EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, May 2, 1995

.1533

[English]

The Chairman: We'll get started. I'm not sure where we left off last week, so I'm open to suggestions. Did you plan to take questions today or do you have a presentation?

Mr. Meyer Burstein (Director General, Strategic Research and Analysis, Department of Citizenship and Immigration): No, we don't have a presentation. We made our opening pitch last week. We're here to answer questions either about the relationship between research and policy or in connection with the testimony you heard this morning from Don DeVoretz.

The Chairman: Okay. Is the committee comfortable? We're ready to start with questions.Mr. Nunez, would you like to pass?

Mr. Nunez (Bourassa): Yes, for the moment.

The Chairman: Mr. Hanger, do you want to fire away?

Mr. Hanger (Calgary Northeast): I have some questions.

We spend $500 million or more on immigration programs. Would our economy benefit more by increasing that spending or, as an alternative, by spending that much on high-tech education for Canadians?

We always spend x number of dollars in settlement, language and training of all kinds in the whole immigration picture. Would we not be better off spending that kind of money on high-tech education for Canadians if we're looking at an economic benefit?

Mr. Burstein: Those are the kinds of questions to which researchers never give you direct answers. I don't know that you can have a direct answer to that kind of question, so I'll do it obliquely.

When economists look at economic growth and the sorts of things that contribute to economic growth, I think that economic ``new-think'' - and I'm open to anything my colleagues want to add to this - would suggest that investments in human capital are associated more with economic growth than with almost any other form of investment. If you can figure out a way to use immigration to support the development of Canada's human capital base, you're probably making a wise economic investment. I don't think I could push much beyond that on this question.

Mr. Hanger: Okay. I'll relate it to something even more specific. In the city of Calgary, not only in my own riding, there is a large Vietnamese population. There are a great number of individuals who cannot speak English. They have trouble integrating into the job market. Funds for language training fall far short of what should be available for the need to be adequately met and for them to be trained to be able to even apply for a job. Yet the funds aren't there to do that.

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My question stems from this. We still put in $500 million to be utilized right across the country for such programs as language training and other skills counselling, and yet I understand, just from the Calgary situation, that this meets the need of only about 25% of the immigrants who actually have a further need to adequately fit into the job market.

Mr. Burstein: I should have an easier time answering that question because most of the Vietnamese who ended up in Calgary weren't selected under economic programs. They came in as refugees. They're subsequently sponsored.

Is it a smart investment, when you have people here, to invest in language training? I think the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. Language ability is correlated more strongly with settlement success and with contribution and income and taxes, etc., than is almost any other measure you can think of.

Mr. Hanger: You're still not answering my question.

Even the moneys placed into that very small group of people still only meet the needs of one-quarter of the basic population requiring additional training.

Mr. Burstein: If you're asking me if I were running an economic strategy, if I were using immigration as purely an economic strategy, would I have a refugee component and a family class in it or would I concentrate on independents in business, the answer is the latter. If your only objective were economic, you would not be in the refugee business. We know that independents perform better.

Mr. Hanger: I appreciate that.

Mr. Burstein: That's why it's difficult to answer your question directly.

Mr. Hanger: We are in the refugee business.

Mr. Burstein: Right.

Mr. Hanger: We do have a need in that area, and I recognize it to be greater than probably what it should be in the immigrant area.

But let's switch it over to the immigrant side, then, excluding the refugees who have special needs. From what I can tell, because of the mix of immigrants the funding is still insufficient to meet the needs for language training and for the training required to fit in adequately. Would that be a fair statement to make?

Mr. Burstein: That we need more language training, or that we need to reinforce language skills in immigrants?

Mr. Hanger: We actually need more settlement money to meet the needs that are out there right now.

Mr. Burstein: I won't say it that way, but I will say I think we need to pay more attention to the language skills of newly-arrived Canadians. I would agree with that. There are a variety of ways to do that. One way to to do that is through your selection system, which is really a way of privatizing the acquisition of language.

Mr. Hanger: Is $500 million enough money?

Mr. Burstein: I don't know the answer to that.

Mr. Hanger: So you're saying you don't know specifically what kind of need there is out there for -

Mr. Burstein: To begin with, I'm not sure we spend $500 million on language training.

Mr. Hanger: I'm not talking just about language. I'm talking about resettlement.

Mr. Burstein: Resettlement overall...the number I have in mind is considerably lower than that, but it's not all provided federally. I'm just trying to get at the general point. Does it pay to help integrate immigrants? The answer is yes. I think investments like that provide a return.

Mr. Hanger: Granted, it helps. You're sitting here as members of the immigration department. Is there is a greater need out there for more than these programs offer right now? Do you have a handle on this?

Mr. Burstein: We do not provide language training to every immigrant who could benefit from it. Is that a good answer? There are unmet needs.

Mr. Hanger: I would have to agree with that answer.

Mr. Burstein: Yes, there are unmet needs. Right.

Mr. Hanger: Okay. Then if there are unmet needs, to what extent is the need unmet and is it a downside? It probably would be if you're looking at competition in the job market of today. How great is that unmet need?

Mr. Burstein: I don't know how great the unmet need is. It is a unquestionably a disadvantage in the labour market. Immigrants who don't have English or French skills are half as likely to participate in the labour market, their unemployment rate is twice as high, and even after a period of maybe eight years in the country there are still significant performance differences.

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So there's no question that language correlates with contribution and with success.

Mr. Hanger: To correct that problem, then...or is it a problem?

Mr. Burstein: Sure it's a problem.

Mr. Hanger: To correct it, what would you suggest as policy?

Mr. Burstein: There are a number of policies, really. In the November announcement, the department took some moves in that direction. Increasing the proportion of people who are selected for their skills is one answer. Placing greater emphasis within the selection grid on language ability is a second answer. We think that's also a partial answer to the question of what sort of skills and abilities the family class has, because through the sponsorship chain there will be a link in that direction. Another part of the answer would be in the area of partnering with other levels of government and with other institutions that deliver training, finding different ways in which to deliver training.

I'm not the policy person. I'm the research person. It's a mix of all of those strategies put together.

Mr. Hanger: So you couldn't tell me, in spite of the fact that that's the direction the department is heading in, how far it has moved on this point?

Mr. Burstein: You'd be better off asking that question of somebody else if you want a good answer. Then we won't have to back-track on it.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: What subjects of concern will your reseach department address in the coming months or years? What major immigration policies will you study? What are your priorities?

[English]

Mr. Burstein: Our priorities as a research department are to do research in areas that support the strategic directions of the department -

Mr. Nunez: For example?

Mr. Burstein: I'm going to elaborate. That wasn't the end of that sentence.

I think we need to get a better understanding of immigration and economic performance. There's a whole set of issues comparing the performance of immigrants we're admitting today vis-à-vis the performance of immigrants who have come in the past. That was a question I alluded to the last time.

We know we're taking immigrants from much more diverse sources than in the past. Has economic performance changed? Are some of the things that people claim about immigration still true today or are they no longer true?

You can't resolve some of those issues by looking at census data. You have to resolve some of those issues by actually tracking immigrants. So that's an important area we're going to be researching.

We want to look at the relationship, or to see if there is one, between immigration and the development of marginalized populations. That's an important question if you're running an immigration program.

We want to look at the relationship between immigration and tolerance. There is a view - and I don't recall if I alluded to it the last time or not - that immigration promotes tolerance rather than the opposite. I know you've probably heard both. However, if you look, for example, at what's happening in Vancouver, you find that people are much more inclined to think of immigration as a positive quality. It relates back to selection. So we want to get a better understanding of that particular issue.

We want to get a better understanding of social integration. We know more about those people who participate in the labour market. We need to get a better understanding of the rest of the movement.

We need to get some kind of a handle on inter-generational effects. We've done virtually no research on them. I think almost everyone will acknowledge that when you talk about integration, you're often talking about the children of immigrants rather than the immigrants themselves. There's virtually no information on that. You find that the children are often higher performers in the school system, but we don't know where that takes us exactly. So that's another area we need to look at.

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On the point I made before to Mr. Hanger about the relationship between the characteristics of the person you first bring in and the downstream characteristics of the people they sponsor, we need to do some work in that area.

There is a set of issues around the refugee system that we need to look into.

