By Nicole HunT
Canada has long been hailed as a land of opportunity, a bastion of hope for those seeking to make better lives for themselves and their families. There is a belief, widely held among prospective immigrants and Canadian society, that just about anyone can come to Canada, find a good job, and raise a happy, healthy family.
This is a myth.
In Ontario, where nearly half of the 250,000 immigrants who come to Canada each year will settle, more than 36 per cent of new immigrants will find themselves below the poverty line within the first year of arrival. In 1980, this number was closer to 24 per cent.
What’s more, according to the Ontario Hunger Report of 2007, released earlier this month by the Ontario Association of Food Banks (OAFB), new immigrants make up nearly one third of the 320,000 Ontarians who are forced to use food banks to feed their families each month.
Why are so many of Canada’s immigrants going hungry? Ontario is failing them. And the number of immigrants using food banks is indicative of a much bigger problem.
According to Adam Spence, executive director of the OAFB, new immigrants have difficulty in finding high quality employment and end up working in low-wage jobs.
This would not come as a surprise if immigrants to Ontario were uneducated, untrained and unable to work. But this is not the case.
The federal and provincial governments are actively recruiting skilled immigrants. In fact, 78 per cent of new immigrants are considered skilled workers. They
have post-secondary education, training or experience. In spite of this, a 2004 Statistics Canada report noted that 60 per cent of immigrants “are forced to make a downwardly mobile shift into a career, or job, other than the one they were qualified for.”
Despite repeated promises from all levels of government, and from all parties, an Ontario or Canada-wide institution to assess foreign credentials has never materialized. As a result, thousands of educated and trained immigrants are being forced to work minimum-wage jobs or are left unemployed even though their credentials are one of the reasons they were accepted into Canada in the first place.
Those immigrants who can find work or qualify for social assistance are likely to be spending more than half of their monthly income on housing, as are many other Ontarians. According to the Ontario Hunger Report, energy costs are forcing many households to choose between “heat or eat” as low-income households contribute 14 per cent of their income to energy bills.
After meeting these most basic expenses, many people simply do not have any money left to buy food. Though food bank use has decreased slightly in the last two years, the overall five-year trend is one of sharp increase. The fact that hunger is increasing at a rate disproportionate to the population increase simply means that not enough is being done to address the contributing factor.
This is not to say the government has done nothing. Just that it has not done enough. The 2007 Ontario budget promises $392 million towards affordable housing. This is a good first step, but in the months it will take to implement the program, hundreds of thousands of Ontarians will continue to choose between paying rent and feeding their children.
Likewise, the $2.1 billion Ontario Child Benefit program is a positive move forward, but it is not a poverty reduction plan that applies to or helps all Ontarians.
And while the provincial government is currently referring new immigrants to agencies to have their credentials assessed, the process is expensive, leading many people to accept any job that comes their way in the meantime, regardless of pay or field. They need to work on implementing a province-wide, streamlined system for credential recognition to put our skilled immigrants into the jobs they were trained for.
Overall, they need to actually address the root causes of poverty and hunger instead of relying on band-aid solutions such as food banks, which are, after all, meant to be emergency services and not monthly necessities.
True, this sounds too idealistic, but in the end, a provincial poverty reduction plan – one that is attainable and actually implemented – is in the best interest of the government, the economy and, most of all, the people of Ontario.