Questions?
Comments? E-mail Robert T. Chisholm, Associate Member OSPE, at attention_to_the_facts@hotmail.com
A1.4. FOREIGN TRAINED PROFESSIONAL IMMIGRANTS TO
CANADA; “PROMISES”; CONTRACT OF EMPLOYMENT “FIDDLE”.
Recent changes (as at September
2015) to Canada’s federal immigration laws have involved, among other things,
the new “Express Entry” program. Under this, such immigrants (and I was one
back in 1982) must have APPROVED JOB OFFERS. In my view these must include contracts of employment
that are legally-binding under Canadian law.
With the
regulated professions at least, the contracts of employment must guarantee work
for at least the period necessary to meet the Canadian experience requirements
component for official licensing to practice in Canada. Job offers not
meeting these requirements “….aren’t worth the paper that they are written on..”.
My own case involving SNC-Lavalin, which happened in Quebec in 1982, turned out
to be an instance of this.
Provincial
labour legislation might not mandate such contracts for foreign-trained
professional immigrants but must be amended accordingly.
This may
give rise to certain concerns for the business community on account of certain
economic and social trends in Canada going back at least as far as 1982.
But the
issue is one of stopping a massive wastage of people enticed to Canada to work,
caused by bad information and legalistic chicanery at their expense.
MY OWN CASE
Reference: “South Asia Mail” article at www.exposethismuck.com/SAMART1.htm
(the full text is
also on the South Asia Mail
website)
The South Asia Mail article concerns an engineer who
arrived in Montreal, Quebec from the U.K. in 1982 after being enticed there
with a job offer from The SNC Group that appeared to mean at least 24 months of work but was then dismissed
after 15 weeks.
(Note: The SNC Group was re-named SNC-Lavalin Inc. in 1995 by
then-President and C.E.O. Guy Saint-Pierre)
Obviously this story has nothing to do
directly with the NCR in particular - but
it contains unavoidable and important lessons about how NOT to recruit or
entice foreign-trained professional immigrants to Montreal, Quebec or anywhere
else in Canada, including the NCR.
This job offer dated July 27th
1981 contained the following, among other things:-
Quote 1:
“SNC is pleased to recognize your past
experience, and therefore, you will
be entitled to three weeks vacation per
year according to our current policy.
Our
financial support for your
relocation to Canada will include economic
air
fare for you and your approved dependents and accomodation in a furnished
apartment
with kitchen facilities for two weeks if this arrangement
is
required. All arrangements will be made by us when you have confirmed
your
date of arrival. We will
also contribute a fixed amount of $5,400.00
towards the remainder of your
relocation expenses, with payment when you
have demonstrated that substantial
expenditures have been incurred.
Our payment of relocation expenses as
indicated above is made on the assumption
that you will be a long term employee
of SNC. If you wish to terminate
your employment, for any reason
whatsoever, before twenty four (24) months
from its commencement in Canada, you
hereby agree to reimburse to your employer
a pro-rata amount of the total
relocation expenses that have been
paid by the
Company.”
Quote 2:
“”This offer is conditional to your
obtaining “landed immigrants” status or
“bona fide work permit” from the
Canadian Immigrant Authorities. We
therefore
suggest that you start procedures immediately by filling your
application
to emigrate at the Canadian Immigration Bureau. At our end,
we
will be filling with them a confirmation of our employment offer to
you.
Please bear in mind that this offer of employment does not automatically
imply
immigration acceptance but simply indicates our needs for
your technical expertise.””
Some comments could be made about it now, as follows:-
1.
The job offer contained no mention
of any probationary period - but appeared to make it clear that the person so
recruited was to work for the company for at least 24 months.
2.
The choice offered between obtaining
“landed immigrant status” or getting a “bona fide work permit” now appears a
little odd but at the time there seemed little or no reason to investigate what
might lie behind it.
3.
Item 2, in light of current debate in Canada about the Temporary
Foreign Worker program, might have meant that the person so recruited was
expected to decide between entering Canada as a “landed immigrant” – for
permanent employment - versus obtaining a “bona fide work permit” in order to
enter Canada as a Temporary Foreign Worker in order to work on a single and
short–term engineering contract. But no such thing was mentioned by SNC or anyone
at the Quebec government office in London, U.K., or the Canadian High
Commission in London, U.K., who saw this same job offer.