I could say one more thing that you might find interesting. We're developing now, in cooperation with a number of other countries, mostly developed ones, a project that looks at the effect of immigration on large cities around the world. So we're comparing the effects of immigration on Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver with the effects of immigration on cities such as Los Angeles and New York. We have a partner in Italy. We have a partner in Australia, so we'll be looking at Sydney. We're also looking to partner with countries such as France and Germany and a number of others.

We think we actually have some lessons that we can provide or offer to those countries in regard to best practices and in regard to having a system. There are differences between the Canadian system and the systems used by other countries, and we think we can extract some interesting policy lessons from that.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: Most of the research done on immigration try to link it to economic factors in order to see whether it makes a contribution to Canadian society or whether it involves a cost. Have you examined immigration from a democratic point of view, given the very low birth rate in Canada? Even though it may be expensive for the country to bring in immigrants, if Canada were to suspend this immigration or stop it altogether, wouldn't we see its population start to decline, and in how many years? Can you explain this problem to us?

[English]

Mr. Burstein: I think that if we were to stop immigration completely, then by the year 2700 there'd be no Canadians.

You have to realize that some of these areas are contentious. People have widely conflicting views. One of the things the Economic Council did was look at countries with large populations, small populations, high population growth rates and low population growth rates, and they tried to develop a relationship between those things and economic performance. They found that, by and large, there was no relationship at all. They concluded from that that population growth didn't have much of a relationship to the development of the economy.

I'm not sure that I agree with that, although I'm not quite sure of how to get at it. A number of adjustment problems might be easier to get at in a growing economy than in a stagnant or declining economy. From the standpoint of having to do certain things in the economy, it may be easier to do that when the economy is growing. I think that's an area that's been unexamined.

I won't claim to be an expert here, but I myself am not persuaded by demographic arguments. There are two things that the demographic arguments leave out. If you have a very large immigration movement, then you can have a much bigger Canada. I think that's true. I don't think that's an interesting question. I think the more interesting question is not what our GNP is but what our GNP per capita is. It's not clear to me that immigration makes a huge difference in GNP per capita.

We'll just pause there for a second. One of the reasons why it doesn't do that is that you have trouble in shifting the actual age structure of the population with immigration. You can inflate it like a balloon, but you can't change its shape all that much, and therefore you can't use it to correct for all kinds of economic imbalances that easily.

Having said that, there was an answer.... I don't remember who asked the question last week around economic performance and relating it back to specific countries, if you could develop that kind of link. I gave an answer. I had an analogy in mind, which was listening to some health expert. He was asked, does exercise contribute to longevity? His answer was, if your plan is living for the next five minutes, the best strategy would be to lie down and not move from your bed. However, if your strategy is to live productively for a long time, then the answer to that would be to exercise.

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My connection between that and immigration would be that I have difficulty seeing how we could develop closer ties with emerging economies in Asia without using immigration as a way to support that. Even if we didn't use immigration to support it, immigration or migration would be a consequence of developing those sorts of linkages.

When we begin to look at some of the inter-generational effects, you can probably build a case for immigration as well.

But I don't think there are any clear answers. The one thing I would say is if you're developing an economic strategy for a country, immigration can play a supporting role; but immigration is not the answer to Canada's economic problems.

That's probably a long enough answer.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: But you did not really answer the questions about the declining birth rate in Canada. How much of a decline in the birth rate is there at present? What is the breakdown? Is it even lower in Quebec than it is elsewhere?

I would also like you to explain the situation of minorities. For example, in the United States, black Americans have a higher birth rate than white Americans. Among Latin-Americans, it is even higher than it is for black Americans. So if we bring in immigrants from certain regions of the world, the birth rate could be higher or lower. Can you explain that?

[English]

Mr. Burstein: I had intended to answer your question. My answer to the question about the declining birth rate is I'm not sure it matters from an economic point of view, in the sense that it's not obvious that having a smaller population matters economically; not if your target measure is your per capita income. If your target measure is the size of the economy, then it matters. My point was that's not the relevant target measure.

The relevant target measure for a population, the relevant target measure for Canada in running an immigration program...if it's economic, you say to yourself, what will they do to my income? Should I bring this immigrant in? What effect will it have on my income? Granted, when the immigrant comes here the overall size of the economy is larger, but my income may not have moved. So my response to the question around declining birth rates is I'm not sure it matters economically.

My reading of the literature - and again, I'm not an expert on demography - is that after several...I shouldn't even say after several generations. When you control for various socio-economic factors, the birth rates of the incoming populations are the same as those of the native born. There may have been some recent shifts. If anybody here is aware of that, please correct me. But that's my reading of it.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: Have you done research on jobs held by immigrants? In general, with the exeption of highly skilled people, immigrants are said to hold the lowest-paying jobs in Canada, sometimes the most unpleasant ones, jobs that Canadians don't want, and where there are few opportunities for advancement, especially for the first generation. Have you done any research on that?

[English]

Mr. Burstein: I think - and you probably heard from Don DeVoretz this morning as well - when you look right across the board and you look at the performance of the foreign born, it exceeds that of the native born. That would contradict the point that immigrants are by and large distributed in the lower end of the labour market. I don't think they are. I think people who have looked at this argue that to some extent the policy of selection has had something to do with that.

I'm sorry. I have forgotten the second part of your question.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: It dealt with the most difficult and unpleasant jobs with little opportunity for advancement.

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Have you conducted studies on that? In which sectors of the economy are these jobs?

[English]

Mr. Burstein: I think, in effect, I did answer your question, in the sense that when you look at the overall distribution, you find that immigrants are more highly represented in the professional occupations. They tend to be underrepresented in things like the primary sector. This is partly related to the fact that they live in cities rather than in the countryside. You find the same thing in regard to the service sector.

A more interesting way to pose that question is actually to look at how the different classes of immigrants tend to operate in the labour market. I'll pause on that.

To support the point you were making, one of the things you find is that - and this actually goes directly to your point - when you look at the economic performance of immigrants and you break it up according to levels of education, you find that those immigrants who have lower levels of education tend to do better in comparison with the native born vis-à-vis those who were at the upper end, who tend to do not quite so well. The reason for that is probably related to motivation and to the effort they're prepared to put into it.

It's pretty obvious that being an immigrant is a difficult experience and that nobody makes that transition entirely voluntarily. There's a certain amount of push involved in having people place themselves in this new situation. They come here because they think they can be successful, and they do that through additional work.

Mr. Assadourian (Don Valley North): When you use the phrase ``integrate into Canadian society'', how do you measure integrating into society? What categories do you use? How can you say that group A is more integrated that group B? What scale do you use, and do you make a distinction between individual integration into society and ethnic integration into society?

Mr. Burstein: I'm going to refer this to my colleague Derrick Thomas, because I think you'll get a sharper answer from him than from me.

Mr. Derrick Thomas (Senior Research Officer, Department of Citizenship and Immigration): There isn't any real agreement about what constitutes integration.

We look at it in an number of different ways. We look at, for instance, are they economically independent? Do we have to spend any money on supporting them? To the extent that they can function independently, we can say that they are integrated.

Another way of looking at integration is to compare them with Canadian norms, to look at Canadian norms and ask if immigrants achieve them, if they reach the Canadian norm. There are a lot of different dimensions to it.

Another way of looking at it would be to ask if they achieve their aspirations. You can set up the immigrant aspirations as the goal and see if the immigrants are able to achieve their own aspirations, whether that requires some modification in their aspirations or whether a more realistic appraisal, sometimes, of their capabilities in Canadian society is involved. Is there a convergence of their aspirations and what they actually achieve?

So those are three ways.

Mr. Assadourian: Is the time factor one of the ways? Should someone who has been here for 20 years or 25 years automatically assume that he's integrated?

Mr. Thomas: No, you wouldn't automatically assume that. Time is a dimension along which integration occurs, and the assumption would be that the more quickly it occurs, the better. I think that's true of certain kinds of integration. The more quickly people become independent and function on their own, that's probably better, unless it interferes with their ability to achieve Canadian norms a bit later.

If they're going to spend another three weeks in a language course, it might benefit their ultimate income more.

