Quote:

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Orginally posted by Dips

[Canada is a great country which is far beyond the reach of India.)

Only area where canada is far beyond the reach of India is governance rest it lags behind india in every aspect.

Before arriving here i felt canada is great country which is far beyond the reach of India but it is not so.

I heard of this quote: " All that glitters is not gold". I have now experienced it. I am surprised how you have come to the above conclusion even after being in this country.Have not been to india in last 3-4 yrs...?

Canada can not compete with good private firms of India. Take the example of private banking in India. I found the service standards of ICICI and HDFC bank much much ahead than TD bank which is the biggest bank.

I was working with Accenture in one of the project and believe me i have seen the IT guys over here which are no way comparable to the IT guys of Accenture back in India or other indian IT guys.

Telecom sector is fantastic in India with lots of private firms and much much cheaper with excellent 24 hrs call center facility. Bell canada, I am sorry to say does not provide service after 5 pm.


The above are just few examples.

Conclusion:
Comparing both countries is not correct. However, if you are dealing with govt firms Canada is better place to get good service however, if you dealing with pvt firms india is much better place to get better customer services.

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Source: Globe and Mail, 19 April 2005



Broken Gates: A star immigrant gives up on Canada

By Maria Jimenez

With great reluctance, Umesh Yalavarthy, a physician from southern India, is giving up on the Canadian dream. He and his wife moved to Toronto 2? years ago. Young, educated and fluent in English, they were ideal immigrants, according to Canada's recruitment plan.

His wife, a chemist, qualified under the point system that seeks to bring professionals to Canada. She sponsored her husband, a recent graduate in family medicine, who expected he would obtain his medical licence here without a problem.

Dr. Yalavarthy, 27, knew Canada had a dire shortage of doctors and was in particular need of family physicians in rural areas. He was prepared to go anywhere.

He passed the Medical Council of Canada evaluating exams. However, three years later, he still couldn't obtain a residency position to repeat the training he had just finished in Hyderabad. There were more than 2,000 foreign-trained doctors vying for just 200 spots.

Turns out, the elusive residency post was much more attainable south of the border. This spring, Dr. Yalavarthy will leave the multicultural milieu of Toronto for Chattanooga, Tenn., a city less than one tenth Toronto's size and in the southern Appalachian Mountains, where hardly any foreigners live. He will become a resident in internal medicine at a hospital there.

"I really love Toronto, and if they ever let me practise here I'll be happy to come back. Our dream was not to emigrate to Tennessee. It was to emigrate to Canada. We have lots of friends here," said Dr. Yalavarthy, whose wife and newborn daughter will join him in a few months.

"But in Canada they doubt our credentials. I think that is unfair. I was one of the top students in my college. In the U.S., if you score well on the exams, you can get a residency to repeat your training."

This conundrum -- the recruitment of qualified professionals whose skills do not compute in the Canadian labour market -- has become a critical issue facing the Immigration Department.

In 2002, Ottawa changed the way it selected immigrants, abandoning the idea of matching newcomers with worker shortages. Now applicants must score 67 out of a possible 100 points in education, skills and language to be accepted here.

The theory is that Canada gets plug-and-play immigrants able to integrate into a knowledge-based economy.

However, the reality is far different. A Statistics Canada study found that 70 per cent of the 164,000 immigrants who settled in 2000 and 2001 had trouble entering the work force. Six in 10 eventually took jobs outside their areas of training.

A 2004 study of 829 immigrant engineers in Ontario found that 55 per cent were unable to find jobs and 29 per cent were working in fields other than engineering and not commensurate with their skills.

There is a crucial bottleneck preventing professional newcomers from working in their chosen fields. The provincial bodies and agencies that regulate medicine, engineering, pharmacy, accounting, teaching, nursing and other professions cannot assess credentials in a timely manner. Many discount overseas training and experience.

At the same time, Canada faces a shortage in the trades, and many white-collar workers are being forced to take jobs sweeping floors and delivering flyers.

Foreign doctors have become bricklayers.

Nurses are slinging coffee at fast-food restaurants.

This failure to use foreign brain power is not just a problem for immigrants.

The Conference Board of Canada found that it costs the economy more than $1-billion a year in lost immigrant income due to underemployment.