In general, it could be said that the job offer
intentionally contained vague language calculated to allow SNC to avoid any
significant responsibility to the person so recruited in the event of an
economic down-turn such as actually occurred (between about1981 and 1983 -
precisely the wrong time, in this case).
Such vagueness of intention was reflected in the
behaviour of SNC and their Montreal, Quebec lawyers towards the engineer
concerned, following his dismissal. This was compounded by his finding that he
was not eligible for unemployment insurance benefits, plus not being able to
find alternative employment. His experience with having “lack of Canadian
experience” used against him when applying for jobs with some other Canadian
employers also ran counter to SNC’s own approach which said,
“SNC is pleased to recognize your
past experience,”
Readers are reminded here that this is the
same SNC-Lavalin Inc. that has been deeply involved in bribery and improper
payments in Libya, reported continually in the media since late 2011. Example:
a bribe of $160 million that they paid to Saadi Gadhafi which led to the RCMP
raiding SNC-Lavalin Inc.’s Montreal H.Q. in April 2012 to search for the
relevant documents.
No system of
recruitment / enticement of foreign-trained professionals to work in Canada can
be perfect.
But one possible
option here is to invite people to comer initially as Temporary Foreign
Workers, with the option to transfer to Landed Immigrant Status later if things
work out well between the employer and the person recruited and if there are no
contra-indications involving economic down-turns “conveniently” waiting to
happen at precisely the wrong time.
The problem of
gross over-supply of engineers to Canada between 1990 and 2002, caused by
flawed immigration policies, has been referenced in Sub-Appendix 1.6. The
information presented about this particular problem was researched and compiled
by Mr. Paul Martin, P. Eng (Ontario):–
Questions?
Comments? E-mail Robert T. Chisholm, Associate Member OSPE, at attention_to_the_facts@hotmail.com
A1.6.
IMPORTANT ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS LEFT UN-ANSWERED
The aftermath of this is still causing serious trouble in
2014; the underlying causes of it are still present in Canada and are still not
being properly addressed. More information about this and related matters is
at:-
Reference: www.unempgeninfo.com
--------------------------------------------------------
AFTERMATHS OF THE CONTRACT OF EMPLOYMENT “FIDDLE” ALREADY
REFERRED TO.
The same engineer from the
U.K. , also referred to in the “South Asia Mail” article located at:-
www.exposethismuck.com/SAMART1.htm
- also had endless trouble in addition to that
already noted, concerning unemployment insurance benefits and Ontario social
assistance after moving to Ontario in 1991. This is referenced on one of his
personal webpages at:-
http://www.exposethismuck.com/THECAUSE/MAINGATE.htm
See points 3 and 4 on the web page just referenced.
While the problems about to be described in Ontario – strictly speaking – lie outside the scope of federal government legislation, they nonetheless constitute a condemnation of a system as a whole which happens to include the federal government plus an element of the “left hand does not know what the right hand is doing” – and doesn’t care either, all in the name of allowing certain bureaucrats and lawyers to keep their jobs partly by wasting time and government money to generate irrelevant legalistic verbiage calculated to prevent the engineer referred to from getting back to work and contributing to the tax base again.
Among other things, there are links under
points 3 and 4 to the full story from 1994 onwards along with the supporting
documentation. See again: http://www.exposethismuck.com/THECAUSE/MAINGATE.htm
It partly involved a combination of being refused unemployment insurance benefits and access to retraining funds, after leaving an employer who was not paying him and was going bankrupt. As a result, he was forced on to Ontario social assistance but there was a complication involving a small rental property in Montreal, of which he was part-owner and which was running at a loss, and this was exploited later by the Ontario government to pursue him on account of an alleged “overpayment” of social benefits. In particular, the bureaucrats and lawyers involved attempted to assert that sale of the property would have released funds to defray the cost of the said social benefits – when, in fact, this was not the case because of the slump in the Montreal real estate market since the property was purchased in April 1988. The said real estate market slump, between 1988 and 2000, produced a situation where the value of the property was less than the outstanding mortgage principal – as was in fact proven in 2000 when, due to being unable to continue paying the mortgage and other expenses, he was forced to give the property to the lender (in this case the Royal Bank) in payment for the mortgage; the actual sale price realised by the bank was $135,0000 versus the outstanding mortgage principal which was about $140,000. Bureaucrats and lawyers at the federal government’s Board of Referees and Umpire’s office, the Social Benefits Tribunal in Ontario and the Ombudsman’s office in Ontario were all involved in exploiting the “letter of the law” in order to create this mess.
