Friday, September 16, 2022

"Exploiting the workers" (Temporary Foreign Workers)/ "University-educated immigrants face tough challenge finding employment in Edmonton"

Sept. 20, 2016 "Exploiting the workers": Today I found this article by Alia Dharssi in the National Post in the Edmonton Journal: 

After having a baby, Amy wanted to buy a home for her family in northeast China, but she figured the only way she could afford that was to move to Canada to work as a temporary foreign worker.

She expected to earn almost $9,000, far more than she could have made at her job at an engine factory in China.

Amy paid $2,000 to an agency before flying to Canada, knowing she wouldn’t see her baby for months.

“I felt uncomfortable in my heart,” Amy, a petite woman, said through a translator.

Today, more than a year after landing in Canada, Amy, whose name has been changed for her protection, has not returned home.

Instead, she is filing an application to stay in Canada on humanitarian grounds. She is scared to return home after raising the alarm about her Chinese recruitment company.

Amy’s story provides a glimpse into the murky dealings that characterize the way many low-paid temporary foreign workers have come to Canada since 2002, when a new stream was created for low-skilled workers.

The issue was flagged by a parliamentary committee that released a review of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program on Monday.

In spite of a series of monitoring and enforcement measures, “migrant workers continue to be at risk of arriving in Canada to find no job and are often indebted to recruiters,” it said.

Chances are the migrant workers building condos in Vancouver, cleaning hotel rooms in Alberta or picking tomatoes in Ontario greenhouses paid fees to come to Canada and work in their low-paying jobs.

Some workers are further abused by recruiters who control their money, housing and movements.

Those who escape, like Amy, may wind up in Canada’s underground economy.

During an interview in Toronto, Amy said the company that brought her and a few dozen other Chinese to work in the food industry confiscated their passports and bank cards.

None of the workers spoke English, so a representative of the agency acted as an intermediary between the workers and management.

“The eight months I spent there was like being in the jail,” Amy said. “I did not have freedom to go outside.”

She worked 12-hour shifts six days per week and, on their day off, she and the other Chinese workers went to a field to dig up plants to supplement their diet of preserved vegetables from China, according to Amy’s affidavit.

At the six-month mark, Amy said she’d been paid only $400 and grew anxious, even though the recruiter promised to pay her and the other workers once they returned to China.

By the end of last year, the owners of the factory discovered what was happening and hired a translator to speak directly to the workers. 

The recruiter was forced to return the workers’ passports before they returned home.

In her affidavit, Amy said some of her co-workers disappeared after they returned to China. “I hope I can stay in Canada so that my safety can be protected,” she said.

Not all recruiters are involved in questionable dealings.

It is legal for employment agencies and immigration consultants to charge employers to find foreign workers.

But enough operate outside of the law that it’s commonplace for low-skilled migrant workers to pay high fees to come to Canada, even though they are illegal in most provinces.

Canadian employers have also been involved in such dealings, skirting Temporary Foreign Worker Program rules that require them to pay for workers’ airfare and other costs.

“Quite frankly, I’m not sure I know the definition of the scope of the problem,” said federal Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk. “I’ve heard of amounts of up to $10,000 for a position, for a low-wage job in Canada.”

Eighteen of 33 migrant workers from developing countries who were interviewed about recruitment for this investigation paid between $2,000 and $10,000 for their jobs in Canada to work in seafood processing, greenhouses, on chicken farms, as nannies and in other low-paying jobs.

For example, a 30-year-old Bangladeshi man living in Calgary said he paid a Canadian recruiter $10,000, his savings from working as a waiter in Dubai, to secure a job at an Alberta gas station in 2013.

Many workers see the fees as the price of admission to Canada.

But this global industry is rampant with exploitation by unscrupulous agents who charge fees as high as US$15,000 for placing migrants in jobs dramatically different from what was promised or don’t exist, said a 2015 United Nations report.

For jobs in Canada, workers typically pay fees worth up to two years of their earnings in their home countries, according to estimates by Toronto lawyer Fay Faraday, who interviewed more than 200 temporary foreign workers for a 2014 report.

Migrant workers often take loans with steep interest rates, putting their houses up for collateral, or use their family’s savings to scrape together money to come to Canada.

In return, recruiters promise unrealistic salaries, provide false information about opportunities for permanent residency and lie about working conditions, among other ploys, migrant advocates say.

