeable, that's how I'll proceed.
The Chairman: Go ahead.
Mr. Burstein: Beginning with the strategic directions, the announcement in November concerned a large number of themes or individual items. However, I think it's much handier to group them. I'd like to group them in the following way and identify two in particular.
The first is a shift from what I call the private to the collective interest. I'll take it down now to the specific. What that means is reduction in immigration levels, rebalancing of the mix from family toward independence and toward skilled workers and then changes to the actual selection criteria themselves. That's how this direction expresses itself.
The second one starts by affirming (1) that integration is absolutely paramount and (2) that immigration has to be affordable. You come down from that to ideas around a sponsorship guarantee, a right-of-landing fee and, again, the shift toward independence and a change in the criteria.
Other directions are contained in that but the two that are implicated by Diminishing Returns are those two strategic directions, so those are the two we can focus on.
The question is, what did we base ourselves on? It wasn't the research from the Diminishing Returns book, but there are certain similarities.
.1630
Before going much further, I'll make a theoretical distinction here between stocks and flows. It's an important distinction, and I'll explain to you why.
If you think of immigration as a stream of people coming to Canada, we can say certain things about that. If you think of those people who are already here, what you deal with is the stock or the pool of people.
The pool is an accumulation of historic policies. If you confine yourself to analysing the pool, what you have is an expression of what Canada did in one time in the past.
If you look at the stream, you find yourself looking at what we're doing right now or maybe what we did six months ago, because that's how long it takes for a decision to express itself.
The distinction is a very important one, because if you look at the stock, you might be tempted to say that everything is terrific, whereas if you turn your attention to the stream, you might say, ``Hold on. There are some issues here we need to address''.
The reverse is also possible. You might have fixed all of your problems. You look at the stream and you conclude this policy set is working the way you want it to work. You still see a whole set of problems, but those problems arise from a set of policies in the past. The business program has aspects of that.
An hon. member: In your analogy, do you have a difference between a slowly moving stream and a bubbling, rapidly moving one?
Mr. Burstein: Oh yes, we can extend it forever. Big fish, little fish - it just goes on.
Depending on where you're looking, there is an issue that needs to be managed, but your remedies are different. Therefore we need to keep those distinctions in mind.
The question you might want to ask now is which one is it? Is the problem a problem with the pool or with the stream? Our answer to that is there's a problem with the stream.
When you look at some of the statements, some people say, ``Look, by and large immigrants make it. My father came here at such-and-such a time and sooner or later he caught up. Look at how well he's doing now'', ``Immigrant incomes exceed the incomes of native-born Canadians'', and so on.
All of those statements relate to the pool, though policy concerns the stream, and I think that's what we're going to focus on.
In coming to our conclusions, we didn't base ourselves on any single study. We based ourselves more on trends that emerged from the academic literature and some work we did internally. Although it may appear to you that there's a number of us here and a number sitting back in Phase IV of Place du Portage, there aren't that many of us when you get right down to everything we do. A lot of the work we do is as interpreters. We work between the academics and the policy decision-makers. In other areas, we actually contribute to the policy design itself.
I'm going to lay down a set of facts here, or what we think are facts. First of all, the immigrants Canada receives today are different from the immigrants Canada received in the past. I think it's obvious to just about everyone that the immigrants today come from much more diverse backgrounds than immigrants did in the past, and you said a challenge is associated with that. They're much less likely to have experience in Western labour markets, and that has implications for how they integrate themselves in the labour market.
We don't think immigrants today are doing as well relative to native-born Canadians as was once the case, and we think there's evidence to back that up. We also think that the labour market itself has changed and that some of the skills required at one time when it was okay to just work hard are no longer necessary in today's labour market and you need a different set of skills if you're going to make it.
Even though it's difficult to get economists to agree on almost anything, we don't think there's a lot of agreement in the economic literature about how long it takes people to catch up. You get a whole range of estimates, from 10 or 12 years right up to never. We discount the ``never'' one, but the fact is there is agreement that it is taking longer for today's immigrants to approach Canadian income norms than it did in the past. That's an important finding.
.1635
There are a couple of things you might want to draw from that. One is that the taxes immigrants are going to be paying over the life-cycle are going to be lower. Hence, there are additional concerns around the impact of immigration on the fiscal situation.