Social ills will also result from the deterioration of earnings, warns University of Toronto sociologist Jeffrey Reitz. "Among them are increased demands on the social safety net, more widespread public perception of immigrants as a liability or social problem and political reaction on the part of immigrants themselves."

It used to be that immigrants over time did as well or better financially than their Canadian-born counterparts. The rags-to-riches story was part of the immigrant mythology.

Today, Canada accepts 220,000 to 245,000 newcomers a year (and aims to increase this to 300,000, or 1 per cent of the population), to help offset an aging work force and declining fertility rates. By 2011, immigrants are expected to account for all net population growth.

But they no longer are able to catch up to native-born Canadians, despite their high levels of education. Statistics Canada released two recent reports showing the new long-term trend of increasing low-income earners among immigrants.

Researchers found that the "rate of improvement for recent immigrants has not brought them back in line with the economic fortunes of their predecessors."

Another recent research paper concludes that the return on a year of foreign work experience is only about a third of what Canadian-based experience provides in terms of higher earnings.

Prof. Reitz believes that the competition is stiffer now for immigrants, in part because their native-born counterparts are better educated than they were a generation ago.

"Canada now has its own intelligentsia. Our method of selection will only work if employers recognize a foreign education."

The problem is complex because while the federal government sets immigration policy, the provinces are in charge of the newcomers. "There is acknowledgment about the need for collaboration," Prof. Reitz said.

"But at the end of the day there is nobody in charge of implementing the solution."

Those who study immigration believe it is time to retool the selection system to ensure human capital is not wasted. Recruitment should be flexible so the country obtains the workers it needs and highly qualified people are not wasting their skills -- or giving up and heading south.

Ottawa knows the immigration system is flawed.

"We need to have a national immigration framework," a senior immigration official said. "How do we build a system that is more responsive to labour-market needs that will bring a healthy flow of professionals, as well as trades people?

"The answer is work with the provinces and maybe make the temporary-worker program more responsive to labour market needs."

Last month, a government roundtable began crisscrossing the country to canvass the public for solutions.

"The committee would like to see a process in place whereby immigrants will be able to obtain the Canadian equivalency for their professional and trade credentials," notes a release from the House of Commons immigration committee.

As the government brainstorms, frustrated immigrants are voting with their feet.

Don DeVoretz, an immigration economist at Simon Fraser University, found that as many as a third of all immigrants leave Canada, and that 20 per cent of recently arrived immigrants from China are returning to their homeland or moving to a third country.

"We're doing an awful job," he said. "That's because of the typical Canadian problem: The provinces control the licensing and the feds control immigration, and they don't talk to one another."

Immigrants' credentials should be assessed before they arrive to give them a realistic sense of what their future holds, he said.

Like Dr. Yalavarthy, about 20 per cent of the foreign-trained doctors registered with the Association of International Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, or AIPSO, are applying for medical-residency positions in the United States.

There, the spots available exceed the number of U.S. medical students.

Joan Atlin, executive director of AIPSO, said many foreign-trained doctors stay in Canada just long enough to exhaust their life savings trying to requalify.

"They are in an incredibly difficult position, and many question why they came here."

Members of this new underclass feel betrayed.

Abu Yakub left his three-storey family home and prestigious position at the Bangladesh Association for Aged and Institute of Geriatric Medicine in 2001 and immigrated to Canada with his wife and three children.

Despite passing his medical-evaluating exams here, he has been unable to obtain a residency position in Canada. He has been forced to take a $10-an-hour job as a personal-care assistant, helping patients wash and use the toilet.

"I have spent $15,000 on courses and exams here. Actually, my life is worse off here. My children are not accustomed to living in such hardship. I feel I have so much expertise and experience in family medicine. I would go anywhere in Canada. I wonder if I should give up and go home."

He knows of five colleagues who have accepted medical-residency positions in the United States.

Cognizant of the looming physician shortage, the Ontario government recently increased the number of residency positions for international medical graduates to 200 a year from 75. At this rate, it still will take 10 years to put half of the foreign-trained doctors in the province back to work.

"I can understand there is a frustration for people who arrive in Ontario and expect to sail into practice.

"There is a bottleneck. The schools can only train so many people at one time," said Brad Sinclair, executive director of IMG-Ontario, set up to oversee the program for foreign doctors.

