Alberta`s immigration deal model for country

Comments

Alberta's immigration deal model for country

By Licia Corbella / London Free Press

 If there's one file the feds have botched for decades, it's immigration.

Hard-working people from around the world with bankable skills spend years grinding their way through the legitimate channels of our backlogged, bureaucratic, bungling immigration system.

And for every legitimate immigrant trying to get in the blocked and costly front door, hundreds more make their way through the back door as refugees.

Many are perfectly legitimate refugees, fleeing oppression and potential death from dictatorial regimes or tribal warfare.

Others, however, use Canada's refugee system as a way to bypass the slow, costly, legitimate channels of entering this country. There are agencies around the globe that charge wannabe Canadians a fee for tips on how to enter as a refugee to beat the system.

For a country that has built itself on immigration, we sure are doing a lousy job of attracting and expediting the entry of those immigrants we need most and who will be of most benefit to this country. It really isn't rocket science.

What should be happening -- but isn't -- is if one area of the country needs bricklayers, the government should go through the files, find the best-qualified bricklayers and expedite their files.

The same goes for engineers, carpenters, butchers, bakers, hairstylists and candlestick makers. Whatever.

And that's exactly what Alberta is proposing to do.

Next week, it's expected that Alberta's Conservative government, along with the federal Tories, will announce a new immigration arrangement between the province and the feds that will essentially have Alberta take over its file.

It's not, apparently, going to be as good a deal as what Quebec has (no surprise there), but it's better than the current situation of incompetence and glacial movement of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.

This idea, oddly enough, is one of the planks in the infamous "Alberta firewall" agenda co-authored by now-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and now-Alberta MLA Ted Morton. Critics tried to make it sound really scary.

Here's a guess: In a couple of years, the rest of the country is going to follow Alberta's lead and this country will be better off for it.