There's evidence from the census which suggests that the unemployment rate among recent immigrants is higher than it was in the past. There's a fair body of work, especially in Australia, that says that immigrants have a tougher time dealing with recession. They're the first laid off and the last to be hired.
The Chairman: ``Recent'' is defined as...?
Mr. Burstein: The last five years, the last three years, that sort of thing.
We've done a fair amount of analysis on the sponsorship system recently and it led us to conclude that the incidence of sponsored immigrants relying on welfare was higher than we previously believed. Again, that suggested to us some difficulties around absorption.
When we look at some of the criteria that account for performance, we find that language, education and adaptability can be correlated with this. That drives some of the policy changes we want to make in the selection area.
I'll just bring this back a little bit closer to the actual directions we took.
The reduction in immigration levels emerges from a concern around Canada's absorptive capacity. We can expand on this point if you want.
It recognizes that immigrants are having a harder time integrating and also that public resources for this purpose are scarce.
In order to reduce some of the fiscal pressures and to reconfigure immigration so that people have an easier time integrating, there is a rebalancing of the immigrant mix and a change in the selection criteria. That's the response to that situation.
Because we found that sponsors are unable or perhaps even unwilling to fulfil their obligations and that results in a transfer of the financial burden back to other taxpayers, who don't seem to be all that willing to bear the costs, the idea of a financial guarantee was introduced.
Because immigration has to be affordable - and maybe this is a more philosophical reason in that it is seen as being a privilege and not a right to enter Canada - the right-of-landing fee was introduced.
We can back up and try to reinforce some of those things, but I'll turn to Elizabeth - I see you looking at the clock, so you're making me talk faster - and have her say some things around the report, and then we'll respond to your questions.
The Chairman: Okay. One of our members has to leave at 4:55 p.m. and I wanted to make sure he had an opportunity to engage you in some dialogue.
Mr. Burstein: We're happy to come back, too, any time you want.
The Chairman: Okay.
Mr. Burstein: Would you rather we just open it up to dialogue now and we can just take it from there?
The Chairman: It's been recommended that we hear Ms Ruddick for a few minutes.
Ms Elizabeth Ruddick (Director, Economic and Demographic Research Section, Department of Citizenship and Immigration): I'll try to be brief.
What I would like to do is touch on some of the conclusions in the report, indicate whether they support what we've done - and I'll refer to some of the things Meyer just mentioned and the announcements the minister made in November - and whether we agree or disagree with the conclusions that have been reached. You might want to reserve this for later. I can, if you wish, make some comments on if we agree with how the researchers obtained their results because sometimes we agree with the outcome but not the way in which they reached the conclusions.
The Chairman: Are you aware that we are looking initially at four or so chapters?
Ms Ruddick: Yes. What I've tried to do is pull the conclusions that relate to those chapters. I'll be focusing on those and not on some of the other articles.
.1640
The first conclusion in the book is that the mix between the economic and the family class should be more equal. That's based on an assertion that those who are selected, in particular the skilled workers and business immigrants, do better in the labour market. They have better skill sets than the family class or refugees. I think when you have Professor DeVoretz as a witness he will say, and we would agree, that it's important to get the economics of the program right.
We agree with that and we have our own research to support the fact that the people whom we select have higher earnings. They contribute more economically than those we don't select, and certainly the announcement that the minister made in November in terms of shifting the mix more toward the economic and away from the family would support that direction.
There is also a recommendation by Professor DeVoretz that there should be a sponsorship bond in place. We also agree with that. We are looking at the issue of sponsorship undertakings and whether or not immigrants or sponsors, who are often Canadian citizens, respect those undertakings. We are trying to ensure again, with a view to getting the economics right, that sponsors don't draw on social services and that they're covered by their undertaking. I find that the link between the proposal that there be a bond and the research that's in Diminishing Returns is tenuous at best. The conclusion is there, but the notion of the bond is not directly supported by research in the volume.
Also in several of the studies there is an indication that education and language are important determinants of economic success. It comes through when they look at various elements of labour market participation. Again, this supports the direction that the minister announced for the new selection criteria for skilled workers. In particular we will be looking at language and education as being really critical for immigrants who come in who we expect to be job ready when they arrive, and we don't have any difficulty with that work.
