I met a guy from Holland (White guy) who migrated to Canada in 1960 with a Mathematics degree. He then learnt Carpentry and has been a carpenter since.

He is now in the office designing and stuff.

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"Ever dance with the devil in the pale moon light?"
"I always ask that of all my prey."
"I just like the sound of it."

THE GREAT IMMIGRATION SCAM
Friends
Here is an article I came across, written by a white man criticizing their own immigration policy and the truth behind it.Hope you find it as an eye-opener.

THE GREAT IMMIGRATION SCAM
MIKE TAYLOR UNCOVERS A GLOBAL SWINDLE

By: Paul Fallavollita

Mike Taylor’s The Truth About Immigration deftly uncovers what future historians will undoubtedly call "The Great Immigration Scam." This swindle takes place both globally and nationally, orchestrated by elites connected with multinational corporations and international finance who are obsessed with the "bottom line."

Taylor, a former immigration investigator for the Canadian government, reveals that these elites desired access to Third World resources and markets following the Second World War and the decolonization of Asia and Africa during the next two decades. To maintain friendly trading relations with these new nations, the West adopted an egalitarian and humanitarian façade, opening its borders to Third World immigrants. These events prove E.H. Carr’s observation in The Twenty Years’ Crisis that self-interest is often cloaked in altruist garb.

At home, the elites sought to increase profits by depressing the wages of labor and weakening the countervailing power of labor unions, regardless of the effect on the social fabric and cohesiveness of the nation. Flooding Canada with poor immigrants and "refugees" furthered this goal. These immigrants were radically different from their Western hosts, and the ensuing tensions guaranteed that public concern would focus on identity victimology rather than economic and class issues, giving the elites a "free pass."

Taylor highlights the "propaganda value" to elites in admitting Third Worlders to the wealthy West, just as they claim that anybody in Canada can succeed if they work hard. This is nothing less than the globalization of the Horatio Alger myth. Taylor challenges many such myths, including the myth that immigrants are needed to do the grunt jobs in a successful economy. For instance, he rightly asks how Canada filled such jobs before the 1970s.

The book boldly addresses the National Question: What is a Canadian? What makes Canada unique and different from the constituency of the UN General Assembly or the Tower of Babel Revisited? Thankfully, Taylor is courageous enough to point out that Whites are endangered as a race; they are a shrinking percentage of the world’s population, due in part to feminism and low fertility rates. He makes the case that Whites should not be ashamed to fight for their own interests and should work to retake the country they founded and built. Taylor discusses the "good cop-bad cop" routine the elites play on White Canadians in order to get them to cooperate in their own demise: feel-good diversity propaganda on the one hand, and on the other, "hate speech" laws for anyone who objects.

Taylor wisely makes a distinction between acceptance of diversity versus acquiescence in the face of dispossession, and he contrasts the richness of particularity, an organic and ethnic nationalism, from the abstract "civic nationalism" that is now promoted by the elites. He restores the meaning of the once-honorable word "discrimination," which meant "fine intellectual discernment," just as he challenges the basis for the Orwellian use of that same word today.

The elites may yet curtail immigration, emphasizing skills over raw numbers, but this shift does not cure the larger problem. Taylor notes, "Big business would like nothing better than to flood the market with high-tech workers so as to depress professional wages." Americans will recognize the parallel with their own H1-B visa program.

American readers will find much in Taylor’s book that speaks to their concerns. Taylor shows that there is an eerie attachment between the immigration policies of Canada and the United States. For example, when the U.S. repealed its Asian Exclusion Act in 1943, Canada did so in 1947. When the U.S. opened its doors to the Third World in 1965, Canada followed suit in 1967. As signs of backlash appeared in America in the late nineties, they also emerged in Canada. On another front, the United States has a problem with Hispanics, particularly Mexicans, arriving and replicating their own self-contained cultures. Taylor shows that the same process is happening in Canada: substitute the word "Asians" for "Mexicans."

Patrick Buchanan’s Death of the West, released four years after Taylor’s book, covers some of the same ground as Taylor, and is one of the top non-fiction bestsellers today. Buchanan read Taylor’s book as a resource while putting his own together. There are important differences between the two books. Taylor focuses on a meat-and-potatoes economic and class history of immigration, while Buchanan deals more with the philosophy of the social movements of the sixties and analyzes the Gramscian "Long March through the Institutions" launched by the Frankfurt School radicals. Taylor’s book is free of the Catholic social teaching sub-themes that infuse Buchanan’s work, making Taylor’s book more accessible to non-Catholics. The fact Taylor is a man of the Left who opposes open immigration also invites attention and garners credibility. Only Nixon could go to China.

