HEC: The Selection of Recent High-Skilled Immigrants to Canada

2026/05/11 Leave a comment

Noteworthy study. Interesting that the government has adopted the recommendation to “reweighting current selection criteria to predict earnings” while at the same time implementing sectoral draws that are lower ranked with lower earnings in some cases:

We study economic integration, intentions, and selection using a new survey of recent high-skilled immigrants to Canada (arrivals 2015–2025), linked to native-conditional earning percentile ranks. We document five main results. First, high-skilled immigrants experience large earnings gains from migration, with average earnings roughly doubling within one year of arrival. Second, entry status strongly predicts early outcomes: immigrants on closed work permits outperform direct permanent residents, while students and open-permit entrants start lower, with students catching up faster. Third, nonpermanent residents do not, on average, integrate faster than permanent residents relative to natives, except for former students. Fourth, intentions to stay are more closely related to earnings growth than to income levels. Fifth, reweighting current selection criteria to predict earnings improves expected outcomes and shifts selection toward high-performing non-permanent residents, particularly those on closed permits.

Source: HEC: The Selection of Recent High-Skilled Immigrants to Canada

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Why this Toronto man is being flooded with requests from Americans about their Canadian ancestors

2026/05/11 Leave a comment

More on the demand to prove citizenship links under C-3:

…Unlike record seekers before the new citizenship rule, Pugh said the people who reach out these days don’t usually have much information on their Canadian ancestors to guide the search. It creates more work for archivists.

“Because they don’t know where their baptism or that marriage took place, sometimes they don’t even know the city, they might just say, ‘I have a relative who was baptized in Ontario in 1850. Can you find it?’” he noted.

“It takes so much longer to prove a negative because we keep saying well, it could just be in this next register and so we have to look. So it’s much more time intensive than somebody who knows exactly which register it’s in.”

Also, records could be lost after being passed around multiple congregations as local churches amalgamated and separated over time, Pugh said. Variations of spelling, such as when a silent letter was missed or a name ended with an “ie” instead of a “y,” can all make the search that much more difficult, he added.

Where to start your genealogy search for citizenship

So far, Pugh estimated that his office has a 20 per cent success rate in searches based on the number of people that have come forward and the number of certified documents issued.

Due to the volume and complexity of requests, the United Church of Canada Archives has started to charge a $25 research fee and raised the fee for the certification of a pre-1900 certificate to $50 from $30 in order to hire a student archivist….

Source: Why this Toronto man is being flooded with requests from Americans about their Canadian ancestors

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Griffiths: Canada’s AI debate has a mile-wide blind spot. It’s our immigration policy

2026/05/11 2 Comments

Good commentary and flagging a real issue that will become more important as AI develops. Just as our trade strategy has been slow to address IP and AI implications, so has immigration:

…But the labour market we are barreling toward is anything but normal.

If the AI thesis is even half-right, the bottleneck for Canadians over the next five years will not be a shortage of workers. It will be a shortage of jobs that AI cannot do—almost all of them physical, hands-on, or relational. Trades. Eldercare. Construction. Skilled installation. Personal services. The very segments where displaced white-collar Canadians, suddenly competing for “hands-on” work, will exert powerful downward pressure on wages. Adding hundreds of thousands of newcomers per year who will struggle to compete in either the contracting knowledge economy or in a skills economy experiencing a surfeit of labour, multiplies the AI disruption rather than relieving it.

The radical idea—and it is radical only because no one in Ottawa is willing to say it out loud—is that an AI-dominated economy may make Canada’s high-immigration model not just unnecessary but actively harmful to the workers we already have. The composition of intake, in such a world, would also need to flip towards ultra specialists, veritable immigrant unicorns, and away from generalist knowledge worker credentials in fields AI can now do at a hundredth of the cost.

Make no mistake: this argument is not nativism dressed in economic clothing. It is the opposite. It is the argument that immigration policy, like every other major lever of state, must respond to the actual economy in front of it—and the economy in front of us is being rewritten in real time by machines that, on a benchmark designed by the companies building them, now do the work of 44 professions about as well as the people who trained for 14 years to do it.

