The new Canadian immigration law & regulations: an old mare with a new saddle.

• Author: Wong, Lawrence
• Position: Feature on Immigration Law

It may be fitting that this article begins with a cliche since the new Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) and Regulations (IRPR) merely serve to recycle traditional concepts of immigration, with a new spin. This is unfortunate because since the enactment of the former Immigration Act and Regulations in 1985, the world has changed considerably. The immigrant's realities and needs have changed and he/she has more choices. But the central thinking of Canadian immigration policy, which is to attract immigrants to come here to contribute, has not. Instead, what has been changed as reflected in IRPA and IRPR is the shifting of control of our immigration policies to senior bureaucrats rather than our elected representatives in Parliament. IRPA introduces framework legislation, which in essence amounts to turning the governing law into a framework or outline of what the law should be and leaving the details to be filled in by the accompanying regulations. For instance the accompanying Regulations of IRPA consist of 365 sections while under the former regulations there were only 56 sections.

The framers of the IRPA and IRPR may disagree. No doubt they believe they have something groundbreaking to offer in policy issues as well. In the Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement (Canada Gazette, Part II vol. 136, Extra No.9, 14th of June 2002), they have this to say:

"The Federal Skilled Worker selection model is designed to identify economic immigrants who will be able to provide a significant economic benefit to Canada. This is not to imply that economic immigrants do not also provide important social benefits to Canada but the primary goal of their selection should be their positive economic impact. Not only is this beneficial to Canada, but to the immigrant as well. Prior to 1988, economic immigrants consistently averaged higher employment earnings than the general Canadian population, even as early as one year after they arrived in Canada..." "It is now taking university-educated immigrants up to 10 years to reach the employment earnings of comparably educated Canadians While there are, no doubt, many factors responsible for this trend, the present outdated and unresponsive selection system has played an important role." The complaint about recent immigrants is that their income earning capacity is significantly lower when compared with those who came to Canada 20 years ago. The Immigration Department seems to believe that the main...