The problem here could also be summarised as one
where un-thinking bureaucrats and lawyers in the federal H.R.S.D.C. and
their administrative tribunals (the Board of Referees and the Umpire’s
office), followed by the Social Benefits Tribunal in Ontario and the
Ombudsman’s Office in Ontario were making a stupid mess and refusing to
use any common sense - all aided
further by government-financed lawyers concerned only with the “letter of the
law” as an excuse to avoid solving a problem when they were told about it. Jonathan P.
Langsner was the lawyer in H.R.D.S.C.’s Legal Services department who
was involved in creating this mess.
Among other things, it has also been proved that at
least two bureaucrats involved, working on this particular case in the Ombudsman’s
Office in Ontario , were deliberately refusing to follow the official
mandate of the Ombudsman’s office. They were Mr. Tom Barber and Ms.
Jenny Ryu, who were supporting the positions of Social Benefits Tribunal
members Ms. Mary Lee and Ms. Roslynne Mains who in turn were
deliberately exploiting the “letter of the law” to ignore the facts of the
situation, at the expense of the engineer referred to.
As at October 2014, the official mandate of the said
Ombudsman’s Office concerns the following:-
COMPLAINTS – 2013-2014:
Wrong,
unfair decisions
Bad
service
Inadequate
communication
Delays
(Reference: http://www.ombudsman.on.ca/Home.aspx#Authority
In 2009 there was the following web page stating the
mandate of the Ombudsman’s office:-
http://www.ombudsman.on.ca/en/what-we-do/administrative-tribunals/fact-sheet.aspx#Authority
Among other things, this stated the
following:-
“The Ombudsman can review the processes of administrative tribunals and
make
recommendations where appropriate to ensure that individuals are treated
fairly.”
and – quote 2:-
“Where the Ombudsman finds that an individual was not treated fairly, he
may make
recommendations to the tribunal to address the problem. The Ombudsman
may also make
recommendations to address any underlying problems related to Ontario
government legislation,
policies or programs, which the
tribunal is required to apply.”
In October 2014, this should be covered by the
Ombudsman Act, located here:-
http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/english/elaws_statutes_90o06_e.htm
Time precludes detailed comparison of this with the
2009 information given just before.
However, that 2009 information was used in
correspondence dated December 18th 2009 with the Ombudsman’s office
- and they have not attempted to dispute it at any time since then.
As to WHY the problems affecting the individual
referred to happened, some of the reasons can be seen HERE. This is from a new book dealing with the
failure of the administrative system in Canada, “Unjust By
Design” By Ron Ellis, published by UBCpress in
2013.
Based on this, some of the factors involved seem to
have been – quote:-
(1) A
general problem involving “Defeating the Rule of Law in the Administrative
Justice System: Executive Branch Strategies and Tactics”.
-
and –
(2) 2002.
Gail McGregor, “Anti-Claimant Bias in the Employment Insurance Appeals
System: Causes, Consequences, and Public Law Remedies”, Canadian Journal of
Administrative Law and Practice 15, 3: 229-91.
On top of this, there is a suspected problem with
potentially ageist elements in the federal employment insurance system.
In addition to this, the problems were aggravated by inaction on the part of federal M.P.’s and Ontario M.P.P.’s when the individual concerned approached them for help.
The federal M.P.’s involved were, among others, the
subject of a new book released on April 15th 2014 titled “Tragedy in
the Commons” by Alison Loat and Michael MacMillan, published by Random House.
The book deals with the failure of Canada’s democracy and the difficulties
confronting federal M.P. ’s in their work.
They interviewed 80 former federal M.P.’s; one of them was Marlene
Catterall, Mr. Chisholm’s M.P. until she left politics in January 2006. The
general picture involving M.P.’s seems
to be one where they are grossly
over-worked, combined with a complex system of rules (both written and
un-written) governing what they can or cannot do. More information: HERE
Questions?
Comments? E-mail Robert T. Chisholm, Associate Member OSPE, at attention_to_the_facts@hotmail.com