In one of several cases coming to light, an Edmonton woman who came to Canada as a caregiver in 1998, was sent to jail in May for exploiting temporary foreign workers. Between 2006 and 2010, she hired dozens of foreign workers from the Philippines, charged some of them fees for work permits, forced them to work overtime in her restaurants and janitorial business, and paid less than minimum wage.

The threshold for becoming a recruiter is “really low,” Faraday added. “All you need is a cellphone, a Rolodex and a bit of charm.”

The government doesn’t know how big this problem is, but investigating fraud related to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is a priority for the Canada Border Services Agency. It receives tips about TFWP fraud weekly, said Dan Davidson, a regional programs manager with CBSA in the Prairies.

Critics say the structure of the program is to blame for creating a widespread recruitment problem in Canada.

Until the program peaked in 2014, when the Conservative government instituted further restrictions, there was steady growth of third party for-profit recruiters, Faraday said.

“The difficulty is that those recruiters are not subject to oversight and licensing and regulation in a way that ensures that they are not exploiting workers.”

For employers, the world of recruitment is tricky to navigate. Even if everything seems above board, their workers may still have paid fees.

Jim Suydam, general manager for All Seasons Mushrooms Inc. in Airdrie, Alta., avoids recruiters altogether. Instead, he asks his migrant workers to recommend friends and family.

“(Agencies) can do the paperwork fine for me, but I’m going to steer clear of them from a recruiting perspective,” said Suydam.

After charging fees, some recruiters fire workers within hours or days of their landing in Canada, a problem called “released on arrival.” It is common among caregivers, say researchers with Gabriela Ontario, a group that conducted a nationwide survey for Ryerson University.

Every few months, women who came to Canada for fake jobs as caregivers turn up desperate for help at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Toronto.

“We tell them to make sure they always have a Xerox of their documents in case their passport is taken or stolen,” said Jeanette Rosales, the church’s co-ordinator of the social ministry.

Shady recruiters target women like Elma, a single mother in her mid-30s who lives in Toronto. Her name has been changed at her request because she is worried her story will jeopardize her permanent residency application.

After being offered a job as a live-in caregiver in Canada in 2012, Elma was thrilled even though she had to pay a fee of about $4,500.

She was fired after working overtime for seven days in a row and paid just $100 at the end of the week, she said.

Under the rules of the Live in Caregiver Program, Elma could stay in the country and look for another job. But it took her a year to find a new family to sponsor her and an additional six months for her papers to come through.

While waiting, Elma worked illegally in Montreal, Saskatoon and Toronto, so she could remit money to her three children in the Philippines.

Twice, she stayed with families and cared for their children at rates below minimum wage because they promised they would sponsor her, she said. They never did.

Robin Seligman, an immigration lawyer who has dealt with cases like Elma’s, says the government’s policy doesn’t make sense and puts caregivers in a precarious situation.

“What live-in caregiver is going to sit around for six to eight months not working and what employer is going to wait?” she said.

This conundrum is one of several regulations and policies related to the TFWP that concerned groups say pushes temporary foreign workers to work under the table or makes them hesitant to stand up to abuse.

“They have been taught by traffickers, most of the time, that if they say anything to authorities or to anyone else outside of their ring, they’re probably going to be arrested and they will no longer be able to go back to their countries and see their families,” said Victor De Moura, an investigator with the RCMP in Montreal.

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program requires employers to pay for recruitment costs and workers’ airfares, but regulation of recruitment fees and recruiters fall under provincial jurisdiction.

The parliamentary review of the TFWP released Monday highlighted this issue, in addition to providing recommendations that call on Economic and Social Development Canada to work with the provinces, territories and other stakeholders to create an accreditation system for recruiters.

Currently, worker protection varies across Canada.

Part of the problem is a lack of monitoring. Only eight on-site inspections were initiated out of a total of 5,907 employers reviewed by Economic and Social Development Canada from 2013 to 2015.

But it is the responsibility of the provinces to ensure their labour codes are followed, said Mihychuk.

“They are looking for the federal government to have a role because it is a program we administer, but, on the labour front, they have inspectors,” she explained.

“So we are working with jurisdictions to try and work out some of these issues, but clearly we have to have more on-the-ground inspection.”

In Manitoba, shady recruiters caught the attention of officials after an influx of migrant workers in 2008, said Jay Short, manager for special investigations for the provincial government.