Another article that you were looking at, by Ather Akbari, is about basically the life-cycle contribution of immigrants to the treasury. Do immigrants contribute, pay more in taxes, than they draw or than they receive in public funds and transfers of all kinds?
This is an interesting question to pose. It looks, over the lifetime, at how much you pay and how much you receive. For Canadians or immigrants, at some point you might be paying more than you receive and at another point you might be receiving more than you pay. It depends on your age, on the number of children you have, on your health, on various aspects.
It's important to remember in this that all taxpayers, whether they're immigrants or Canadians, on average are going to pay more than they receive in direct transfers. Otherwise, the country would be bankrupt from day one.
An hon. member: We are bankrupt.
Ms Ruddick: We'd be in even worse shape.
An hon. member: Therefore we've received more than we've paid.
Ms Ruddick: What we're looking at are direct transfers. We're looking at what we receive in actual dollar transfers as opposed to things like what the government spends on infrastructure or on subsidized housing. So we're looking at direct transfers. In that respect, I think it's fair to say that even now that's the case.
But what's really important from a policy perspective is not whether over the lifetime an immigrant pays more or contributes more than they receive, but what's the current fiscal situation relative to the services that are needed to support integration. The government is paying out or spending money on language training, on settlement services and on integration. The government can't afford to wait the ten or twenty years down the road for the particular immigrant who receives those services to pay back in the form of higher taxes or -
An hon. member: I'm sorry. Are you saying that we can't?
Ms Ruddick: We can't.
.1645
It's an interesting issue and it's interesting to know what takes place, but from a policy perspective the issue is more an immediate one of how much has been paid out and how that can be recouped.
The last point I want to touch on is a conclusion that regional economic needs and constraints should be factored into immigration policy. This reflects the fact that we look not at a national labour market in Canada but at a series of regional labour markets. The economic conditions in provinces are different and while some provinces are in decline, other provinces might be growing and immigration policy should reflect that fact.
We would agree with that, although again I don't think the conclusion is based on specific research. It doesn't appear to be drawn from specific research in the book but more from casual observation of the situation currently in Ontario and British Columbia. Ontario's economy has not done well and Ontario has received a large number of immigrants. B.C. is doing relatively well and has also received a large number of immigrants but a different mix from those in Ontario.
This is a policy issue that is of great concern to the minister in terms of how he plans his immigration levels, through provincial consultations. It is also a little bit more complicated than is suggested in Diminishing Returns in that immigrants go where they have family and friends and where there are jobs and support services.
One of the things we know about immigrants who move is that the ones who are mostly likely to move are not the ones who come in with family ties but the ones we select, the ones who are better educated and who have better language ability.
It's very difficult to direct people to different provinces and really to influence that immediately in any kind of significant way. The family class immigrant is the least likely to move, but those in that class are a very large proportion of the movement right now. That's something we're looking at and the provinces are concerned with.
In fact, research is going on now at the provincial level. We will be starting to do some on mobility, to look at what factors cause people to move and whether there are things the government can do to direct them. But at the moment what it suggests is that there are a lot of institutional reasons in place that cause people to go to certain provinces or certain areas and that these are not things that are going to be easy to change.
That's all I have to say, in a very quick pass over some of the conclusions. What I'd like to do is to come back to you and see if there are other issues you'd like to raise or other questions you have.
The Chairman: If the committee doesn't mind, Mr. Dromisky has to leave at 4:55 p.m. If you don't object, I'd allow him to go first.
Mr. Dromisky (Thunder Bay - Atikokan): I was at a citizenship session in Edmonton and some questions were asked pertaining to the new citizens that we bring in, be they immigrants or refugees, and whether there is potentially a better citizen being produced in certain areas of the world than in others. Is there any research to show us that the foundation or preparation is far superior or significantly superior in certain areas of the world than in others? Putting it even more simply, are there any countries from which we should take people, over other countries? In other words, when we take someone from a specific area of the world do we have a better chance of ending up with a far superior Canadian citizen in the future than if we take someone from another area, who we know potentially has a greater possibility of producing far more problems for us, simply because of the way this person has been brought up, his or her value system, or whatever the factors might be? Do we have any kind of research in that area at all?
