 New legislation, termed “long overdue” by Ontario Citizenship and Immigration Minister Mike Colle, has been adopted by the province to help fast-track recognition of foreign credentials and enable new immigrants to find employment that matches their qualifications.
Adoption of the legislation by the Ontario Legislature will break down barriers and expedite the process allowing internationally-trained professionals to work in their fields of expertise.
Passage of the new law took place in December, along with announcement that $920 million in new immigrant settlement funding will start flowing to the province in 2007 under a federal-provincial agreement negotiated 13 months previously.
The funding agreement led in turn to announcement of a series of new programs to help skilled newcomers to Ontario find employment in the province.
The Fair Access to Regulated Professions Act, the first legislation of its kind in Canada, will require Ontario’s regulated professions to ensure their licensing process is fair, clear and open and will require them to assess credentials more quickly.
The legislation “will go a long way to ensure that newcomers are a brain gain for Ontario, not a brain waste,” Colle said.
“This bill represents one of the boldest attempts by a provincial government to address inequities that confront newcomers,” Madina Wasuge, Executive Director of the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion, said of the legislation.
The joint settlement funding agreement between Ontario and the federal government means $182 million federal dollars will be transferred to Ontario in 2007 as the first stage of the five-year plan. The funding, negotiated in late 2005 as the Canada-Ontario Immigration Agreement, will help co-ordinate settlement services, improve language training and promote partnerships among municipalities, agencies, businesses and community organizations.
“Newcomers were not doing as well as they had in the past years without the access to language, literacy and career training,” former federal Citizenship and Immigration Minister Monte Solberg said in announcing the start of funding under the plan. (Solberg was moved to a new portfolio in the January 4 cabinet shuffle, exchanging places with Diane Finley as minister of human resources and skills development, while Finley takes over as immigration minister.)
Calling the agreement “a most important breakthrough,” Colle said the Conservative government had honoured the agreement that had been worked out with the previous Liberal government before last year‘s election. About 140,000 newcomers arrive in Ontario annually, about half of them in Toronto.
 Colle and George Smitherman, Ontario’s minister of health, later officially opened a one-stop resource and recruitment centre for Global Experience Ontario. The centre will provide resources and support for immigrant professionals to navigate the provincial system of licensing and registration. It also houses the HealthForceOntario Strategy, a program to attract and retain health care professionals to work in the province.
The centre will offer a single point of access for information for health professionals and will promote the advantages of working in Ontario, Smitherman said, adding it will also assist internationally-trained health professionals obtain the licensing needed to apply their skills.
Global Experience Ontario will provide links to education and assessment programs, settlement agencies, internships and mentoring programs , as well as direction on standards for professional qualifications, licensing and registration processes, referrals for training and to alternative professions that complement skill sets.
The recruitment centre is designed to position Ontario as an employer-of-choice for practice-ready health professionals through marketing and advertising to target groups of professionals, including a campaign to repatriate about 3,000 physicians registered to practice in Ontario but currently living outside the province.
Other announcements by Ontario last month included:
- $871,000 for internationally-trained early childhood educators
- $596,000 for foreign-trained dieticians to find work in their field
- $600,000 for language training for adult newcomers
- $25,000 in settlement funding to the Chinese Professionals Association of Canada
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