Perhaps one of the strengths of Taylor’s book is that it is not Buchanan’s book. While there is an advantage gained from Buchanan’s visibility and name recognition on the immigration issue, there are also liabilities. Some focus too much on the messenger rather than the message, and important points are lost in the noise. Readers are more likely to approach Taylor’s text without this "prejudice of the personalities," making his book a better "conversion tool" for immigration-restrictionist activists.

For the West, there is cause for hope. Taylor writes of cleaning up the immigration problem, "any number of restrictive measures could be implemented, only the political will is lacking." He predicts things may get worse before they get better, but notes that Whites ultimately "will not go willingly into that racial slaughterhouse" that the New World Order has built. Taylor, a fine Canadian patriot and defender of our Western Civilization more broadly, gives us the truth we need to resist global capitalism’s attack on the nation-state. Taylor’s book, if widely read, will help generate the "critical mass" needed to muster our collective political will.

The Truth About Immigration: Exposing the Economic and Humanitarian Myths. Mike Taylor. Coquitlam, BC: Karma Publishing. 1998. Paperback. ISBN 0-9683952-0-1. $19.95 (CDN). 250 pp.

New Delhi, June 11: Far from being the El Dorado of repute, for many immigrants Canada has emerged as a land of unmitigated disaster. From rampant discrimination to hidden booby traps, Indians have been forced into an economic quagmire that has generated despair and dejection.

Wretched tales abound of even highly qualified Indians landing up in Canada, only to find that they don't get the job that their college degrees and experience require, having to instead settle for a dead-end job, even to the extent of being a sweeper with a PhD!

Unfortunately, for those who actually manage to land the job they want, are sometimes paid 80% or even 70% of the amount a white Canadian will be paid for the same work. This is increasingly happening in recent years, signalling that Indians and the rest of Asians are deliberately discriminated against.

While many say that previously most white Canadians were not really highly educated and that is why immigrants from Asia in the 60s, 70s, and 80s were able to bag jobs that were highly lucrative and satisfying, turning Canada into the proverbial land of milk and honey for themselves.

No longer. The International Herald Tribune's Clifford Crauss tells the tale of Gian Sangha who was so desperate for a job that he willingly cut his hair and removed his turban to canvass for employment, even though he was a Sikh.

An environmental scientist, Sangha even had a doctorate from Germany and had taught in US. "Here in Canada, there is a hidden discrimination," Sangha said. He says Canadian institutions have refused to give him jobs sometimes providing excuses that he is over-qualified for the job!

He is suing them for discrimination. To scrape by, he once cut lawns. Now he does clerical work and shares his house with his extended family. It was not supposed to be this way in Canada, which years ago put out a welcome mat to professionals from around the developing world. With a declining birth rate, an aging population and labor shortages in many areas, Canada, a sparsely populated nation, has for decades opened its doors to engineers, health professionals, software designers and electricians.

But the results of this policy have been mixed, for Canada and for the immigrants. Recent census data and academic studies indicate that the incomes and employment prospects for immigrants are deteriorating. Specialists say a growing number of immigrants have returned to their homelands or migrated to the United States. About 25 percent of recent immigrants with university degrees are working at jobs that require only high school diplomas or less, government data show.

However, writes Crauss, the Canadian public continues to support the government's goal of increasing immigration, and relations among ethnic groups are good, though neighbourhoods in some cities are becoming more segregated. But some fear that if opportunities for immigrants do not expand, social cohesion may suffer. "The existing system is broken," said Jeffrey Reitz, a sociologist who studies immigration at the University of Toronto. "The deteriorating employment situation might mean that Canada will not be able to continue this expansionist immigration program in the positive, politically supported environment that we've seen in the past."

Reitz estimates that foreign-educated immigrants earn a total of $2 billion less than an equivalent number of native-born Canadians with comparable skills because they work in jobs below their training levels.

What immigrants may also be up against is a system that refuses to recognise many of the degrees earned by these people back home. It creates the kind of piquant situation where Canada advertises for doctors and nurses abroad, yet refuses to give Indian medics a job in a hospital, because their degrees are not valid here. Thousands are left jobless.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but not for immigrants. Crauss says, the children of immigrants, who enter the job market with Canadian credentials, typically do better at acquiring high-paying jobs. "We have an arcane infrastructure of professional organizations that essentially mitigate against the immediate integration of these highly skilled immigrants," Joe Volpe, the minister of citizenship and immigration

Volpe said he was concerned that news from disappointed job seekers would seep back to their native countries and discourage qualified people from immigrating.

For Sangha it may have become what he says is "a painful life. I'm angry and frustrated. I never thought it would be like this in Canada."

Immigrants find themselves going cold, wet and hungry in a land they had sacrificed everything they owned to reach. Believing they would be treated well, that their willingness to work long and hard even in inhospitable conditions of Canada would bring them wealth, that jobs would be aplenty, these people are now in a situation that is threatening their health and life because of the longstanding nature of their woes.

