Tuesday, November 25, 2003


Ottawa tracks immigrants' bad languageFluency in english, french key to jobs. One-on-one interviews by Statistics Canada aim to get more accurate evaluation of skills than traditional census self-assessments


Immigrants may think they converse in English or French better than they really do, and that may hinder their job search. So Ottawa is studying how strong or weak immigrants' language skills are, a senior federal immigration official said yesterday.\"We need to be able to objectively assess how well these people actually converse.

Right now we can't, because we're relying on (immigrants') self-assessment,\" said Elizabeth Ruddick, director of research at Citizenship and Immigration Canada.When they describe their knowledge of one of Canada's official languages to census-takers and in official documentation, \"people will err on the positive side, especially when they're applying for citizenship,\" Ruddick said in an interview yesterday at an international conference on ethnic diversity.

On the job market, \"they may find they're disappointed, because they can't converse like they expected.\"Unemployment is a growing problem in Canada's immigrant communities, even for foreign-trained professionals, who are often frustrated in their hopes of applying their skills in the workplace here.Over the last decade, the earnings of immigrants have been trending downward, just like those of college graduates, and there has been a \"declining return on foreign (job) experience,\" Ruddick said.One reason might be that immigrants' language skills simply aren't up to snuff, Ruddick said.

A person may be able to hold a simple conversation but isn't fluent in the specialized language of his or her trade, she said.To get a clear picture, Statistics Canada has started a special survey of more than 1,000 immigrants to assess how comfortable they are in either of Canada's official languages, Ruddick said.The results of the one-on-one interviews are to be released next fall.

As well, Ruddick's department has started testing immigrants as they apply for citizenship - 1,000 in Toronto now and about 500 each in Vancouver and Montreal next year - and is to report the data next summer.Also being studied are:- How well university-educated immigrants' language skills match their job qualifications.- What kind of training they're getting - or not - to improve.- Whether alternative types of training should be made available.\"The question is, do you first try to get the job and then get language training on the side, or do you get the training in order to get the job?\" Ruddick said.\"This is the most difficult and the most expensive chunk of research we've been doing over the last 10 years to understand more about the immigrant communities,\" she said. \"We've waited this long because it's a very time-consuming process.\"Ruddick was one of about 40 speakers at the Opportunity and Challenge of Diversity conference.

It was organized by the Policy Research Initiative and other federal agencies and departments, along with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.The conference is being held at a downtown Montreal