Mr. Burstein: The difficulty in answering the question that you pose is that if you were to pose the question strictly in economic terms, then in the short run the answer would be that if you take somebody from the United States who speaks English and where the labour market is just like the Canadian labour market, they're certainly going to have an easier time integrating in Canada. Their performance is almost immediately going to be exactly the same as that of a Canadian. In fact, when you look at Americans, you often find they outperform Canadians just because those are the ones who tend to move.
.1650
If you look at somebody who comes to Canada who doesn't speak English or French, doesn't have experience with the Canadian labour market and may be subject to discrimination, obviously that person is going to have a tougher time making it.
But I qualified that: I said, what is the game you're in?
Look at the children of those people. There's some evidence now that suggests that children of foreign-born immigrants, say Koreans, outperform. As a matter of fact, if you say we want to integrate Korean children, one of the things you might be saying is let's create people who aren't as keen on educational achievement. That's what integration might mean.
You have to come down to your timetable. If you have a strategy that says the world economy is going toward Asia and immigration can support that kind of integration of Canada with the developing economies, then your strategy might be in that direction.
Then, if you set aside the economic sphere, because immigration is not just about economics, and you say that immigration is at least in part about producing a more tolerant society, you can't teach people to be more tolerant by importing people who look just like them. You have to figure out how to import people who don't look like them, and you have to teach them that those people make good neighbours. When you import them, you try to pick people with qualities that are admirable. So it might make more sense to select somebody from India or from China who is going to be successful than to select an American.
I don't know exactly how to answer your question, but that's how I try to orient it.
Mr. Dromisky: It's quite obvious that we don't really have the data in a sense to support some of the concerns that I raised, or some of the questions or curious comments I made pertaining to selectivity.
Mr. Burstein: I can give you a blunt answer. If you say, ``Can you display for me the economic performance by country of origin?'', the answer to that would be yes.
Do you want to know where are you likely to find people who perform very highly? It's going to confirm probably the sorts of speculative things that most people think, with some exceptions. So you can do that.
The real question is what you are trying to prove. What is the theory behind it, and is it a good idea?
Mr. Dromisky: I hear comments such as this from police chiefs when they talk about criminality: ``People coming from that country never end up in my police cells,'' in jail, in other words. Judges will say they never see anyone from a specific country coming before them as someone who is going to be convicted, simply because they're just not here. They have a different lifestyle. They have a different value system. Those are the kinds of things I'm hearing from judges and from people who are in positions of authority in the judicial system, supervising it and implementing it. They have in their minds very specific ethnic groups.
I'm wondering if we can do any kind of research, or is that against the human rights code?
Mr. Burstein: No, no. Look, we're past Diminishing Returns here, but we actually have done research on some of those issues.
I'm going to ask Derrick in a second to say a couple of things, because he's done a fair amount of work there.
When you look, say, at the issue of criminality, there are a couple of things you want to sort out from a policy end. If you find that a particular group has more criminals, are we importing them? Is that the reason? Is it that once people are in Canada, we're discriminating against people, not allowing them to enter the labour market and get decent jobs? Therefore the question is, are we producing criminals?
Mr. Dromisky: I understand -
Mr. Burstein: Why don't I just let you say in a general way what we've found?
Mr. Dromisky: I'm sorry; I have to leave. I'm going to be on a network talk show.
.1655
Mr. Burstein: I hope you don't think this is argumentative.
Mr. Dromisky: No, it isn't.
Mr. Burstein: It's just a way of posing questions and responding.
Mr. Dromisky: I've always been curious about it, but I can't find any information to support the statements these people are making.
The Chairman: Why don't we hear an answer and then we'll get Mr. Nunez.
Mr. Derrick Thomas (Senior Research Officer, Economic and Demographic Research Section, Department of Citizenship and Immigration): I think I'd agree essentially with what Meyer said. He answered the question quite well.
You can produce data that show that certain groups are over represented, for example, in the prison population and so forth, but I think you have to turn to other explanations. You have to turn to things such as the education level of that group. You have to turn to the age structure, because the people in prison tend to be younger males. You have to turn to things such as discrimination in the labour markets and in the educational system.