They can't even go back to India. Some feel ashamed to go back penniless to their families. It would mean that they were not smart enough to do well as the going principle is that, 'In vilayet even monkeys become millionaires'. Others simply can't put together enough money to pay for their ticket.

This trend has increasingly translated into numerous Indian families moving into so-called slum areas of Canadian cities as they increasingly get impoverished.

For these people ebullience has turned into depression and their chance for plenty has transformed into poverty. Many of them have been left scrounging on Canada's unemployment benefits even having to rely on unemployment insurance and welfare, which is anathema to an Indian.

The only thing in all this misery that is making them continue to hold body and soul together are their children. They are expected to do better and achieve the dreams that have been denied to their parents.

Hope, and scant else, is all that these Indians have been left with after travelling tens of thousands of kilometres to a foreign land. They must be ruing the day they decided to get their passport and jet out of India.

The truth about immigration to Canada
Thousands of eager immigrants arrive in Canada only to discover their education and professional credentials are almost worthless.

The situation is so bad that this week an Edmonton couple decided to sue the federal government.




It is a great irony to many in the immigration field, and to newcomers themselves, a bitter joke. Canada has a shortage of skilled professionals, and yet thousands of internationally trained doctors, engineers, teachers and nurses are forced to deliver pizzas and drive taxis.

Some immigrants believe that this is intentional, that Canada wants them only for their genetic potential. They may sweep floors and clean offices, but their offspring will be intelligent and creative. Why else would the government accept them and then make it so very difficult to have their credentials recognized?

Citizenship and Immigration Canada bristles at such a suggestion, and advises immigrants to check the ministry's Website, which clearly warns newcomers there is no guarantee they will find work in their chosen profession.

Still, frustration is mounting: This week, a British-trained accountant and his bookkeeper wife launched a lawsuit against the federal government, alleging that they were misled by immigration officials who assured them they would find good jobs here. Instead, the couple -- he is originally from Sri Lanka and she from Malaysia -- have spent five years in Edmonton shovelling snow, cleaning toilets and borrowing money to support their teenaged son.

"What angers me is we are capable people. We have the credentials. We just can't get the jobs," complained Selladurai Premakumaran, who feels the government has shattered his hopes and dreams.

Last year, when Canada changed the way it selects immigrants, many were happy to see the end of the old system, which matched newcomers with worker shortages.

Critics had long complained that, by the time the physiotherapists and teachers arrived, those jobs had been filled and the labour shortages were in other fields.

Now, Canada chooses immigrants based not on their occupation, but on their education, skills and language abilities. Applicants must score 67 of a possible 100 points to be accepted. Ostensibly, being talented and smart should make them more employable.

But it isn't working out that way. Canada is recruiting the right kind of people, but they are stuck in a bottleneck, as the agencies and bodies that regulate the fields of medicine, engineering, teaching and nursing struggle to assess their qualifications.

"We have a disaster on our hands," says Joan Atlin, executive director of the Association of International Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.

"There are thousands of un- and under-employed foreign professionals across the country. At the same time, we have a shortage of skilled professionals, especially in the health-care field. We don't so much have a doctor shortage as an assessment and licensing bottleneck."

About 1,300 doctors from more than 80 countries have joined the association she heads, but she estimates there are many more out there. Ontario alone may have as many as 4,000, most of them still trying to get their medical licences.

At the same time, there is a shortage of as many as 3,000 physicians across the country, especially in smaller communities in Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ontario (provinces that have been forced to recruit doctors from South Africa, whose medical training Canada considers acceptable).

A recent Statistics Canada study of 164,200 immigrants who arrived in 2000 and 2001 found that 70 per cent had problems entering the labour force. Six in every 10 were forced to take jobs other than those they were trained to do. The two most common occupational groups for men were science (natural and applied) and management, but most wound up working in sales and service or processing and manufacturing.

As well as credentials, there is a problem with supply and demand.

Patrick Coady, with the British Columbia Internationally Trained Professionals Network, believes that far too many engineers are coming -- as many as 60 per cent of all those accepted each year. (In Ontario, from 1997 to 2001, nearly 40,000 immigrants listed engineering as their occupation.)

"When they arrive, the Engineering Council for Canada evaluates their credentials, which sets up the engineer to think there are opportunities here," Mr. Coady says. "Then they discover that each province has a body that regulates the industry. They need up to 18 months of Canadian work experience before they will get professional engineering status. And, there isn't a great need for consulting engineers. A lot of the infrastructure has already been built in this country."

Michael Wu, a geotechnical engineer from China, is a classic example of what's happening. Accepted as a landed immigrant last spring, he came here with his wife and child, leaving behind a relatively prosperous life in Beijing, and now works for $7 an hour in a Vancouver chocolate factory.

