By Chris Maughan
Maunir Louis spends 12 hours a day at the wheel of his taxi.
It’s difficult and demanding work: he has chronic back problems, but can’t afford to take enough time off to get the rest he needs.
He spends more time talking to his wife on his cell phone than in person. To get through the day, he thinks of his three kids.
Getting through a 12-hour workday is tough on anyone. But it’s especially hard for Louis, who, for seven years, worked as a civil engineer in Syria.
He has a degree from al-Baas University and almost a decade of experience under his belt, and he still describes engineering as his dream job.
Like so many professionally trained immigrants in Canada, Louis has found it impossible to find work in his field. He has been here since 1991.
Louis says he had reasonable expectations when he arrived. “I knew I wouldn’t find work right away,” he says in French. So, he made sure to arrive with enough money to sustain him for a while. He passed all the required accreditation courses, and practiced his English, which is almost fluent.
Over the next two years, he sent out more resumes than he can remember, but found no work. Employers told him that his seven years in Syria only counted as a year of Canadian experience, and that he needed one more year to be fully accredited.
To support his wife and seven-month-old boy, Louis took any job he could while trying to find an engineering firm that would let him get that last year of experience.
He worked as a gas attendant, a baker, a delivery man, and a construction worker. But he never got the chance to prove himself as an engineer.
When his daughter was born, Louis found he couldn’t support his family earning such low wages. So he started driving a cab. “At that point,” he says, “I lost all hope and stopped looking.”
Yohanna Kimoun Ntienjem worked in France for 10 years as a specialized pharmacist in hospitals and pharmacies. So when she decided to immigrate to Canada in 2000 with her family, she says Canadian immigration officials were excited.
“They told me I have a great experience,” Kimoun Ntienjem says in English. “(They told me) that I was just the type of health professional Canada needed.”
Kimoun Ntienjem says she was told it would take her only three months to get a job as a pharmacist in Canada.
But while studying English, Kimoun Ntienjem found out the study and exam schedule to become accredited as a pharmacist in Canada would take her up to three years to complete.
The mother of four young children says she studies as much as 10 hours a day to prepare for each test. She admits the schedule is hard and affects her family.
“Some days I have to leave while (my children) are still in bed and come (home when) they’re already in bed.”
After passing the PEBC exams, Kimoun Ntienjem will need to be accredited by the Ontario College of Pharmacists, the provincial licensing authority. She says she hopes to be a full pharmacist in a year.
“I believe in myself. I trust myself. I’ve found my way every time, even though I’ve struggled,” she says.
Awad Loubani knows just how hard this struggle can be, but his years of perseverance paid off. Loubani works in risk management for the federal Department of Public Works and is a prominent community leader in Ottawa. He had almost finished his master’s degree in commerce at the American University in Beirut when, in the late 1980s, the Lebanese civil war forced him to move to Canada.
Like Louis, Loubani soon found that he couldn’t get his university degree recognized here. He says there was such a stigma against him that in many cases, employers told him they didn’t even have time to check his references. Fortunately, he had enough money to apply to the University of Calgary. A friend on the selection board who had also struggled with the immigration process helped him get a full scholarship. Once he had a Canadian degree, Loubani was no longer stigmatized.
“I was successful because someone in the community believed in another immigrant and gave me a chance,” he says.
Loubani calls on all Canadians to stop tolerating what he calls a hypocritical recruitment system. “We can’t say we believe in people only to turn our backs on them once they get here.”
Louis has certainly had people turn their backs on him. But he says it doesn’t matter because he has three beautiful children.
“It may be too late for me to make my mark,” he says, “but my kids have a bright future. My son’s a whiz in school. Someday, he’ll be something great.”
With files from Niall McKenna