So it's not completely true that the shorter the period, the better, but I think that in general that's true. The shorter the time it takes for people to function independently, to achieve Canadian norms, to achieve their own aspirations, the better.

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I think you can also look at the degree of comfort immigrants have in the society. You can look at how secure they feel in their culture and how secure they feel about Canadian culture.

Mr. Assadourian: How do you measure that?

Mr. Thomas: You could ask questions. If you did it in the context of a survey, for example, the questions would be: Do you feel threatened? Do you feel your culture's going to die out? Do you feel a fortress mentality? Do you feel you have to defend yourself against the pernicious influence of Canadian society?

Mr. Assadourian: Is that good or bad?

Mr. Thomas: I think that's bad. If you feel uncomfortable about it, it's bad. It's not bad that you would want to preserve some of your cultural background, but it is bad to the extent that you feel threatened.

It's the same on the Canadian side. I think integration involves some changes on the Canadian side as well. It's a two-way street. It involves changes on the part of the Canadian society to the extent that Canadians are threatened or feel their culture is under attack or feel that something they hold dear is slipping away. I think that's also a bad thing.

Mr. Assadourian: So integration is a two-way street more often?

Mr. Thomas: It is, yes.

Mr. Burstein: Maybe that comes back to the second part of your question, which you didn't quite ask. You were looking at the issue of social integration within a society, and basically you can't have a society that's integrated where you have different parts of the society fearful of other parts. Whatever idea you have of what integration is, when you have different parts viewing the other part and fearing it, you haven't managed to achieve integration. I think that goes without saying.

Mr. Assadourian: Thank you.

The Chairman: Do you want to jump in on that one?

Mr. Hanger: Yes, I do.

I think that's an interesting statement, actually, and it's probably quite right. One of my questions here was to what extent does the official multicultural policy in this country drive the immigration policy to the point where everyone is encouraged to keep separated, to keep significantly apart?

We go back to your comments there. If you can't have this integration because of this emphasis in the country, then obviously our multicultural policy is wrong.

Mr. Burstein: I'm probably not the person who should be talking about multicultural policy, but I just want to make a distinction. The point Derrick was making was not that people should have different values or different cultural aspirations. His point was that if you have different cultural aspirations from me, I shouldn't be threatened by yours, and vice versa. That's what we have to negotiate between ourselves.

So in the end, an integrated society is one where you and I can be different but where the differences aren't a source of tension. I don't think you'd find somebody in the multicultural sector who would define it differently.

Mr. Assadourian: So tolerance in this case is a factor for integration. Am I right?

Mr. Burstein: Yes, definitely.

Mr. Assadourian: So if someone is born here, say to an Asian family, and he is not a tolerant person, he is not integrated into society. Is that the right statement to make?

Mr. Burstein: Yes, I think you can say that. You can have people who are maladapted and whose parents came over 300 years ago.

The Chairman: They vote Reform. Just kidding.

Mr. Hanger: Well, there are an awful lot of people voting Reform.

The Chairman: With the little bit of time he has left, I'll take my colleague's time.

The gist of what Mr. DeVoretz said was that provided we keep the balance between economic immigrants and family class immigrants at roughly 50-50, and perhaps even 52-48, we would have growing returns instead of diminishing returns from our immigrants to Canada.

He suggested the level of 200 plus; he agreed with the levels of the government, basically. But he said if we wanted to have our population grow by 1% a year, we would need to bring in about 300,000 immigrants. He didn't see a problem with that as long as we provided the right balance.

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I wonder if you want to comment on that.

Mr. Burstein: Yes, I probably have quite a number of comments on that.

I can't quite figure out what exactly Mr. DeVoretz intends by the 50-50 mix. I haven't sorted that out. On the one hand, if he leaves out of that calculation the dependants of the independents, he's talking about the status quo. If he includes them, he has pretty well shut out the family class completely.

Mr. Hanger: Excludes them.

Mr. Burstein: Excludes them, right.

So I don't know exactly what that 50-50 mix means. I don't think it means anything. I think that one needs to be refined a little.

The Chairman: But I think he agrees with the definition the department would have, that if an economic immigrant comes over with a spouse, then the spouse is included as an economic immigrant. If you sponsor your spouse five years later, then it's part of the family class. But by and large, the head of the household plus the household that come over at the same time would all be classified on the economic side of the 50-50 ledger.

Mr. Burstein: I would have difficulty with that assertion, and I think empirically it's wrong.

The Chairman: With the definition of the term?

Mr. Burstein: I would have several problems. First of all, some of the people who come over as sponsored spouses are sponsored by native-born Canadians. They're not sponsored by immigrants.

The Chairman: So they're family class.

Mr. Burstein: Yes, in the family class.

About the performance of the spouses, I would suspect it probably doesn't equal that of the selected immigrants. I think there would be some relationship, but I would be very surprised -

The Chairman: He was not suggesting it does.

Mr. Burstein: Maybe I should ask you. Maybe you had clarification of this. When he says we want to have a policy of 50-50, who is included in the economic 50?

The Chairman: The household that comes with him.

Mr. Burstein: You see, this is my problem. If the 50 includes the selected person plus the dependants -

The Chairman: It does.

Mr. Burstein: - then he's advocating basically the status quo. That's roughly what we're doing right now.

The Chairman: Right.

Mr. Burstein: My view on that is that we're in the process of shifting that ratio somewhat.

The Chairman: To what?

Mr. Burstein: To an overall mix such that when you include spouses it is.... If you knock out the refugees, I think 53-43 is the number we used in the plan. It's certainly not a precise science.

The Chairman: He would agree with that. He would say you want to err on the side of...slightly above 50%, err on the side of economic class, and the justification for a 50-50 split is that on average every economic immigrant somewhere down the line will want to sponsor one family-class member.

Mr. Burstein: I think the work broadly supports the strategic directions of the department. But with the specific studies, for example that multiplier you just cited, I don't believe that multiplier. I don't think that multiplier is right. I don't even think looking at multipliers is a useful way to do it. We get into a whole lot of questions here that we're opening up.

My overall take on the work by DeVoretz is that at a very broad level it's supportive of the directions the department is taking, and I think in that sense I would go along with it. When we get down to the specific methodology and some of the specific recommendations that come out of it, I have a lot of difficulty with some of them, and many of them I actually can't understand. I can't understand them at an empirical, methodological level, and I cannot understand the policy prescriptions.

The Chairman: What two or three recommendations would you find most contentious? I didn't hear any this morning.

Mr. Burstein: At the moment, I would find the one about assigning points to spouses contentious.

The Chairman: Bonus points.

Mr. Burstein: Bonus points to spouses are contentious.

The Chairman: If you wanted to expedite them in the line.

Mr. Burstein: That's a statement without meaning, because there is no line at the moment, and we're not proposing to set up any kind of line or queue when it comes to dealing with independents, nor when it comes to dealing with spouses.

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The problem I have with assigning points to spouses is that I could only understand that if Canada had a policy where we placed more value on families being selected than on individuals. We toyed with this idea. Intuitively, you say let's take two cases here; we have a case where we have a person with a spouse who is highly educated, speaks the language, and another case where with a person whose spouse doesn't. Which of the two would Canada prefer? I think the answer there is obvious, that we would prefer this.

Try to operationalize that, though, and you find that as soon as you give additional points to somebody who has a spouse who speaks the language, you're discriminating against somebody who is single. I can see where you'd construct a policy where maybe you'd want to do that, but we don't have a demographic policy like that, and why would we want to at the moment? It doesn't come out of anywhere. We toyed with that for a while. We thought maybe what we need to do is develop a concept of an average spouse. If somebody has a better than average spouse, we give them points. But in the end we just gave up on it.

The Chairman: I want it on the record that I have a better than average spouse.

Mr. Burstein: You asked me for a number. If you want me to continue, I'll -

The Chairman: I'll come back. I feel like I'm hogging the time. I don't want to leave this point. I'll hand it over to Mr. Dromisky.

Mr. Dromisky (Thunder Bay - Atikokan): I find everything you've been presenting is very fascinating. I'm really enthralled by the kind of plans you have for the future and all the variables you're considering in making future studies. That will keep your whole department very busy.