Mr. Sinclair pointed out that the physician shortage is a complex problem that relates not only to licensing foreign doctors but to remuneration of all doctors, regulatory policies and how long and where physicians practise.

The immigration official in Ottawa conceded that to have good immigration policy, "good poetry and good plumbing" is needed. The government has tinkered with the plumbing.

Only poetry -- in the form of legislative change -- can save the system.

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Source: Globe and Mail, 25 April 2005



More education, experience, but money still tight for some



By Terry Weber

Canadian workers are better educated and more experienced today than they were in the early 1980s, but their chances of being stuck in low-paying jobs remain virtually unchanged, a new study suggested Monday.

The report, prepared by Statistics Canada, said the proportion of adult employees who had a university education rose to 24 per cent from 14 per cent between 1981 and 2004.

At the same time, as the Canadian work force aged, employees were also bringing more experience to the job, according to the agency.

But those two traits did not necessarily add up to bigger bucks.

Last year, about 16 per cent of the adult work force laboured in low-paying jobs ? those paying less than $10 an hour (in 2001 dollars) ? compared with 17 per cent in 1981.

?The share of adult workers employed in low-paid jobs did not drop overall in spite of the fact that the percentage of adult employees with a university degree increased during that period,? the government agency said.

?This means that some workers with a given level of education ended up having lower wages in the late 1990s than their counterparts had in the early 1980s.?

For example, Statscan said, young, Canadian-born men between the ages of 25 and 34 with a high school education or less saw their real wages drop substantially over the past two decades.

?Likewise, older recent immigrant men of all education levels also suffered a decline in wages over the last two decades,? the agency said.

The report, meanwhile, also found that the majority of workers in low-paying jobs were not living in low-income families.

In both 1980 and 2000, the percentage of people with full-time jobs living above the low-income level remained at 70 per cent.

That said, the report also found that recent immigrants and people with low education levels were increasingly ?economically vulnerable.?

As an example, the agency said 6 per cent of recent immigrants between the ages of 35 and 54 who worked full time were labouring in low-paying jobs and living in low-income families.

By 2000, that percentage had doubled to 12 per cent.

?Four groups were very likely to be in this position: individuals with no high school diploma, recent immigrants, unattached individuals ? living alone or with cohabitants ? and female lone-parents,? Statscan said.

People in those groups represented 37 per cent of all full-time workers but accounted for 71 per cent of full-time employees who were in both low-wage jobs and low-income families in 2000, the agency said.

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Source: Toronto Star, 26 April 2005



Low-wage earners stuck in a rut
More education and experience not helping: Study Young women the only group that improved

MEGAN OGILVIE
STAFF REPORTER

Canadian workers are better educated and more experienced than they were 20 years ago, yet the proportion of them stuck in low-wage jobs hasn't budged, according to new research.

A new Statistics Canada study says the proportion of jobs paying less than $10 an hour (measured in 2001 dollars) has remained fairly stable since the early 1980s. While the education and experience of workers who hold these low-wage jobs has increased, their chances of moving up the pay scale have not.

"This study reveals a somewhat disappointing trend," said study co-author Ren? Morissette, a senior economist at Statistics Canada. "Despite the growing experience and education of Canadian workers, there hasn't been much improvement in their chances of escaping low-paid jobs."

The research also highlights the struggles of some recent immigrants to find better-paying work. But the overall conclusion is that many are losing out to "credential inflation," according to University of Toronto professor Nancy Jackson.

"This study shows exactly what community-based studies have shown for a long time: the deterioration of living and working conditions for a growing number of Canadians," said Jackson, an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

Education is no longer translating into wages for a large portion of the population, said Jackson, who specializes in adult education.

"It's called credential inflation," she said. "So the same (level of) education you once needed gets you a worse job today, while a better (level of) education today gets you the same job as before.

"You don't gain upward mobility in exchange for education ability. Education is becoming needed for basic employment, rather than upward mobility."

Only one demographic group saw its chances of escaping low-wage jobs improve between 1980 and 2000: young women between the ages of 25 and 29.

That's because today's working women have better access to higher-paying jobs compared to their counterparts from 20 years ago and are also moving toward occupations that have better opportunities to move ahead, Morissette said.

Young women are also much more educated than two decades ago; the proportion of female workers with university degrees doubled from 10 per cent in 1981 to 22 per cent in 2004.