Canada’s policy elites have so far met this once-in-a-century technological inflection with something between a “let it rip” shrug and a quiet hope that the transition to an AI-dominated economy will be slow enough to manage the wrenching structural adjustment. It will not be. The AI dislocation looks set to be wider, deeper, and faster than the prepared playbook anticipates, and immigration policy will be the first of many non-labour files to get caught up in it.

Far better to have the difficult conversation now than after the displacement has begun in earnest. Time, as it has a habit of doing in moments like this, is fast running out.

Source: Canada’s AI debate has a mile-wide blind spot. It’s our immigration policy

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The CAF recruitment system is failing everyone: J.L. Granatstein for Inside Policy

2026/05/11 Leave a comment

Not the principle but the details need to be fixed:

…Very simply, the problems with the CAF’s recruiting system have not yet been remedied. Yes, permanent residents and naturalized citizens should be encouraged to join the military, but not until they can speak, read, and understand French and/or English and are adapted to Canadian life and the military’s expectations. Yes, those with medical problems should be enlisted, but only if they have been properly screened in the recruitment process. And certainly, the CAF should not accept candidates who cannot read, write, or comprehend instruction at an acceptable standard.

To judge by his long memorandum with its substantiated recommendations, Kieley is a very able officer doing his best to deal with the difficulties he and his understrength staff face. The generals in Ottawa had changed the rules to speed up recruiting with good intentions but had failed to consider the possible consequences. The recruiting officers across the country too often pushed the unqualified to Saint-Jean, and Kieley had to clean up the mess. It’s almost as if NHL scouts sent those who cannot skate to training camp. This cannot work.

This matters because such applicants at the CAF’s Leadership and Training School cost DND money and take spots from better-qualified candidates. It also matters because General Carignan is studying options to expand the CAF to as many as 85,500 regular force members. “In the next month or so,” the CDS told the CBC in April, “we will be able to present various options, and the discussion is going very well,” Carignan said. “There is a lot of interest in doing this.”

Canada needs a bigger and better Canadian Armed Forces, and the Carney government is putting much money (and much of its credibility) into getting this program right. But if the recruitment process does not speed up and function properly, that investment will achieve little. The generals at National Defence Headquarters and officers in recruiting centres across Canada must fix these problems now.

Source: The CAF recruitment system is failing everyone: J.L. Granatstein for Inside Policy

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Isak | The day my children and I became Canadian, our long journey finally felt complete

2026/05/11 Leave a comment

Although I still believe that in-person ceremonies are more meaningful, even the virtual moves new Canadians:

…Becoming a Canadian citizen was one of the most emotional moments of my life. The ceremony was online, not in a courthouse, but it still felt powerful. We dressed respectfully for the day and sat together as a family in front of the computer. Around us on the screen were people from different countries, each with their own story, each waiting to take the same oath. As I listened to the ceremony, my emotions overwhelmed me. I thought about the years of uncertainty, the waiting, the fear, and the sacrifices. I felt proud, relieved, and grateful.  Citizenship may feel like paperwork or ceremony for some people. For us, it meant much more. It meant safety. It meant dignity. It meant belonging.

As someone who came from Somalia and lived through insecurity, I know the value of peace in a way that is hard to explain to those who have never feared losing it. I grew up around conflict, armed groups, displacement, and fear. I know what it meant when schools closed because of fighting, when people can’t plan their future because the next day is uncertain. I also worked as a journalist and later in security and political analysis during a time when violence and instability were part of daily life. I know what it means to leave behind home in search of a better life. That is why becoming Canadian was not just a legal milestone. It was a deeply human one….

Source: Opinion | The day my children and I became Canadian, our long journey finally felt complete

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Century Initiative: Strategic Immigration Levels Planning for Canada’s Short and Long-Term Future

2026/05/08 Leave a comment

Summary of lessons and recomendations from the Century Initiative consultations on immigration planning. I was part of those consulted. Further reflection of CI’s efforts to distance itself from its earlier overly simplistic approach to immigration. My quick comments in italics.