But I don't know what it will really amount to, because we're talking about people, people from all over the world, different backgrounds and so forth. You just made a statement right now that I find a little interesting, that it would be unfair if we are going to be comparing a family unit with a single and therefore you couldn't do the kind of thing that has been recommended.

However, maybe we should be comparing singles with singles and family units with family units. Maybe that's a different type of approach we should be using instead of being concerned that we're giving too much weight to a family and it's not fair to a single person. Do you understand what I'm driving at?

Mr. Burstein: No.

Mr. Dromisky: You said you can't compare a family and give the spouse extra points because that wouldn't be fair to a single person. Why should we be comparing a family unit with a single person? Maybe we should be comparing family units - providing that we give additional points to spouses - with other family units and not with the single person. We can only compare single people with single people.

What I'm driving at here is there's a lot of talk as though we were going to a supermarket. We're looking at all kinds of things here to see what we could do to produce the best Canadian. That's what this is all about, the Utopia of the future; we're going to the supermarket and we're going to get a dozen oranges here, a dozen apples there, and a dozen bananas there and everything else, and we're going to compare one with the other. That's exactly what we're doing here. We can compare the oranges with the apples, but are we really comparing within the group? Are we comparing oranges that are smooth with oranges that are dimpled and oranges that are half green and oranges that are overripe or whatever? I don't think so.

I think we are trying to do something that is just generating a lot of work and a lot of data to fool around with and find life very fascinating in the immigration department, and for anybody else who is critical of the immigration policy of this country.

Maybe we should take a better look at what we have in terms of a human being, the type of person we're bringing in. Maybe the type of person, if we look at that, will give us far more clues and evidence regarding the potential or the attributes that person might have to become a far more tolerant individual in our society, a far more productive individual in our society, and one who can get along with other people and continue to grow and become part of this Utopia we're striving for.

There are personality-type indicators out in the market right now; for instance the Myers-Briggs personality-type indicator, which has been used by a multitude of countries, and thousands of institutions use it every single year. Millions of people are going through this experience and the topography labs are just loaded with data, so much so, for so many years, so that the instrument is practically foolproof.

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I'm just wondering if we could possibly go in that direction to see if we can find the type of people.... First of all, we'd have to define what kind of people we want in our society. Do we want aggressive, hostile, competitive people to cut each other's throat at the drop of a hat, or do we want other kind of people? I think that will be the key issue here.

Will you respond to everything I've said?

Mr. Burstein: I can certainly respond to some of it. I assume when you say Myers-Briggs, you're probably talking tongue in cheek. If you're saying should the Canadian system -

Mr. Dromisky: I use that as an example.

Mr. Burstein: It might be a little hard to apply in Malaysia or in Nigeria. I don't know if they have tried it.

Mr. Dromisky: Japan's using it.

Mr. Burstein: But if you're saying should the Canadian system be concerned with people's values, my answer to that would be yes, it is; it already does that. When you select somebody who has higher education, you're selecting somebody who thinks higher education is important. In a sense, some of these measures are proxies for certain values and aspirations that people have, number one.

Number two, I think that empirically Canada has done to this point quite well by immigration. When you try to identify the type of person, we have certain things...the selection system writ large identifies the types of persons that Canada wants. They're people with education, people with an ability to speak the language, people who have some experience in relevant occupations, people who need protection. That is the expression of what Canada wants in the area of immigration, and the research program tries to support that.

If you want to know, for example, is it important to give points for language or for education and how many points, you can either guess or you can rely on our research. I think research is the better choice.

Mr. Dromisky: I'm interested in the kind of variables you introduced at the beginning. Are we going to go into the area of attitudes, for instance, and try to determine what attitudes people have? To me that's crucial.

Mr. Burstein: We do, actually, and the proposal is to place more emphasis on that in future. The intent is that when the minister comes back and announces the 1996 levels plan - this was a commitment he made before - he will introduce at the same time a new set of selection criteria for choosing independent immigrants and also a new system for managing those flows.

Mr. Dromisky: So you're heading in that direction?

Mr. Burstein: Yes, because it's important in a changing labour market that you pick people who have the skills that allow them to be more flexible, and adaptability and motivation go to the heart of that. Of course, that goes then to the question of how an immigration officer makes that decision, and then we need to figure out a better way to do that too.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: On many occasions, I've asked you if you had figures on the number of Canadians who were leaving the country. How many of them leave each year? What countries do they go to? The minister told me that there was no control over that in Canada, but I heard this morning that some scholar had conducted a research and come to the conclusion that approximately 80,000 people left Canada each year. I ask you once again. Have you studied the matter? What countries are these people choosing and for what reasons? Are there really 80,000 of them or more?

[English]

Mr. Burstein: It would be less. Actually, we depend on Statistics Canada for many of these estimates. I think the figure for 1994 is 44,000, but that really is just an estimate. I was here when you asked that question of Mr. Harder, and unless you have strict exit controls, it's very difficult to come up with any sort of measure.

The way they estimate is based largely on things such as differences they find in the census that they can't account for in terms of births and deaths. There are also techniques based on the fact that people are entitled to claim money in various tax refunds and there are some ways of using those measures of non-collection or collection to refine the estimates, but it's very crude, and I have seen studies that suggest the rate of immigration for immigrants is eight times higher than that for native-born Canadians.

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So there's a fair return migration flow, and it's probably correlated quite closely with those countries from which we take immigrants. Then political conditions you can imagine.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: Do you think many immigrants return to their countries of origin?

[English]

Mr. Burstein: Yes, that's true. I don't think that's all that surprising.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: Native-born Canadians too?

[English]

Mr. Burstein: No, not native-born Canadians. These are people who have... Obviously, there are native-born Canadians who go live abroad, but when you look at who is leaving the country, you find that people who are immigrants are much more likely to return, to move abroad, than people who were born here. The factor I saw was roughly eight, but I think that was used in some estimates in a study I saw by Informetrica and I'm not sure where they got it. I tried to pin this down with Statistics Canada and I couldn't quite get a handle on it, so I don't think we have really good estimates of emigration.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: Do you have any figures on domestic immigration? In Quebec, the retention rate is lower than in the other provinces, and Quebec has to spend a lot of money on integrating new immigrants who later leave for Ontario or British Columbia. Is this problem specific to Quebec, or is it generalized throughout Canada?

[English]

Mr. Burstein: I'll start the answer to that and then I'll ask Craig if he wants to say something else.

I think it's a special issue for Quebec, for two specific reasons. First, Quebec has an explicit demographic policy where it tries to retain its population weight. So any time Quebec selects an immigrant and that immigrant moves to another part of the country, they're further behind than when they started, plus they've wasted money in the selection process. So Quebec has a special interest in retention.

Second, in the rest of Canada if you bring somebody in and you do nothing, sooner or later, by and large, that person will assimilate to English. In Quebec, there is that same risk. The natural drift is not always to French, so Quebec has a special interest in integration, which is again different and has to be more intensively developed.

I'll start with that, and then maybe you could say something about some of the work we've been doing on mobility.

Mr. Craig Dougherty (Research Officer, Economic and Demographic Research and Analysis, Department of Citizenship and Immigration): Sure.

In some of the ongoing work we are doing, we have been finding that the net retention rate, if you'll term it that way, is lower for Quebec. That's not a special case; it's also lower for the prairie provinces, for example. In fact, Ontario and possibly British Columbia are the only two provinces that will really experience a net gain over time of immigrants who land anywhere in Canada.

I don't know if that answers your question. My point is that it's not specific to Quebec, no.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: It is reasonable for Quebec to spend more money than other provinces on immigration, settling and language training.

My next question deals with the regionalization of immigration. This is another very serious problem in Quebec. Most immigrants, almost 90%, are concentrated in the Montreal area. Very few immigrants go to the regions. There have been several studies on this. Have you examined them? How can we solve this problem, because there's also the Charter of Human Rights issue? We cannot force anyone to live in a specific city. How could we solve this problem?

[English]

Mr. Burstein: Actually, I think Quebec has done more research in this area than we have. A couple of days ago we were talking in the context of the project I mentioned before, on the impact of immigration on cities. We were talking with a gentleman from Israel, who was saying to us that Israel, unlike other countries, has a very active policy of dispersion and has been quite successful in dispersing immigrants throughout the country.

.1625

Mr. Nunez: Through the kibbutz?