But other demographic groups did not see significant improvement in their chances of moving out of low-wage jobs, with recent immigrants losing the most ground.

The proportion of recent immigrants who work full-time in low-income jobs and who live in low-income households doubled in the past 20 years.

"Since the change a decade ago in the criteria in admitting immigrants, the immigrant population has more education than the Canadian-born population," Jackson said.

"A doubling of that kind is a real indictment of how our country is serving its immigrant population."

The study also looked at how many people earning less than $10 an hour also lived in families whose total earnings were below Statistics Canada's definition of low family income.

Morissette said the study found that most low-paid workers don't live in low-income families.

But according to Jackson, the numbers disguise the economic circumstances of those households.

"These figures show people are forced into multiple-waged households or multiple-generational households to pool their resources to make ends meet," she said.

The study also revealed that economic vulnerability ? full-time workers who both receive low pay and live in low-income households ? was concentrated among four groups: unattached people, single mothers, people with high school education or less, and recent immigrants, Morissette said.

"It is striking that these four groups accounted for 71 per cent of all full-time workers in low-paid jobs and in low-income households, but only 37 per cent of all full-time workers," he said.

Elizabeth McIsaac, manager of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, said her organization sees a disproportionate number of skilled or educated recent immigrants who are underpaid, underemployed or unemployed.

"We do know that there are some very real and structural barriers to very highly skilled immigrants finding appropriate placement in the labour market," she said.

Jackson called the Statistics Canada study a "wake-up call."

"It's time to pay attention to what is happening to our immigrant population," she said.

"We are offering an inhospitable welcome to the best population of immigrants ? that we solicited ? to come to Canada."

But Canada rated highly in another study of employment prospects published yesterday, finishing near the top in an international ranking of social mobility.

A study by three professors at the London School of Economics examined social mobility in Canada, the United States and six European countries. Comparing the earnings of sons and their fathers, the researchers found that the most socially mobile countries ? where sons had the best chances of earning significantly more than their fathers ? were the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, along with Canada.

Germany's level of social mobility across generations was significantly lower, while the U.S. and the United Kingdom fared the worst.

The study suggested that lower social mobility across the generations was linked to education levels, which are more closely tied to income in the U.S. and the U.K. It was supported by the Sutton Trust, which helps children from poorer backgrounds get better access to education.

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I am from Andhra Pradesh. There is a need for doctors in Andhra Pradesh. Two or three days back , it is written in EENADU ,the largest circulated telugu weekly that there are several vacancies in Govt. Hospitals in India. Local qualified doctors are not interested to accept the offers.

We never get what we want. We ignore what we need. I worked as a factory manager of one of the best FMCG company in the world. Now I am enjoying the labour job.
In India , if there is no job means you have to commit suicide . There is no dignity of labour.

Survival is the fittest.

Let us not cry on the immigrants. Self pity is the worst thing. Let us build our careers again. Otherwise let us go back.

One sure reason y doctors r the least interested category in migrating & I always quote them. A practicing doctor is quite comfortable and earns well in India due 2 burgeoning population. he mints money and hence never ever considers another option including Govt jobs.

Manasvi.

The reason why a doctor work as doctor, engineer works as engineer is becuase India's economy is double than what it is on paper.

The reason being the parallel economy. The parallel economy is economy where transactions are done in cash to avoid tax. Though this is not good for the govt but it is helping people survive and do job in their related field.

I agree there is dignity of labor as of now here. That has to be becuase here there are shortfalls of Laborers .

Whenever there is supply and demand gap, there will always be dignity for that resource be it labor, IT professional or any....

Companies are not here to respect you. They want to get best at cheapest rates to make their balance sheet look great.

Thats the reason why IT outsorcing is happening like any thing. The good thing about labor jobs like Plumbing, electrician etc is that they cannot be outsourced. I have seen the plumbers and electricians over here earn like anything but than same is the case for IT professionals, most doctors, Biotechnologies etc earn good in India.

However,other labor jobs like machine operator and others are already getting outsourced to China which is becoming factory of the world.

Labor rates are already going down over last 5 years which eventually will go down with more immigrants coming in. So i hope one should not be thinking that just because there is dignity for labor jobs this country is better than India.