Suddenly, they started hearing alarming stories of workers who had paid thousands for jobs.
Even though many of the payments take place abroad, Manitoba has cracked down so effectively on recruiters that its policies have been recognized internationally. 

In addition to making recruitment fees illegal, the province checks up on employers and developed a licensing system for recruiters that requires them to pay a $10,000 bond that can be used to reimburse workers for any recruitment fees they might pay.

Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia have followed Manitoba’s lead with similar models. Other provinces, with the exception of Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island, have also passed laws against recruitment fees.

In Ontario, charging recruitment fees to all migrant workers became illegal in November 2015, though it has been against the rules to charge caregivers since 2010.

Even so, a survey of 132 caregivers by the Caregivers’ Action Centre and Parkdale Community Legal Services in Toronto found that two thirds had paid fees averaging $3,275 after Ontario prohibited them.

About one year after Amy first arrived in Canada, one of her co-workers said the same Chinese recruitment agency returned to Canada to supply workers to another company.

Amy grows restless when she thinks about it.

“I want the recruitment agency to be eliminated completely,” she said.


This news article reminds me of this:


"#MeToo movement becomes #WeToo in in victim-blaming Japan"/ "Outrage as women in Japan told not wear glasses in the workplace"


Aug. 17, 2020 Saying: I found this on Facebook:

"You never look good when you are trying to make someone else look bad."- Unknown

Cham: Sometimes people need to be exposed for who they are hahah or maybe I should stop being petty

Tracy Au: There's a difference between trying to make someone look bad, and exposing them for who they are. It's like those #MeToo accusers and victims, they are plainly telling everybody about the perpetrators. They're not trying to make them look bad.




Oct. 4, 2016 "University-educated immigrants face tough challenge finding employment in Edmonton": Today I found this article by Juris Graney in the Edmonton Journal:


University and post-secondary educated immigrants moving to Edmonton are caught in a Catch-22 scenario that is preventing many from following their dreams of living in Canada.

“The biggest problem I’ve found when looking for a job is the Canadian experience,” says Ahmad Alzouabi, who moved to Edmonton from Jordan with his wife and three children in January this year.

“No one will hire me if I don’t have that experience, but how can I get that experience if no one will hire me?”

War prevented the Syrian-born 32-year-old from teaching in his country of birth after completing his four-year bachelor’s degree in English and literature, so he worked in Jordan for a year as an English-as-a-second-language teacher before moving to Canada.

Upon arrival, he supplied his degree to International Qualifications Assessment Service (IQAS) — a government branch that assesses educational credentials and compares them to Canadian standards — yet he’s had no luck in his job search.

“Teaching English here may be more difficult because this is an English native speaking country, so it’s not easy,” he says. “Whenever a volunteer opportunity comes up, I immediately volunteer.”

So far, he’s offered up his experience teaching Arabic and as a volunteer at summer camp for the children of newcomers to Canada.

Alzouabi says he hopes volunteering with groups such as the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers will bolster his already brimming resume.

But volunteering doesn’t help pay the bills.

“It’s disappointing not to be able to work,” he says. “I don’t want handouts from the government. I’m looking forward to being productive.”

Data compiled by the Edmonton Community Foundation (ECF), which partnered with the Edmonton Social Planning Council for its annual Vital Signs report, shows that on average, immigrants arriving in Edmonton are more highly educated than non-immigrants.

In 2011, 60.9 per cent of all immigrants had obtained a post-secondary certificate or above, compared to 53.8 per cent of adult Canadian-born residents.

But Labour Force Survey data for 2015 showed higher education didn’t necessarily translate into jobs.

Nationally, the unemployment rate of university-educated immigrants was seven per cent, double that of Canadian-born residents.

The unemployment rate for immigrants with a post-secondary certificate or diploma in 2015 sat at 6.3 per cent, while for Canadian-born residents, that number was 5.5 per cent.

Carol Watson, ECF communications director, said the four-month project to produce Vital Signs report was an eye-opening experience.

“We were pleasantly surprised to see how quickly immigrants want to be part of this great country,” she said.

“They are so interested and excited to learn the language and get integrated. They want to start businesses, they want to get jobs, they want to see their children get into school.

“The spirit of wanting to get into this country and contribute is so prevalent.”

Watson acknowledged that converting credentials and qualifications from overseas to Canada was “expensive, time-consuming and a very challenging situation.”

Ibtihal Mustafa knows all too well about the qualification conundrum.