Mr. Burstein: Maybe through the kibbutz. I'm not sure exactly what the machinery is for doing this, but he thought this was a special expertise that they could bring to any large-scale study.

I'm just going to pick up, not necessarily in sequence, on some of the points you were making.

On the question of our ability to legislate limiting mobility, and the charter, you're right that in the charter mobility is guaranteed. But we do have in the Immigration Act at the moment a provision that would allow us to restrict mobility for a limited period of time, and if we were to actually try to regulate that we would have to provide a section 1 defence in the charter.

My own view is that we could sustain that. It certainly would not address, though, the sort of concern that wishes to affect the overall dispersion. I think if we wanted to provide a lawyer or a doctor to some small town and tried to arrange that in some way, we could possibly employ that sort of regulation.

I think the only answer to the question of how a policy of dispersion can be achieved is to do it by involving the local community in the provision of jobs and in integrating the person into that community. I think that was the conclusion of Quebec as well. You could not do that in any other way.

Mr. Nunez: You mentioned 90% of the immigrant population living in Montreal. Do you have figures for Toronto and Vancouver, for example?

Mr. Burstein: I don't have them right in my head, but my guess would be that in Ontario, I think that Toronto received something like 60% of the flow. I think in the case of Alberta, if you were to count both Calgary and Edmonton, you probably would not be far off. I'm not sure, I don't know. Maybe you know the answer to that.

Mr. Hanger: I believe Toronto gets about 60% of the immigrant flow into Ontario. I'm not sure about Calgary, but I would suggest that the majority by far are going to the two cities.

Mr. Burstein: Yes, right. So maybe you have the same thing in Alberta. I don't know what it's like in British Columbia, but I don't think the Vancouver flow is as concentrated as in the case of Quebec. I don't know why.

The Chairman: Mr. Hanger.

Mr. Hanger: This is a good conversation and I think it's important to get into all of that, but I wanted to quickly ask one other question first, to do with the $975 addition onto the landing fee.

Would there be more government revenue generated by altering the immigrant mix to attract business and independent immigrants or by leaving the mix as it is and charging a large upfront landing fee?

Mr. Burstein: The overall fiscal impact would be more favourable by altering the mix.

Mr. Hanger: Okay. Now, the Immigrant Act requires consultation with the provinces prior to setting any of the immigration levels. The minister has talked about these consultations and seems to be making more of an effort to do this. What has failed in the past with these consultations and what difference in total now is going to take place?

Mr. Burstein: I'm not going to try to answer all of that because while consultations are something I've participated in, they're certainly not my primary area of responsibility. What I can tell you is that the department has put a major effort into consultation over the last couple of years, and if there's any legacy that Mr. Marchi will leave with the department, it's his success on that front. I'm not here really to endorse government policy, but it really has improved.

Mr. Hanger: Let's just forget what he is doing right now. What was the failure of the agreement under the Immigration Act prior to Mr. Marchi's time in office, when it came to the consultations on immigration levels with the provinces?

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Mr. Burstein: I don't think there has been a failure in the past; I just think we're doing it better now.

Mr. Hanger: Okay.

Mr. Burstein: It's not a trick answer.

Mr. Hanger: No, but there have been some major failures in this area, from what I can see and from all the information and data I assume the department would have. Take, for example, the Province of Ontario seeking $110 million more just for health care coverage because it can't meet the need of the immigration levels in the main centre. Obviously there's a failure on the part of negotiations between federal and provincial governments.

Mr. Burstein: Without commenting on that specifically, when Ontario comes to the table they don't come to say ``We have a problem with our health care and we think you should do something about immigration.'' When we consult, we consult on immigration, not on health policy. We leave it up to Ontario to come to us and say these are the consequences that we need to manage.

Mr. Hanger: That is the area the Ontario government came back to Mr. Marchi or the department on, their need to look after health care costs solely in the area of immigration. I'm saying there is a failure here obviously of agreement between the federal government and the provinces if they cannot meet -

Mr. Burstein: We should have done this in camera. Just a little joke.

The Chairman: We can.

Mr. Burstein: No.

Mr. Hanger: Now about the point system. When an evaluation is done on an individual - let's say, for instance, he has a degree in teaching in Lebanon - is he granted points for the degree per se with the view that he has a teaching degree or the equivalent educational background comparison in Canada?

Mr. Burstein: There's actually a shift in emphasis being introduced now into the selection system. Until recently the bulk of the points have been awarded based on a person's intended occupation. Referring to the selection grid, you would receive points based on a specific occupation, you'd receive points based on the skills associated with that occupation, and you'd received points for experience, which again were indirectly associated with that. Roughly one-third of your points would come for the specific occupation in which you intended to work and then separately from that you would receive points for the level of education which you had achieved.

The direction in which we are moving right now is to say that the kind of people we want to select for Canada are people who are going to be able to adapt to changes in the labour market. Nobody should expect to be in the same job for life, not even public servants. Therefore we're putting much more emphasis on language, education and adaptability than on occupation. We still think occupation should play some role. For example, we should not be selecting people for very low-skilled jobs. Canada does not need that kind of labour force, and we'll have adjustment problems of our own that we'll have to deal with.

Let's take the specific example you mentioned, which is somebody who is a teacher somewhere else. What we would look at first is whether or not we would exclude that specific occupation. In the case of a teacher, I don't think we would. We would then say, what is the mix of skills and abilities this person could bring to the Canadian labour market? Do they have the education, etc.? On the basis of that, we would try to develop our selection.

Mr. Hanger: I can see it would be advantageous to move in that direction, but if your level of training is insufficient to meet most standards in any of the provinces here in the country, then to what advantage is it for that individual? He or she will be at a disadvantage still by coming here, because they will not be able to utilize that training they received elsewhere.

Mr. Burstein: I guess I'd give three parts to that answer. One is that I think there is a problem in Canada of accreditation and I think that's an issue we need to deal with. There's really no point in selecting someone with skills and abilities, bringing them here and having them waste their time. That's one part.

The second part is that I think we need to provide people with information if there is going to be an issue around their ability to practice whatever it is they're doing.

.1635

The third part, though, I would argue is that you're not selecting the person because they're a teacher; you're selecting that person because they bring other sorts of skills to bear when they come.

Mr. Hanger: Granted, but if we're going to look at a point system, then the concentration will certainly be on an independent individual. He's going to want to utilize whatever skills he has achieved through his occupation. He will be in no better shape - and I can name hundreds of such people in my own riding.

Mr. Burstein: I can trump you on that. This is where I said research is helpful. We've been basing a lot of our work so far on the database that looks at all immigrants who came in between 1980 and 1988 and their actual tax files over that period of time. We know that selection makes sense. My argument here would be that the person might be disappointed to some extent, but empirically it shows that when you select people based on certain qualities, you, and they, get a return on that.

Mr. Hanger: Through their tax files, you have that data already, then.

Mr. Burstein: Yes.

Mr. Dromisky: First, for my opponent on the other side of the table, the declaration of failure from within the Province of Ontario by the present government is nothing but a political statement being made in desperation for funds they desperately need because they have mismanaged the funds for over four years. I assume that it's because there's a government in that province that doesn't really understand the true economic forces that are at play and the value of a dollar. However, that has nothing to do with immigration.

Is any country in the world using an incentive program to get people to locate in specific geographical areas within the country in order to get some kind of balance in the distribution of immigrants? Has anyone ever tried anything like that?

Mr. Burstein: I don't know of countries that have used those sorts of incentives. There may be, but I don't know of it.

For a while we had a system whereby we offered bonus points to people who would locate in particular regions.

Mr. Dromisky: Did it work?

Mr. Burstein: No, because -

Mr. Dromisky: Because you can't keep them there.

Mr. Burstein: And because what you're trying to gauge is somebody's intent, which is very difficult to gauge.

Mr. Dromisky: That's right.

In my office I have already found three or four cases where people have come to this country but they were given wrong information regarding the kind of job scarcity situation that exists in the country. In other words, the information regarding the types of jobs available was not accurate. The lists are out of date.

I understand that this is a common complaint, and not only here. When I went to Edmonton last week, I discovered the very same complaint there.

Who's responsible for generating those lists?