As for the IRPA recommended changes, unclear whether the government is planning to make any amendments to IRPA given other priorities although the CIMM immigration study may suggest otherwise:

Key Lessons for Immigration Levels Planning

  1. Misinformation and disinformation pose growing risks to the integrity of immigration levels planning. True, but arguably also applied to a number of pro-immigration advocates.
  2. Significant investments are needed in Canada’s data ecosystem to provide the evidence needed for effective immigration levels planning. While IRCC and StatsCan generate a wealth of data, there still remain significant gaps, particularly with respect to integrating different data sets.
  3. Immigration levels planning requires deeper analysis at the local and regional level. Challenge is balancing local and regional with national levels, recognizing mobility rights mean that immigrants may relocate to pursue opportunities.
  4. Immigration levels planning requires longer time horizons to avoid sudden system shocks. In principle yes, but the famous line, “in the long run, you’re dead.”
  5. Immigration levels planning must combine quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine what types of immigrants are needed to meet Canada’s economic, demographic, and social objectives and how to improve outcomes for recent arrivals. Challenge is in the doing.
  6. Immigration levels planning must reflect Canada’s short and long-term absorptive capacity and social and economic objectives, rather than responding reactively to changing national and global dynamics. Good reference to absorptive capacity but there will always be political pressures to be reactive.

Recommendations

  1. Amend s. 94(2)(b) of IRPA to require the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to include the total number of annual arrivals in the immigration levels plan (permanent and temporary). Long overdue.
  2. Amend s. 3 of IRPA to explicitly recognize permanent residence and citizenship pathways as core objectives of Canada’s immigration system and require that immigration levels planning account for expected transitions from temporary to permanent status. Also overdue. Always struck me as odd no reference to citizenship in the plan.
  3. Amend s. 94(2) of IRPA to require the Government of Canada to consider Canada’s absorptive capacity in the immigration levels planning process. Also overdue.
  4. Amend IRPA to introduce accountability and reporting mechanisms to the immigration levels planning process. Would be nice! Particularly with respect to outcomes, not just outputs.
  5. Develop a core set of indicators to inform immigration levels planning across short-, medium-, and long-term horizons, and provide transparent public information on how these indicators are used in future immigration levels plans. To a certain extent, the core CRS human capital criteria provides the basis for the indicators and the CRS and any indicators should be coherent and mutually reinforcing.
  6. Strengthen collaboration with other orders of government by more transparently reflecting regional priorities and realities within the national immigration levels planning process. Arguably, regular fed-prov consultation provide for this.
  7. Establish a formal long-term immigration planning framework that defines Canada’s demographic, economic, and nation-building objectives and explicitly guides future immigration levels plans. Again, in the long run we’re dead.
  8. Clarify and harmonize the Government of Canada’s language regarding immigration levels and targets. Always an area for improvement.
  9. Strengthen research and data infrastructure on two-step migration to better inform immigration levels planning. Agree.
  10. Increase the time horizon of immigration levels plans beyond 3 years, recognizing that longer-term projections are a forecast and subject to adjustment over time. In theory, yes, in practice not sure how meaningful given electoral cycles and events.
  11. Make strategic investments in the data ecosystem on immigration-related issues to better inform policy and planning. Always in favour of better data and analysis.
  12. Increase the depth, rather than breadth, of the Government of Canada’s immigration levels planning consultation process. Makes sense.

Source: Strategic Immigration Levels Planning for Canada’s Short and Long-Term Future

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ICE Immigration Enforcement Has Harmed U.S. Workers, Research Shows

2026/05/08 Leave a comment

Not that surprising:

New research finds that Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has harmed U.S.-born workers. The findings contradict a central policy justification for ICE raids and arrest quotas in U.S. cities. Earlier this year, ICE and Border Patrol agents killed two Americans in Minneapolis and generated widespread protests. The new research shows ICE activity also caused economic disruption and failed to deliver on the administration’s promise to improve the economic situation of U.S. workers.

