Canadian immigrants are overqualified and underemployed — reforms must address this.
Canadian immigrants are overqualified and underemployed — reforms must address this
How many doctors and surgeons are going to waste in the midst of a Canadian health-care crisis?
Also in AB - I once worked with a general surgeon, a fucking surgeon(!), who could only get work as kitchen staff at a hotel. …or a taxi driver, but he hated that.
Also, a high-school teacher, and an electrician (3 phase qualified …or something like that?).
One was a bus-boy.
How many doctors and surgeons are going to waste in the midst of a Canadian health-care crisis?
The health-care crisis is at least partially intentional. Here in Ontario, Doug Ford wants to introduce a two-tiered system where people with money can pay for enhanced services. He promised to end hallway healthcare before he was elected the first time.
He's had almost 8 years to do something and it's only gotten worse. He could've fixed so many things if he'd wanted to. He doesn't want to.
He refused federal funding years ago when it came with a clause that all the money had to go to public health care until Ontarians found out about this and he backed down and accepted the funding (something like 200 million I think), only to cut Ontario spending on public healthcare and redirect it to private hospitals a few years later.
Ford is Ontario's greatest salesman ever, selling off the province one sector at a time to his oligarchic buddies, even all the while the courts get inundated with lawsuits due to the laws and contracts he signs. Hell, I think the greenbelt lawsuit is set to start a week after the provincial election. Why do you think he called it when it did?
I know a cardiovascular tech who is a pediatric cardiologist in Pakistan. He feels lucky to have this job even though it's a waste of his talents, and worked as a security guard when he got here. I also know a psychiatrist from South Africa who was forced to work as a GP for five years in rural Nova Scotia before being able to practice in his field, a German psychiatrist who had to redo five years of residency, a Bolivian neurologist who became a PA and is redoing his residency, and my own GP was a respirologist in Croatia and had to go back through medical school to work here. It's a waste of much needed talent, and while there are certainly educational differences, surely we could create bridging programs for these doctors to get them up to our skill requirements and fast track them. Instead we continue to import people to work at Tim Hortons or simply not at all, in a housing crunch. It's a huge waste. International doctors often are the only ones who work in subspecialist clinics, because some specialities are not very well paid if you are Canadian and went to school here, so we really do need them.
The other problem nobody is addressing is how the Saudi government buys their doctors positions here and gives them large pensions for it, and they're sometimes not very qualified, and I've had some male residents who REALLY hate women because they're conservative Muslims and don't think they should have to work with us. The Saudi government will also demand their doctors come back whenever they want by taking away their pensions, and make them come back and work in hospitals there. They also will stop Saudi women from going to medical school here. I don't know how much money they hand our health care system, but it's hugely problematic and unethical.
This is a problem we've had for something like 20 years. It's not the fault of any one leader, but pretty much all of them for decades. I remember reading an article about immigrant doctors working as taxi drivers in the early 2000s, yet things have only gotten worse.
While I do think that there are issues that a certification gained in one country does not equate to one in another, if we're working so hard to bring in such professionals, we should also set up systems to update their certifications to local standards. It makes no sense for a doctor to work a decade doing minimum wage when they could go through a six month recertification course then work at a local hospital instead.
Maybe it's not that easy, but it makes no sense that such a thing is happening when we've had a shortage in such fields for decades. And it's not like money is an issue. These people working high paying jobs would increase the government's tax revenue by a massive margin, and such recertification wouldn't even risk they emigrating out since the new certifications would only be good in Canada in the first place.
Yeah, the cab driver that picked me up from the airport was some sort of agricultural engineer in India, his specialization was water management systems integrated to flow/volume/ scheduling software and logic circuits. To get the most growth for least amount of water.
There should be equivalency testing.
And based off of my Indian friends comments, there should be a verification system...because they say many things in India are bought with bribery, which can include fake accreditation papers.
Canada, the land of inopportunity.
Yeah, structural issues like "there's only so many jobs"
Good paying*
There is never a shortage of shit shovel
Happened to one my mom's husbands. Dude was a electrical engineer and was working the froze fish scene because his degree meant nothing
And the sad reality is that there is an international accreditation board and their schools don't meet that standard.
It is the fault of their home countries that their schools don't meet that standard.
We cannot and should never compromise high standards of education.
I don't disagree that we shouldn't compromise our standards, but a school based accreditation process doesn't allow for any sort of individual appeals process. (ie. Doctor "a", who is really talented, gets universally shafted because he comes from a school that was deemed "unfit", even though he himself could blow any of our accreditation tests out of the water)
Let the specialists come here and fast track an accreditation instead of saying "sorry...you school sucked, welcome to Tim Hortons."
These two things are generally unrelated. Higher education institutions around the world don't have many incentives to get these accreditation stamps in the first place, and it's mostly bureaucracy, nothing to do with the actual standards of these institutions. My engineering degree was much, MUCH harder to get than it it would have been in Canada. The bar to graduate at my uni is way higher than the average university here - but in the end it's a pile of paperwork that no one cares to make it easier.
A friend of mine is finishing his 3 year journey towards his P Eng and it's insane to think that the quality of his education has anything to do with this, it's one of the best engineering schools of the continent.