Mr. Burstein: I don't know that there are lists as such, but Human Resources Development Canada would be responsible for producing labour market information.

It's a pretty tough business. When you look at the actual projections they have, first, they're short term. They are three-, maybe four-, maybe five-year projections, but basically we are talking about three-year projections at a pretty aggregate level.

I don't know if you have children, but I do. Try to give them advice on what they should do in school, which is the same kind of question. You're saying what the future holds and where you should specialize. It's pretty tough to do that.

Mr. Dromisky: I understand that. An invention might take place today that will wipe out 1,000 jobs tomorrow morning. We can appreciate that.

I'd like to get back to the area of your future plans. I'm still interested in the kinds of things you are planning. What are you involved in right now? What is your department doing?

Mr. Burstein: On the research front?

Mr. Dromisky: Yes. What specific goals are you working on right now, what projects?

Mr. Burstein: We're going to table with you next week a report that describes what our current research agenda is. We prepared this last year and we've changed our minds a number of times since then, but it will give you a picture.

Just to draw more people in, I'll ask Claude to talk about some of the things we're doing with our longitudinal database.

.1640

Mr. Claude Langlois (Senior Research Officer, Economic and Demographic Research and Analysis, Department of Citizenship and Immigration): We are doing some work internally on the longitudinal database. Just as a short explanation...we have had Statistics Canada link immigrant visas for the 1980-88 period with immigrant tax records for the same period. It's at Statistics Canada in the form of a very large database that is very expensive to access. We have only recently begun to generate information from that database. One of the documents we will send you is a summary description of the relative performance of the independent and family classes, based on information from that source.

We do not have the resources internally to do all of the research we'd like to see done, so we've contracted out with academics at the Wilfred Laurier University, Queen's University, University of Montreal, University of Saskatoon, for specific research projects dealing with the issues of inter-urban mobility, specifically what makes people move towards Montreal or towards Vancouver or Toronto after they arrive in Canada; also with the issue of economic performance in relation to educational qualifications and experience, unemployment experience of different categories of immigrants, self-employment experience. We have quite a range of information on sources of income.

One of the really interesting parts of this whole research effort is that for the first time we can isolate or distinguish between categories of immigrants, so we can decide very specifically what we are going to treat as independents, whether it's only the principal applicant or it is dependants and spouses as well, family class, refugees, etc. We can break it out by country of origin, knowledge of French or English on arrival, and educational qualifications.

This came on stream only a very short time ago and we are only starting to exploit it as a source of information. It looks as if it will turn into not a panacea but a very valuable source of information on the comparative behaviour of different immigrant groups.

Mr. Dromisky: That would be criminal behaviour or charges laid in court cases.

Mr. Langlois: Not in this source. The information we have here is under privacy constraints at Statistics Canada. The information includes the data recorded about the immigrant at landing - name, date of birth, country of origin, language, gender, education, occupation, etc. - and the information we can pull from the income tax return. No other sources of information are linked into this source at this time. So criminality is not -

Mr. Dromisky: That comes later.

The Chairman: Or in another area.

Mr. Thomas: We have done a study on criminality, and that involved looking at the records of those who were incarcerated federally in Canada. We have determined that immigrants are about half as likely as Canadian-born persons to be incarcerated for serious offences.

The other front we're working on is welfare receipt by immigrants in some of Canada's major cities, specifically Toronto at this point. We've looked at the family-class immigrants, those who have arrived over a ten-year period, so they should still be subject to sponsorship agreements. We've linked the welfare records with our immigration records for a cross-section in December 1993 and another one as of October 1994. We've looked at the proportion of those people who are on welfare. On the order of 14% of those who arrived over the ten-year period were on welfare as of December 1993.

So we know those rates, and we know something about the characteristics of those who are on welfare versus the characteristics of the general flow.

Mr. Dromisky: About the work being done on integration between and among the various ethnic groups, for instance a person of a certain ethnic group in Canada abandoning some of the controls or the some of the mores of the society from which they have left, adopting the Canadian way of life and therefore crossing -

.1645

Mr. Thomas: Falling away from their traditional values...

Mr. Dromisky: - ethnic boundaries and getting involved with a representative from another ethnic group, do we have any kind of information where there are cross-marriages between various religions or ethnic groups?

Mr. Thomas: We have some evidence of that from aggregate statistics and some surveys that have been done in the past. They suggest groups that actually retain some of their traditional values for a longer period of time may be in a better position to avoid some of the negative consequences of the transition. Their strong values tend to keep them out of the criminal system, for example, or out of some of the other systems, such as welfare. There may be some evidence of that.

I don't know whether that helps them achieve Canadian norms or not. We don't have any evidence of that, but there's some suggestion that might be the case. It's difficult to get at just exactly what -

Mr. Dromisky: In our courts we no longer identify the ethnic background of an individual, do we? It's very difficult to determine.

Mr. Thomas: The prison authorities have that information. I don't think the court system collects those kinds of statistics and I don't know if we'd want it to because it's making decisions.

Mr. Dromisky: That's right.

Mr. Thomas: But that information is collected in other places.

The Chairman: I'm going to take some of your time. Let's go back to DeVoretz. I would like you to list the main points where you feel you disagree with him. But before I have you do that, my sense was that by and large there was an endorsement of the current government policy.

Mr. Burstein: I agree with that reading and I'm not throwing it all out. But there are a number of studies I have difficulty understanding, so I don't know whether I want to count them as my friends, even though we come out at the same place. There was the issue I cited before around spouses and bonus points.

I don't agree with the idea, as expressed, that it would be ideal to have 300,000 people, or whatever the number was, for British Columbia and a smaller number for Ontario and we'd average that. I don't buy the analysis on which that's based and I don't buy the argument at all. I actually reject that one completely.

The Chairman: Do you reject that different regions have different needs for different levels of immigration?

Mr. Burstein: Yes. I kind of reject the idea of need per se. It strikes me that the underlying analysis comes out of that paper by Akbari. I wouldn't use that as a basis for deciding immigration levels. I would be critical of the paper itself.

The Chairman: Can you succinctly tell us why? What are the guts of your criticism on that point?

Mr. Burstein: The guts of it are that I think the calculation of net benefit and the gradual decline of net benefit, from which he calculates some kind of diminishing return and eventually decides an optimal policy, is just totally wrong. I can take the time to tell you why I think parts of it are wrong, but I just think it's wrong.

It's wrong if only because when you look at the calculation, you find that everybody - both native-born and immigrant - in those calculations is a net contributor. Yet Canada's running a deficit. To me there's kind of a logical issue here. Second, when he does the computations he leaves out all those special expenditures that go specifically to immigrants. Third, I believe he's using 1990 statistics. The interesting question is what's going to happen to the trend over time?

I also don't think it makes much sense in Canada to have a separate policy for British Columbia or a separate policy for Ontario, because I don't know how you would run that kind of policy. I think by and large immigrants make the right sorts of strategic decisions about where to locate themselves.

.1650

The Chairman: Right.

Mr. Burstein: That goes to the same question Mr. Nunez asked me. Why do they go to Montreal? Because that's where there are jobs, and they figure it out. That's where their relatives are and that's where they like to live.

I think that emphasis on multipliers is totally off. The idea of a multiplier is that you bring in one person and they bring in x number afterwards. Back in the 1970s the department was riveted by that kind of question, because the idea was you didn't have much control over your policy if you brought in one person and then they did all the follow-on selection.

I think all of the studies in the past concluded that multipliers are very unstable. A lot of immigration is driven by what takes place abroad. Political events may suddenly cause people to make applications and rush you when they want to avoid something. Part one, you can't look at a particular country over time and say the multiplier is stable.

Part two, the multipliers in the study don't accord with any of the earlier work that has been done. I can't quite follow the way it was done, but just eyeballing the statistics, if you look at India, for example, you find that a very small number of independents leads to an absolutely enormous number of follow-on family class. I cannot see how that's consistent with the multiplier. When you look at the ratios of independents to family and what the multipliers are, I just don't think that would work.

My real criticism would be that it's irrelevant because in the latest act there is the ability to decide, first of all, what any class should be and then whether or not you want to put a limit on it. If you felt there was a runaway in any particular class, you could cap it.

