MUST READ, FOR DOCTORS.
These are significant steps forward to ensuring processes are fair, consistent, transparent and above all timely. As I mentioned, Canada’s Economic Action Plan invested $50 million in order to continue our work with the provinces on this new approach. We’re doing a lot of other interesting programs. I’ll just give you one example.
In Edmonton I met a medical doctor trained in Syria, an obstetrician. She was trained there, delivered hundreds of babies, moved to Canada with a dream of becoming a practicing physician here and has instead been cleaning hotel rooms for the past six years. That’s the human tragedy of this. The woman was in tears when she explained to me her sense of humiliation and struggle and disappointment.
In a sense there’s too many people like that to whom we sell the dream of working in their profession in Canada implicitly through our immigration process but for whom the dream has turned out to be a disappointment. We must do what we can to open up the doors of opportunity for women and men like that.
I met her in the context of a program we were launching in Edmonton to give foreign trained physicians like her who had for various reasons been unable to obtain their licensing through the medical college, the physicians’ college, training on how to become paramedics in Canada. We took a group of 40 foreign trained physicians there in Edmonton, training them on the technical aspects of working as a paramedic in Canada so they could at least get their foot into the labour market in the medical profession, develop some Canadian work experience, learn some of the different Canadian specific aspects of patient care, and also have the emotional and professional satisfaction of at least working with patients.
We are funding and piloting programs like that right across the spectrum of regulated professions. Having said that, Canadians certainly don’t want us to lower Canadian standards. They don’t want people who aren’t up to the Canadian standard as engineers building our bridges. They don’t want people operating on us who aren’t properly trained surgeons.
We can’t ask the licensing bodies to reduce their requirements and that’s not what this is about. It’s about having a streamlined and reasonably quick process for credential recognition. If their qualifications don’t measure up to Canadian standards, at least we can tell them how much additional training they might need or if they might want to look into work in a similar field where they still might be able to apply their skills and experience.