The 47-year-old moved from Iraq in 2013 to Edmonton as a skilled immigrant and has yet to land a full-time job, despite having graduated from the University of Baghdad with a bachelor of arts and having obtained a master’s degree in French language after studying in Paris.

Mustafa, too, had her degrees successfully assessed by IQAS and started applying for jobs to teach, but to no avail. She even tried for a teacher’s assistant position with the public school system but, again, with no luck.

Not one to give up, Mustafa went back to school and completed a full-time, 10-month Day Home Provider certificate at NorQuest to work in child care.

After applying, unsuccessfully, for an estimated 60 jobs without even a call back or an interview, Mustafa has again gone back to school.

This time she is studying at NAIT to become a bank teller.

“But I’m not sure if I complete this course if I will get the chance to get a job in a bank,” Mustafa said. “The government gave me the opportunity to study at NorQuest, but it’s not the government, it’s the companies here. I don’t know what they need.

“I don’t know what I can do. I like Canada, I want to stay here in Canada, but if you were in my situation, what would you do?”

jgraney@postmedia.com

twitter.com/jurisgraney




Sept. 11, 2022 My opinion: I find that Mustafa is doing the good, right, and conventional strategies by attending 1 yr programs at these practical careers like Day Home Provider and a bank teller. 


I liked this part where immigrants can get jobs in their field by going here:


"International Qualifications Assessment Service (IQAS) — a government branch that assesses educational credentials and compares them to Canadian standard."


After I read about these immigrants moving to Canada and struggling to get jobs and careers in their field, and adjust to life in Canada, I feel grateful.  I'm grateful to be born and raised in Canada.


Rapidly Solve the Physician Shortage Crisis Canadians are facing


Dear Premiers Jason Kenney and Doug Ford, respected Ministers of Health, and Honourable Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,

As Family Physicians and Specialists practicing throughout Canada, we are experiencing first-hand the detrimental effects the current physician shortage is causing Canadians. As you are aware, more than 5 million Canadians lack access to a primary care physician according to Statistics Canada. 

Although we appreciate the steps taken by the federal and provincial governments in expanding healthcare access and funding, increasing medical school and residency positions, more immediate solutions are critically needed to address the current health care crisis. 

We call for the rapid and robust acceleration of internationally trained physician uptake into the Canadian healthcare system. This will lead to better health outcomes for all Canadians and help to address the seemingly insurmountable healthcare backlog we are currently experiencing. 

We agree on the urgent need to reform the health-care system and that the current system status quo is not working.

Further delay is not an option. 

Petition · Rapidly Solve the Physician Shortage Crisis Canadians are facing · Change.org


This week's theme is about jobs and immigrants:

"How Canada can solve its worsening skilled labour shortage"/ "How Canada can ease its labour crunch by giving immigrants more support"

Tracy's blog: "How Canada can solve its worsening skilled labour shortage"/ "How Canada can ease its labour crunch by giving immigrants more support" (badcb.blogspot.com)


"Labour shortage hampering post-pandemic recovery for businesses in Canada, study finds"/ "How lack of affordability could scare new immigrants into moving away"




My week:


Fri. Sept. 9, 2022 CX Building: This is the 3rd Friday night in a row.  

Fluxx: We played the this board game called Fluxx between the 5 of us who came at the start of the party at 6pm.

The game is called Fluxx because the rules keep changing.  If you play this card "Draw 5 cards" and play 1.  Then someone puts another card "Draw 3 cards."  Someone puts a new goal card, and that changes how you win the game.  The game took about an hr before someone won. 

I didn't really like it because of how the rules keep changing.

Last week I played Crazy 8s card game with 2 other people.  This game is played with regular playing cards.  Whatever card you put can change the game, but the rules stay the same.


Food: I brought this Mary Organic crackers.  My mom bought them and she didn't like them.  I also didn't like it either.  M and D ate them.  I then gave D the rest of it, because he liked them.

The others and I chipped in $5 so M could buy some steamed veggie buns and other food from H- Mart and steam them there.


"Dollarama attracts customers from 'all walks of life' seeking relief from high prices": Today I found this article by Brett Bundale on BNN Bloomberg:

Discount retailer Dollarama Inc. is winning over new customers as Canadian shoppers "trade down" from more expensive stores and gravitate toward the dollar store's cheaper prices amid inflation.