A much more interesting question is the one I mentioned before. What is the qualitative link? If I choose you because you have a university education, what are the odds that your wife has a university education? If there is that kind of link, then you have a policy that says there is a follow-on return from a policy of selection, and that's important.

The Chairman: His point would be that if you want to attract me, Mr. Successful Businessman from wherever, if you knew I would want to sponsor three or four years down the road, on average, one grandparent or one spouse, then you would set that up in your -

Mr. Burstein: I think that's empirically wrong; that's nonsense. The argument here, in a nutshell, is that the only way I'm going to get the people I want is if I allow them to bring their families. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's supported when you look at the intake abroad.

The Chairman: I think he said directly that we are more attractive to economic immigrants because of the family class.

Mr. Burstein: I think that may be true with the margin, but I don't think it's true in the sense he intends it. His argument is that a smart economic policy is to allow people to sponsor because otherwise you can't get the ones you really want. I would contest that. A smart economic policy - and I'm putting the emphasis here on the words ``economic policy'' - would be to select as many as you possibly can and have as few of the follow-on as possible. That would be the smart economic policy.

Then the question is, can you -

The Chairman: Can I interject for a second? We also have to make ourselves attractive to the ones we're selecting.

Mr. Burstein: We are. They're coming. I don't believe we can't figure out a way to attract them.

The Chairman: His point was that family class and family reunification are part of being attractive.

Mr. Burstein: But that's a straight-out assertion. He has no empirical basis for that. I'm arguing that in our experience that's not true.

The Chairman: He has anecdotal evidence.

Mr. Burstein: I would argue that ours is more powerful. There is no basis for that. When we've shifted dependency, we have not had a falling off in interest; for example, when we shifted some of the ability of people to sponsor their relatives. At one time you were able to bring your never-married children with you. That has had no impact. The end of that policy did not impact on our ability to bring in independents.

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The Chairman: I want to go back to DeVoretz, but is there an economic justification for family classes?

Mr. Burstein: An economic justification? That's different from the question of whether they create economic value.

The Chairman: Is it?

Mr. Burstein: My answer is no. You don't have a family movement because it's an economic policy; you do it because you want to create a society where you place a value on family. How can you have that as a value without at the same time saying to people who come here that they're allowed to bring members of their family? It's simply inconsistent. It's not an economic strategy.

The Chairman: I have the picture. We can't justify it. So as for the people who are criticizing the family class and that part of our policy on economic basis, we can say to them that there are some economic benefits but -

Mr. Burstein: Yes. There may even be a positive return, but I'm saying that the return is not as great as it is when you select an individual. The studies Claude was alluding to show that the average income for somebody you select is two and a half times higher. The suggestion would be that their tax contribution would be even greater, given the kind of system we run. You can follow it through from there.

The Chairman: I can. I don't want to beat a dead horse, but at one place he's named some fellow who presumably is really rich and who suggested that one of the reasons he came here as opposed to Los Angeles was that he could bring his parents.

Mr. Burstein: And he may be right on that, but across the board I don't buy that as an economic strategy.

It may be a good strategy for all kinds of other reasons - just like refugee policy is a good strategy for all kinds of reasons - but it is not for the economic reasons. Immigration is not just about the economy. I don't think we should try to hang all of immigration policy on what it does for the Canadian economy, because it just won't work.

The Chairman: I understand that, but I think Canadians, at least coming out of the last recession, wanted to know that it's a cornerstone. It might not be the whole wall, but at least it's the whole building that we put our policy in. But it's economics -

Mr. Burstein: I think family immigration is important, but when I think of family immigration I don't think we're doing it to make the host population better off economically. It may happen, but if maximizing economic returns were your objective, you would not have a family class or a refugee class.

I don't think I'm saying anything that's contentious there. I think I'm saying something that's self-evident.

The Chairman: Okay. What else? I didn't want to break off the trend of critiquing DeVoretz.

Mr. Burstein: I don't want to go too far here, because I know him and I actually like him. I don't want him to read the record and think I'm dumping all over everything he's done.

The Chairman: Well, what do you like? Why don't we -

Mr. Burstein: I've made a good start on it, haven't I?

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

The Chairman: What do you think are the strengths of his -

Mr. Burstein: I think he's hit on the right kinds of issues in a broad way and I think the general direction in which his conclusions run are correct. I support that.

Probably whenever you pick any economist or any academic, you'll find that there are lots of things they want to talk about. They'll spend more time fighting than they will agreeing.

I do think most of the work comes out in the right direction.

The Chairman: If you had to pick one or two points where he's dead-on with points that you really strongly support, does anything come to mind?

Mr. Burstein: The part I would focus on is the support for the overall kind of rebalancing of the immigration movement. I think that's good advice.

The Chairman: How do we pick the levels, whether it's 240 or 220 or 190 or 150? I know politics come into it to some degree.

Mr. Burstein: Again, this is a question better asked of my policy colleagues than of me.

It's basically an amalgam. In part it's based simply on straight-out projections. For example, if you're looking at the number of refugee claimants Canada will land, that's not something Canada decides except in the large sense.

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Certainly, when it comes to the family class, under the existing set of policies that's entirely a projected volume. People have certain entitlements. They exercise those entitlements and they come to Canada.

Where the department does exercise much tighter control is in the areas of government-sponsored refugees, of independents and of the business program. To tell you I can do that with some precision here.... It's more a general view of how successful the policy has been, whether we're achieving the mix we've set out for ourselves, and where we need to make adjustments. It's really no more sophisticated than that.

The Chairman: I understand the mix, but I'd have a tough time going back to St. Thomas and explaining 230 instead of 130 to somebody.

Mr. Burstein: I think the way to explain 230 instead of 130 would be to try to explain what you would have to do in order to achieve 130. When you begin to cut away the components you begin to see why a policy like that either makes sense or doesn't make sense.

If you wanted to achieve 130 tomorrow, you would be left cutting out probably all the independents and cutting out all refugees. You'd probably have to bring in legislation to restrict the number of family members who could come. That's how you would achieve 130. If you want to achieve 130 over the slightly longer term, you would do what was done in 1982, which was to cut out all independents. After a while you end up with a movement that is mostly family.

The Chairman: Couldn't I do a bit of both?

Mr. Burstein: Or you could do a bit of both and -

The Chairman: This person in St. Thomas would say yes, okay, so it's complicated and it'll take some time, but why not do it? The Reform Party members aren't here, but they said we should have 150 -

Mr. Burstein: Wasn't their number 170? It was actually quite a modest reduction that -

The Chairman: During the campaign it was 150 and ours was 1% of the population. I heard lots of screaming about their racist policy and our moral policy, but I never heard any real good, hard, solid debate as to why 150 doesn't make sense.

Mr. Burstein: Again, what do you have to do in order to achieve it? What are the issues that surround the present mix? I think you want to position your immigration intake around whether you judge the current set of policies to be successful. Are you meeting refugee needs? Are you meeting the expectations of people who are here and who want to sponsor their families? Are the economic immigrants you're bringing in finding jobs?

If you look at what the Economic Council did, that's pretty well the approach they took. They asked if there were difficulties being produced by the current intake. If difficulties weren't being produced, they suggested that set of policies should continue.

[Translation]

Mr. Nunez: Before asking my last question, I would like to say that I'm not satisfied with the co-operation of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, as far as I am concerned. I already said so to the minister when I was appointed critic for my party. He brought together all party critics and offered us his co-operation. I, for one, am quite frustrated. I would like you to provide me with the list of your publications. How can we have access to such documents, to your work, to your working plans?

I would like to get all this information, but often, I ask for certain things in this committee and there is no follow-up. We do not get any answer. I sometimes feel that lawyers or organizations who defend immigrants or refugee groups have more easily access to the department that we, MPs, do.

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I find this very frustrating. When I ask questions, I feel that officials do not want us to be fully informed. I am not referring to you, but it happened when the deputy minister appeared a few days ago, and I want to say it for the record. That was my preamble.

Have you made any studies or done any research on the countries where in the next century future immigrants will be coming from? Will the Asian continent still be the main contributor? What are your projections? Have you carried out any research on Latin America, which is one of the main pools of immigration for the United States? What are the main countries of origin of immigrants to Canada?

[English]

The Chairman: Do you want a response to the first half of your question?