Immigration Surge Did Not Help U.S.-Born Workers

Under the Trump administration, ICE and Border Patrol agents surged into Minneapolis, Los Angeles and other major cities. Economists Chloe N. East and Elizabeth Cox at the University of Colorado Boulder examined the impact of immigration enforcement actions in a new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. While immigration enforcement has increased nationwide during the Trump administration, the researchers compared areas that “experienced a sudden, large increase in ICE arrests” to places that did not.

One research finding is unsurprising: Among individuals identified as likely undocumented immigrants not physically removed from the labor market, ICE activity produced a “chilling effect” of interacting with ICE, leading to a 4% reduction in employment. According to the research, in an average area, approximately six undocumented immigrants dropped out of the labor force for every one ICE arrest. That may help explain why employers often express difficulties in finding workers well beyond the number of people arrested or deported.

The research finds ICE arrests have not helped and, indeed, likely harmed U.S.-born workers, including those with a high school education or less. “There is a negative and significant impact on employment of U.S.-born male workers with at most a high-school education, who work in likely affected sectors,” according to the study. “This is consistent with a model where undocumented immigrants and U.S.-born workers are complements, rather than substitutes for each other in the labor market.”

There are additional disappointing results for administration officials, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, to ponder: “We see no evidence that employers increase wages to attract U.S.-born workers to fill these jobs in the face of immigration enforcement,” write East and Cox. “Instead, our results are consistent with employers reducing labor demand overall, including for jobs more often taken by U.S.-born workers.”

Source: ICE Immigration Enforcement Has Harmed U.S. Workers, Research Shows

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An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’

2026/05/08 2 Comments

Of note:

On Nov. 10, 2023, the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov published a guest essay in the New York Times. Though scarcely a month had passed since the Hamas massacre of hundreds of Israeli men, women and children, Bartov expressed fears over Israel’s military response to this horrifying act of barbarity. But, he concluded, while “it is very likely that war crimes, and crimes against humanity, are happening,” he concluded, there is “no proof that genocide is taking place in Gaza.”By mid-2025, however, Bartov revised his stance in a second Times essay. As a scholar of genocide who has taught classes on the subject — including at Brown University, where he is currently based — for a quarter of a century, he announced, “I can recognize one when I see one.”In his new book Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov offers a searing analysis, both personal and professional, of the tragically entwined history of Israelis and Palestinians that climaxed with the disaster of October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, followed by the even more disastrous response of Israel. Bartov’s account resembles an earlier book on an earlier war: Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, in which the veteran of two world wars examines the causes to France’s collapse in 1940. Both internationally known historians, and patriots who served their nation in arms, each man wrote their book when the debacles were still fresh.

For France, the collapse was as much moral and political as it was military. “Whatever the complexion of its government,” Bloch observed, “a country is bound to suffer, democracy becomes hopelessly weak, and the general good suffers accordingly if its higher officials are bred up to despise it.”As Bartov’s book reminds us, this diagnosis applies not just to the decay that undermined the French Third Republic, but also to the moral rot that has been sapping the foundations of the Israeli republic. In his account, Bartov weaves the parallel histories of Israelis and Palestinians — a history composed of two catastrophes, the Shoah and the Nakba, that have ever since shaped events.

Inevitably, the very mention of these events in the same breath often sparks a violent response from many Israeli and diasporic Jews, but Bartov rightly insists upon their pairing. One of the many reasons why Bartov’s book is so important is his insistence that the two events are “inextricably linked historically, personally and as part of a politics of memory” and that they each have “become constitutive of Israeli and Palestinian national identities.”William Faulkner’s old chestnut — the past is neither dead nor even past — is the through-line to Bartov’s sharply, at times brutally, etched history of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Crucially, Bartov argues that what has gone so terribly wrong since 1948 was inevitable only in retrospect. An alternative history, one shaped by a Zionism faithful to the ideals of the Enlightenment, was, if unlikely, certainly not impossible. At the very least the history of the past eight decades could have gone in a liberal and democratic direction….

