In April 2013, OSPE’s Mr. Ray Givens, P. Eng., met The Honourable Jason Kenney - your immediate predecessor – about this, in an informal setting. Prior to then, Mr. Kenney was getting the opposite story from many different sources – namely, to the effect that there was an engineering skills shortage. Among othger things he asked Mr. Givens why nobody had informed him earlier about what was going on. He also showed considerable interest in a graph depicting the situation, that Mr. Givens gave to him.
Then nothing much seemed to happen until about Tuesday April 14th - when the Report from the Panel on Employment Challenges of New Canadians appeared, under the following title:-
“Survival to Success:Immigrant Outcomes”
OSPE, along with Engineers Canada, and many other
organisations, participated in the report’s preparation.
As the said Report shows, the said Panel on
Employment Challenges of New Canadians was in fact established by none
other than the same Honourable Jason Kenney already referred to, during his
tenure as federal Minister of Employment and Social Development - and evidently
as a result of OSPE’s Ray Givens, P. Eng.,
informal meetingwith him back in April 2013.
I think the Report as a whole represents some very comprehensive work - but there are some still some very big and very serious things, which lie outside the scope of the Report, that need fixing in Canada.
I myself am an Associate Member of OSPE and have compiled certain information and analysis based on my own research, which I think is relevant to the problem. I will be referring to this information frequently.
I will also be referring frequently to the relevant information and analysis undertaken over the years by OSPE, Engineers Canada and certain other organisations.
Here is the graph that OSPE’s Ray Givens, P.Eng., gave to The Honourable Jason Kenney in April 2003:-
Obviously we have to ask ourselves how and why this
situation was allowed to happen. The history behind it goes at least as far
back as 1990.
First, from 1990 or even earlier, how did the trouble
all start?
It is obvious from this that the immediate cause of the problem was a massive over-supply of engineers relative to what the job market could absorb, caused in turn by immigration policies which took no account of the actual supply versus demand situation and which attracted foreign trained engineers to Canada with claims that they were welcome and needed because of their foreign education and foreign qualifications.
More
recently-available information focusses specifically on Ontario.