It might actually be counter-productive to suggest that through the immigration program we could somehow control this problem. I don't think the immigration program is the appropriate place to control the script. Obviously we have to exclude criminals, but the evidence shows that, in the high-profile cases that got into the news, the perpetrators who shot policemen and so forth were six or eight years old when they came. So something is happening socially in Canada.
By trying to exclude that group from Canada, you might just feed the kind of self-image the members of the group have about themselves, and you might feed the sort of image other people have about them. In other words, imagine feeling that this is not a country that's yours, that people here don't want you.
Through immigration we're attaching values to people who already exist in Canada. Whenever we say we want educated people through immigration, we're saying we like to have educated people in Canada. If we say we want only people from certain countries through immigration, we're saying in effect that those people in Canada are less valuable. You then feed the sort of myth that creates the marginalization and the criminality problems.
Mr. Burstein: I guess statistically the point we want to make is that when you look across the population, the foreign-born adult immigrants make up some 20% of the Canadian population. The foreign-born do not make up 20% of the prison population.
Mr. Thomas: It's about 10%.
Mr. Burstein: Yes.
Mr. Thomas: They're represented at about half the rate you'd expect.
Mr. Burstein: Yes. That's the point I want to make.
When you look at specific groups within that, what you find is, yes, there are some specific problems, and then it goes back to why you have those problems. Do you have bad screening procedures? Is there something wrong with the way we're integrating people who are here? Have we had lousy selection policies in the past which have allowed people to come in who then cannot integrate? That's the question. It's the question we're asking ourselves. I don't know the answer.
The Chairman: I think his question, though, was, do you ever label a foreign society as dysfunctional and say we don't want people from it?
Mr. Burstein: No, and we don't have a machinery that would allow us to do it.
[Translation]
Mr. Nunez (Bourassa): Mr. Chairman, I would like you to follow the same rule as applied in the full committee and that questioning begin with the Official Opposition. Of course, you could also have the floor but I would like your statements to be a bit more orderly.
Thank you for your presentation, Mr. Burstein, Mrs. Ruddick and your team. When the committee decided to make that study, I was really surprised because that study was based upon a document published by the C.D. Howe Institute. I would have thought that you too as the research section of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, would also be in a position to make some analysis and to produce some studies.
In other countries, when government policies are studied, those studies are made from within and here it is from without. That was my first surprise when the committee started to study that very important issue.
.1700
No, you did not give that information. Personally, I am very interested in knowing your publication because I think that you are a professional team. Are you conducting some scientific research or are you only making some research at the request of the Department to support the government policies as was the case a few years back, to support the policies of the Conservative government and today, to support the policies of the Liberal government? Are you really conducting scientific research?
I have several questions to ask but since I do not have much time, you can take note of them and thereafter, if it is your wish, you can answer. I would like some clarification. How many people are you in your section? I can see that you are as professional as the people who wrote to us. You have an added advantage: you can directly access information whereas university teachers or university teachers cannot. They may probably access that information through the Department.
I would like to have a list of your publications. I have not yet read that book but I would like to read it because it contains basic data that you use. First of all, when you say that immigrants, compared to Canadian-born citizens, have higher revenues, I would like to know which immigrants you are talking of and how many are there in Canada? Are they first-generation or last-generation immigrants? When you talk about immigrants it is important to identify them. I think it is your responsibility to do it.
Let us talk about immigrants' education. Today, because there is that anti-immigration feeling that is rapidly developing in Canada, you emphasize the cost of integration but I would like you to be fair and that you also mention the education cost for the countries of origin.
I come from a poor country, Chile, and that country invested six years into my primary education, six years into my secondary education and five years into university education. It did cost a lot to a poor country, to the Chilean society.
I would like you to tell us based upon specific data and not upon vague and ambiguous statements how much it would have cost this society to train and educate here an immigrant such as I. Education wise, what did Canada save by my coming here? I have always worked, I have never asked for anything. Unemployment insurance and all the rest, I do not know anything about that.
There are a lot of professionals that come here. I would like to have accurate figures. If you cannot provide them today, provide them later. What is the price of those studies?
[English]
The Chairman: Apparently we have about 11 minutes before the bells start, and I wanted to give Mr. Assadourian some time.