The retail chain said Friday it's attracting consumers from "all walks of life" — including higher income households — as the climbing cost of living takes a toll on budgets.

"I do believe that there's probably some trading down because of the inflationary environment and the pressures on everybody's wallet," Dollarama president and CEO Neil Rossy said during a call with analysts on Friday. 

Dollarama chief financial officer J.P. Towner said the company recorded robust sales of "key consumables" like food, seasonal goods like beach toys and barbecue accessories and party items as people gathered.

Dollarama attracts customers from 'all walks of life' seeking relief from high prices - BNN Bloomberg



Sept. 12, 2022 "Rape victim turned away from Fredericton ER, told to make appointment for next day": Today I found this article by Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon on CBC news.  This article was sad and upsetting to read.  

Here is a woman who definitely needs help and get a rape kit done to preserve all the evidence if she wants to press charges later, and she needed a (male) cop to talk to the hospital and call in a nurse to help her:

Woman, 26, was told no trained nurses were available to conduct sexual assault forensic exam

A Fredericton woman is still in shock after she went to the local hospital's emergency department to get a sexual assault forensic examination performed and was told to schedule an appointment for the next day.

The 26-year-old victim, whom CBC News is not naming, says she was told no one was on staff or on call that night at the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital who was trained to perform the exam.

She said she was told to go home overnight, not shower or change and to use the bathroom as little as possible, to help preserve any evidence.

"I just really wanted to not have to preserve my body in the state that it was in for another 12 hours," she said in an interview. "So I guess I was feeling like I was being asked to sit in that experience. Like, I could smell him on me."

It was only after she called police for advice about what else she could do, and an officer intervened, that the hospital called in a nurse to help her, she said.




"Elon Musk's ex-girlfriend auctions billionaire's photos, mementos from college": Today I found this article by Betty Hou on BNN Bloomberg: 

Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend is selling off some mementos of their college relationship -- and they’re proving pretty popular.

Jennifer Gwynne, who dated the world’s richest man when they were both studying at the University of Pennsylvania, is auctioning a cache of photos and other memorabilia on Boston-based platform RR Auction. Up for grabs are 18 candid photos capturing the billionaire’s youthful moments as a college student, a handwritten birthday card and a gold necklace Musk gave to his then-girlfriend.

As of Sunday night, the birthday card -- signed ‘Love, Elon’ -- was edging north of US$10,000 with an impressive 23 bids.

Attracting the next most interest was the necklace, which comes with an emerald from the Zambian mine owned by Musk’s father Errol, a South African property developer. The photos include previously unseen snaps of a young Musk hanging out with friends, fooling around in the dormitory, and cuddling with Gwynne.

According to The Independent, Gwynne, who dated Musk for a period in 1994, has decided to sell the items to raise money for her stepson’s college tuition fees.

It isn’t the first time items linked to famous entrepreneurs have been sold on RR Auction’s site. The company auctioned Steve Jobs’s first Apple-1 prototype in August for nearly US$680,000.

In an interview with Insider Edition, Gwynne said the future Tesla Inc. boss was already envisioning electric cars while they were dating almost 30 years ago. “He would talk about electric cars, he would talk about alternative fuel sources,” she said in an Insider Edition’s video Tweet. 



My opinion: That's god that Gwynne is using the money to pay for her stepson's college tuition.  If she doesn't have an emotional attachment to these items, than she can sell them.


Sept. 15, 2022 "Suppressing good news is scaring our kids witless": Today I found this article by Bjorn Lomberg on the Financial Post.  I like this article because this positive:

We are incessantly told about disasters, whether it is the latest heat wave, flood, wildfire or storm. Yet the data overwhelmingly show that over the past century people have become much, much safer from all these weather events. In the 1920s, around half a million people were killed by weather disasters, whereas in the last decade the death toll averaged around 18,000. This year, like both 2020 and 2021, is tracking below that. Why? Because when people get richer, they get more resilient.

Weather-fixated television news would make us think disasters are all getting worse. They’re not. Around 1900, about 4.5 per cent of the land area of the world burned every year. Over the last century, this declined to about 3.2 per cent In the last two decades, satellites show even further decline: in 2021 just 2.5 per cent burned. This has happened mostly because richer societies prevent fires. Models show that by the end of the century, despite climate change, human adaptation will mean even less burning.


Bjorn Lomborg: Suppressing good news is scaring our kids witless | Financial Post



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