Mr. Nunez: I don't know if he's available or ready to answer because it's almost a political question. Could you answer?

Mr. Burstein: It's our intention to provide you with a listing of all the research studies that we have under way. The reason we're here with so many people is that we want to make ourselves accessible to you. All of us here believe research is important. Research isn't something you draw a circle around; it's something you disseminate. It's our intent to display to you as much of the research we do as possible. Our specific difficulty is that we didn't have the document we wanted to provide to you available in French. We have to get some parts edited and translated, but it will be available to you this week.

Mr. Nunez: That was already mentioned to me, but nobody from your department spoke one word of French during the two meetings we've had with you. You are federal employees, not provincial employees from Ontario or from British Columbia.

Mr. Burstein: We have the capacity within the group to speak French, and sometimes I even try to do it myself, but in the interests of precision - and I want to precise here - I thought I'd speak in English.

Your second question was the question of where people will come from. I think if you want to know where people will come from over the next five years, the best thing to do is to just look at where people are coming from right now. Sponsorship is by and large the best determinant. Even when it comes to independents, the interest is driven by a set of factors that probably won't change in the near term. It might change in Hong Kong in less than five years, but for the rest of the world it won't. So that's probably the first part of the answer.

In terms of the pressures for migration, they will be in Asia, North Africa, Latin America - I'm less certain about eastern Europe. We actually tried one time to do a study looking at likely migration pressures. I wasn't convinced in the end that it was a good expenditure of money because it was much too speculative. In the end, you could do almost as well reading The Economist as you could by getting a bunch of experts in the room and having them tell you what they thought. It's pretty obvious.

Where people will come from over the longer term also depends on the policy set of the department, and that's not so much a passive prediction as it is a set of decisions. For example, if you decide that you're not going to have as much of a family class, you're going to reduce the proportion of people who come from Asia and who come from the Caribbean. So in a way, there's really no good answer to your question because it's not just something you can project, it's something determined by policy.

The Chairman: On this point, I'm wondering if it would make sense to give us a couple of pages on the ones we're looking at in terms of critiquing the chapter. I'm also wondering whether you'd be interested.... I think Dr. DeVoretz would be interested in seeing your critique and in entering into some kind of.... Is that of any use to you?

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Mr. Burstein: I need to be guided here. I don't know what the protocol is for people coming to a committee and then engaging in work for that committee. I'll have to go back to my department to ask if this is the sort of thing they normally do. I don't know the answer to this.

The Chairman: It depends on how we phrase it. If I ask you a question and ask you to give me a written response on it, that's normal. So I'm trying to not make it work per se because I don't want you to commit scarce resources.

Mr. Burstein: If that's what you would like, and if the committee rules are that we provide written responses on these studies, then we'll do so. We'll address each one separately.

I'm not sure we would be the best people to do the assessment in some cases. In some cases it might be better to get an assessment done by some of the peers of these people. We are expert in some areas but not in all areas. There's a difference between my coming here and testifying and your having me and my group put down on paper a detailed critique of some of these studies. So I'll be guided by what you want on this.

The Chairman: I guess I don't want to put you up to a lot of work, but if you can, for example, say -

Mr. Burstein: Can I make a suggestion?

The Chairman: Sure.

Mr. Burstein: At the front of the book Diminishing Returns, Dr. DeVoretz has an overall summary. He draws on various studies contained in the book and he comes to some policy conclusions around them. If you want, what we could do is respond to that opening chapter and indicate where we think his policy directions differ from those that are currently in play, what we think of the empirical evidence supporting them, and why we think there may be a different way of looking at it.

The Chairman: Okay, we'll do that.

In the little bit of time we have left, in terms of the ones we're looking at - and you're going to have to help me here - there is ``The Impact of Immigrants on Canada's Treasury, circa 1990''. Do you know offhand whether you would endorse that in terms of conclusions and analysis?

Mr. Burstein: I would not.

The Chairman: You would not endorse it or you don't know offhand?

Mr. Burstein: No, I would not endorse it.

The Chairman: Both in conclusions and analysis?

Mr. Burstein: Yes, except in a very general way and in terms of his very general direction, whereby he's saying returns are diminishing.

The Chairman: Yes.

Mr. Burstein: On that conclusion, I would support the method. I think most economists who've looked at it have agreed with it, although not always by using the same methods.

The Chairman: But you don't think the work in and of itself is particularly valid?

Mr. Burstein: Right. And I don't think the way in which it's used to support a particular set of policy arguments makes sense.

The Chairman: Can you summarize?

Mr. Burstein: Yes. This was the point I made before about the 300,000 in British Columbia versus the 200,000 in Ontario, and about the averaging. I just can't understand why. I don't think that's right.

The Chairman: Okay. Do you have an opinion on ``Canadian Immigration Earnings, 1971-86'', by Sheila Fagnan, in terms of content, conclusions and methodology?

Mr. Dougherty: I would say very generally that I would support the conclusions of the paper.

The Chairman: And the methodology?

Mr. Dougherty: And the methodology, but only to an extent. I'd have to qualify in my opinion.

I feel that some of the specifics leave something to be desired in the final analysis. I'll use her measurement of language as an example. I don't think it's very informative in this type of a realm. The measurement she might get on language's impact on earnings, being less than adequate, would not represent language's true impact on earning. So that's what I mean by qualifying my opinion.

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Mr. Burstein: I would make a second point related to that. She basically looks at performance over two points in time.

Mr. Dougherty: She does, yes.

Mr. Burstein: When you have two points, there are lots of different ways you can connect them up. You can do this, you can do this, or you can do this. We want to know the right way to connect them up. It leaves some policy questions unanswered, and they're important policy questions.

Mr. Dougherty: Yes, it certainly does.

I would just add one other thing to that because of the two points in time. I think the study would have been much better served had a finer definition of cohorts been adopted rather than just ones pre-1976 or 1971, I believe, and then between 1971 and 1986. They're very broad groupings. I just think it would have been more informative and much more interesting had finer definitions of cohorts been adopted.

The Chairman: My sense is that if I were to ask you to spend fifteen or twenty minutes typing - I don't know if you dictate or if civil servants all type these days - out your rough comments, it would be useful. It would not be a waste of your resources, or at least not an overbearing use of your resources. I don't want to send you off on a task on which you're going to spend hours and hours, bringing in other people because you think we're looking.... Am I clear on that?

Mr. Burstein: Yes.

The Chairman: ``Immigration and Unemployment: a Canadian Macroeconomic Perspective and Unemployment'' is the next one. Do you have a comment on whether it's...? That's the Bill Marr and Pierre Siklos piece.

Mr. Dougherty: Again, Meyer, I'll comment if you don't mind.

I look very favourably on this study. I think it was done very well. It brings to us a different point of view than is traditionally adopted in a lot of immigration research, and what I mean by that specifically is this.

A lot of immigration research attempts to calculate the effect of immigration on the immigrants themselves, whereas when you are looking at the impact of immigration on unemployment, you're really looking at the impact on Canada. So in a way we're putting it into a possibly more relevant realm as far as what we want to deal with is concerned. I think that is just a great point of the paper. I think the methods and the conclusions are very strong.

The Chairman: Okay.

Mr. Dougherty: I mean that very broadly.

The Chairman: So you'd give it an A -

Mr. Dougherty: I would, yes.

The Chairman: - Akbari an F -

Mr. Nunez: Do you have the same opinions?

The Chairman: - and Fagnan a C, I guess.

A voice: Which one?

The Chairman: Was it ``Canadian Immigration Earnings''? What was the other one?

A voice: [Inaudible - Editor]

The Chairman: It's somewhere in the middle.

A voice: Yes.

The Chairman: Thanks very much.

Mr. Burstein: So we'll come back to you with what amounts to an estimate of when we can respond to all this in writing.

The Chairman: Yes, but if it's going to take too long, then I think there's been a misunderstanding.

Mr. Burstein: It won't take too long.

The Chairman: Okay. Do you mind if we send that to Dr. DeVoretz?

Mr. Burstein: No, not at all. We'll send it to him ourselves, as a matter of fact.

The Chairman: All right. Thanks very much.

Mr. Burstein: Thank you.

The Chairman: The meeting is adjourned.