Source: An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’

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Black women say they’re at risk due to unequal health care. The Ford government is being urged to act

2026/05/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

…At Queen’s Park on Wednesday, the Black Women’s Institute of Health pushed for urgent action on equity for Black women’s health, based on these experiences, shared by women in a report completed by the institute. The report, “Voices UnHeard,” was based on the findings of a first-of-its-kind national survey that focused on the experiences of Black women and girls and health care.

“There’s nothing in this report that I would say I haven’t lived or experienced,” said Kearie Daniel, who spearheaded the report and is the executive director of Black Women’s Institute for Health.

“This is the first time ever that we had anyone survey Black women across this country to this extent in a cohesive way,” Daniel said.

Researchers say there’s a lack of data about the experiences of Black women and girls in Canada when accessing health-care — that’s why a report like this is desperately needed. A health system ill-equipped to provide a basic standard of care for a community group that already disproportionately faces higher rates of certain chronic illnesses and medical conditions could lead to worse health outcomes and higher mortality.

The briefing Wednesday “was part of taking the report from just a report into action,” Daniel said.

The “Voices UnHeard” report was published in November. The report served as an anchor for the policy and legislative moves Daniel is advocating for at Queen’s Park.

The briefing followed Tuesday’s tabling by the NDP of the Black Health Equity and Accountability Act, 2026 (Bill 115), which Daniel says aligns with many of the 70 recommendations in the report….

…At Queen’s Park on Wednesday, the Black Women’s Institute of Health pushed for urgent action on equity for Black women’s health, based on these experiences, shared by women in a report completed by the institute. The report, “Voices UnHeard,” was based on the findings of a first-of-its-kind national survey that focused on the experiences of Black women and girls and health care.

“There’s nothing in this report that I would say I haven’t lived or experienced,” said Kearie Daniel, who spearheaded the report and is the executive director of Black Women’s Institute for Health.

“This is the first time ever that we had anyone survey Black women across this country to this extent in a cohesive way,” Daniel said.

Researchers say there’s a lack of data about the experiences of Black women and girls in Canada when accessing health-care — that’s why a report like this is desperately needed. A health system ill-equipped to provide a basic standard of care for a community group that already disproportionately faces higher rates of certain chronic illnesses and medical conditions could lead to worse health outcomes and higher mortality.

The briefing Wednesday “was part of taking the report from just a report into action,” Daniel said.

The “Voices UnHeard” report was published in November. The report served as an anchor for the policy and legislative moves Daniel is advocating for at Queen’s Park.

The briefing followed Tuesday’s tabling by the NDP of the Black Health Equity and Accountability Act, 2026 (Bill 115), which Daniel says aligns with many of the 70 recommendations in the report….

Source: Black women say they’re at risk due to unequal health care. The Ford government is being urged to act

Filed under bias, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Carney to continue using Trudeau-era advisory board to suggest Senate appointments

2026/05/08 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see whether there is any impact on the diversity and political leanings of Carney appointments. Trudeau appointments: 55.2 percent women, 19.8 percent visible minorities, and 12.5 percent Indigenous:

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday he will continue to rely on the independent advisory board created by Justin Trudeau to suggest Senate appointments, but gave no timeline for filling a growing number of vacancies. 

After more than a year in office Mr. Carney has yet to make a single Senate appointment. Vacancies are mounting not just among senators but also on the board tasked with selecting new members of the Senate. 

There are currently nine vacancies in the 105-member Senate and another six senators are planning to retire by the end of 2026. The Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments, consisting of federal, provincial and territorial representatives, currently has just five members. It has 24 vacancies, leaving most provinces without representation on the board. 

At a Montreal-area press conference, Mr. Carney gave no indication of when he would begin addressing the vacancies in the Senate. “We will be appointing senators in due course, and I will take into account the advice of the independent advisory committee that was established by my predecessor,” he said. 

Source: Carney to continue using Trudeau-era advisory board to suggest Senate appointments, Carney not planning to allow senators in Liberal caucus, senior government official says


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