[Translation]
Mr. Nunez: I am really surprised that all of that is based upon an external initiative and not on studies made by the department.
[English]
The Chairman: Do you want to set something up for Tuesday?
The Clerk of the Committee: We can do that. A witness is scheduled. We can do both if you wish, Tuesday morning and Tuesday afternoon.
The Chairman: So we'll double up on Tuesday? We have a witness scheduled from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. now, so maybe we could do this on Tuesday afternoon.
Mr. Burstein: It would depend on what time. We could come here at 3:30 or so.
The Chairman: Sure.
Do you have everything my colleague wants?
.1705
Mr. Burstein: No, if I had an opportunity, I'd like to respond to some of that.
Mr. Assadourian: Excuse me. Before you respond to them, I have some questions related to his questions. Maybe you could answer two questions at the same time, because the questions are about more or less the same concern.
First, on pages 8 and 9 of the summary here - I don't know if you have a copy - you refer to Canadian-born immigrants and immigrants who arrived before 1967. Why do you call them immigrants? Once you're an immigrant you remain an immigrant the rest of your life - is that the idea? Is that how you approach it, or an immigrant is for three years and then after that you're a citizen?
Mr. Burstein: That's not my summary.
Mr. Assadourian: Yes, but you applied it in the same way. That is one question because you raised that issue.
Mr. Burstein: Yes. I mean -
Mr. Assadourian: The other point I have is about education of new Canadians. I don't want to use the term ``immigrants''. If a family of six comes, a husband and wife and four kids, and one of them has a master's degree, the other one has a BA, PhD and high school, that education has cost the government of that country money. When these people come, do you include the education fee of those immigrants coming in as an income to the national treasury of Canada, or the provincial government or whatever, when you make your calculation, positive or negative?
The Chairman: In fairness, if you can cover the span....
Mr. Burstein: We will cover it, and maybe I'll let Elizabeth weigh in as well. We'd be happy to provide a list of publications that the department produces and we'll make those available to you.
The Chairman: This is from your research department?
Mr. Burstein: I don't know whether you want just a list from our research or an overall list of publications. I'd be happy to provide both. But if you want a list of the reports that we've produced, I'd be happy to do that.
The Chairman: We don't want the feel-good publications.
Mr. Burstein: No? Okay, the research publications.
I guess your second question was how many professionals are involved in research within my group. There are 19 of us, and until recently our responsibilities didn't centre on research. They centred on a broader range of functions, so we're turning our attention more to research at the present time.
Your third point concerned access to information and whether we have privileged information that academics don't. The answer to that is no. As a matter of fact, to the extent possible, one of our objectives is to try to encourage academic researchers to do more work and to that end we try to help them access information. Much of the information that we access would be from Statistics Canada. In other cases we have a variety of initiatives under way that are designed to produce more data so that academics actually can do the sort of work that we think is useful.
As I said in my opening remarks, if you were working in the labour market area, there would be lots of information available to you. In immigration it's just not there. So it's necessary for us to spend some of our time and some of our energy, our resources, in simply the production of data, which in itself is a difficult thing to do sometimes, and we have some initiatives like that under way.
In terms of what is and what isn't an immigrant, there's no magic answer to that. It's partly a philosophical question. I'll give you some examples.
My parents came to Canada in 1948. I was a refugee. I was born in 1946, so when I came here I was two years old. For the sorts of analysis that we do, we count anybody who is foreign born as an immigrant, so I fall into that set. Now, my education has been entirely in Canadian schools. Somebody else might argue that your parents didn't speak English at home, so maybe that's the reason why you should be counted in the set; I don't know.
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For example, when you look at recent statistics, would you count the Canadian-born children of immigrants as immigrants, or would you count them in the set of Canadian born when you're dealing with certain issues such as education and educational performance? I don't know the answer to that.
There's no one obvious answer to this thing. It really depends on the more precise question you're asking.
On the issue of fairness and isn't fairness important, the answer to that is yes. That's why, when asked if we should have a policy that distinguishes between countries, I said, did you want that as an economic answer or did you want that as an answer from a broader perspective. I'd give you the same answer.
We were asked to come here to talk about Diminishing Returns, which is essentially an economic treatise. One of the difficulties I see with proceeding from an economic treatise to a policy prescription is that it takes only one perspective and not a broader perspective. However, we're happy to engage in a broader discussion if you would like.
When we come to conclusions and statements about performance - and maybe this gets back a little closer to the question you were posing - what we're looking at are incomes, unemployment and those sorts of measures. When we look at the explanations for that sort of performance, what we turn to is precisely the sort of thing you were looking at, which in economic terms is called the embodied human capital.
So if you come here with an education and you come here being able to speak the language, you come here with certain advantages. When we look at our research and when these academics look at it, that's precisely what they find.
That drives policies such as selection policy. One of the things that comes out is if you say, look, right now we think immigration is a good thing, but if you bring somebody into Canada, it's absolutely essential that you integrate that person. If you are not going to integrate them, you may as well not have them, because you're just causing problems.
How do you go about maintaining those two sets of policies? How do you bring them together? You do that through a more clever policy of selection.
There's no simple answer here. We're not trying to present you with a kind of political treatise. We're trying to tell you that the sort of work we do is used and, while our work may be slightly more confined in some ways, it is used to support certain policy directions. We try to make our work objective. We're not running the propaganda ministry of citizenship and immigration. We're trying to run a research shop and to present information that's as objective as possible.
It's not always palatable to the minister, frankly. He's not always happy with what he sees. That's the way it goes.
The Chairman: I don't think anyone is questioning the integrity of the department or the professionalism of this group, at least.
How would you judge the economic benefit of somebody such as Frank Stronach? Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that he didn't speak English when he came here and now he runs the biggest auto parts company in the country and was rated as the best auto parts manufacturing company in the world, let's say. Do you just look at his income, his $2 million a year, and say that's -
Mr. Burstein: In most of the studies, yes. In the business program, no. If you're looking at the program on skilled workers, there we look across the board. You're basically running a policy that says we've looked at the criteria and at what contributes to economic success in big terms, and we've designed a test that responds to that.
If you look at the business program, there you are running much more of a kind of statistical bet that says we select people because we think they have a certain experience and business track record and they're the kind of people who are going to come to Canada and create something. We're prepared to take a larger number of misses for the big successes.
Ms Ruddick: However Frank Stronach came into the country, if you were evaluating his economic contribution what we'd want to look at is not just his income but how many jobs he created and the kind of industry he set up, and less tangible things that are harder to get a hold of. For example, what kinds of trade benefits come from his corporation? What kinds of trade flows has he generated? There's a wide range of things. However, when we look at economic benefits, it's still looking very narrowly at the crass dollars and cents in jobs and those kinds of contributions.
It doesn't look at other contributions that immigrants make.
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The Chairman: No, I won't have that discussion. You used the word ``crass''. Economic contributions aren't crass.
I just wondered whether he's taken into your statistics.
Ms Ruddick: He is, but the only problem is that he is probably an outlier and one of the top performers and since there aren't very many of them we probably don't pick them up. But he is in there, in what we look at.
The Chairman: Maybe if you let in 10,000 people who don't speak English, one will be an outlier.
Ms Ruddick: We know certain things about what contributes to high performers, but there are always going to be outliers, there are always going to be people who don't quite fit that mould, and those are things that, from a research perspective, we have difficulty picking up. But we have visa officers out there who can sense what drives somebody and what's going to contribute to his or her motivation and how he or she is going to do in the economy.
The Chairman: I'll finish on this point. My understanding of an outlier is that you assume there was a mistake in your observation and that's why you ignore it.
Ms Ruddick: No. We only have, say, two or three people who make the kind of income that Frank Stronach makes, and for statistical and confidential reasons we can't identify those people.
The Chairman: Okay, but I would still think you'd want to incorporate into your policy that, on occasion, somebody who doesn't speak English and looks like a -
Ms Ruddick: Ideally, yes. In fact, if you look at the way the skilled workers program is designed, if a visa officer sees somebody who doesn't fit the mould but has all the kinds of qualities that a Frank Stronach would have, the visa officer has the ability to say, ``Come in''.
The Chairman: We'll continue on Tuesday, unless you advise us otherwise or we advise you otherwise. In such a case we'll come up with another convenient time.
This meeting stands adjourned.