Back in Beijing, "I had a three-bedroom apartment and took taxis everywhere -- the Chinese government sent me to build a stadium in St. Lucia," says Mr. Wu, who has a PhD. "Here, no-one will hire me. Many engineering companies think engineers make false documents. They are suspicious of my qualifications. I never imagined I'd end up working in a factory. But I will keep trying. Every month I go to the Vancouver Geotechnical Society lecture."

Susan Scarlett of the Immigration Department points out that regulating the professions is a provincial, not federal, responsibility. "We advise people who are thinking of coming to Canada to prepare by really researching how their credentials will be assessed."

Ms. Atlin says that "Canada has been very slow to change. Our regulatory systems have not caught up with our immigration policies."

But some relief may be on the horizon because the issue has become such a political flashpoint.

A national task force is about to report to the deputy minister of health on the licensing of international medical graduates. And this month Denis Coderre, the federal Immigration Minister, announced that he wants to streamline the process of recognizing foreign credentials, and have provinces announce their inventory of needs so Ottawa can work to fill the shortages.

A doctor 'ready to go anywhere, rural Saskatchewan, small-town Ontario . . .'

Tina Ureten, a diminutive, well-dressed physician from Turkey, was always the hardest-working child in a family of hard workers.

She knew from an early age what she wanted to be, and left home to study science, math and biology at an elite boarding school in Ankara, the Turkish capital. As a scholarship student, she endured ridicule from her friends when she chose to spend summer after summer honing her language skills at a special English-language camp. She aced her university entrance exams, and was one of 20,000 candidates in a field of 400,000 to be accepted by the nation's medical schools. By 30, she had been appointed associate professor of nuclear medicine, a hi-tech field that uses radioactive materials for diagnosis.

Had she stayed in Turkey, she would be at the top of her profession today, a full professor in a department. Instead, she met a Turkish engineer at an international conference, and ended up immigrating with him to Toronto.

Dr. Ureten, now 42, knew it would be difficult to get her medical licence here. But she didn't know it would be such a bureaucratic, disheartening and ultimately fruitless journey.

"I sent my application to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons 2½ years ago, and I haven't even received a response. I worry my file is lost in a drawer somewhere," she says. "I called my MP and she called the college, and said they were driving her crazy too.

"I am ready to go anywhere, rural Saskatchewan, small-town Ontario. The irony is, almost every province has a shortage in nuclear medicine. This country needs my skills."

When she came here, Dr. Ureten knew she'd have to write exams and was prepared to retrain. She and her husband sponsored their in-laws to come and look after their two young children so she could spend her days in the library studying.

It took her two years to write three of the Medical Council of Canada's evaluation exams, because there is a six-month gap between exams (not the case in the United States).

She passed all three tests but wasn't accepted in the medical residency program. More than 150 people applied for one position in nuclear medicine, and the odds are stacked against foreign-trained doctors. (In Ontario, foreign-trained doctors cannot even compete directly for residency positions open to graduating medical students, but are restricted to a few specialties in short supply.) There is a separate stream for foreign-trained doctors, but it has only 125 spaces for graduates in specific fields -- and nuclear medicine is not one of them.

Dr. Ureten fingers an inch-thick binder, which contains all of her credentials, carefully translated and annotated. There are her fellowships at the University of Wisconsin and in Basel, Switzerland; her training course with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and dozens of peer-reviewed articles published in international science journals.

She sent them all off to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in May, 2001. In the past, the college approved the credentials only of doctors who trained in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and England, but two years ago announced a program encouraging all foreign-trained physicians to send in their documents.

Since then, the college has received 600 applications from more than 140 countries, and approved 60 international medical graduates to take Canadian exams in their specialties, says its director of education, Dr.Nadia Mikhael. Dr. Ureten's case is considered "inconclusive," she says. "This case has taken a long time because we are still waiting for Turkey to provide evidence so that we can judge the accreditation system of their postgraduate medical education system.

"We don't want to compromise our Canadian standards. And we have to make other specialties a priority, like gynecology, anesthesiology and obstetrics."

Joan Atlin, executive director of the Association of International Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, says it is misleading for the college even to invite international physicians to send in their résumés because it is impossible to assess the programs of hundreds of medical schools around the world.

She believes a better solution is to assess people on the job. Ontario recently launched a clearing-house program that would do just this: assess fully trained foreign graduates during six-month rotations in hospitals.

"This is the right approach, but it is really just a drop in the bucket."

And it won't help Dr. Ureten because nuclear medicine, once again, is not one of the five specialties in the fast-track program.

"I feel like they are making it impossible. There are some authorities who just don't want foreign doctors in the system," she complains. "I am ready to go anywhere. There is a need in Canada for people like me, trained, ready to go."

Between cramming for medical exams, she found time to train as an ultrasound technician and a medical and cardiac sonographer. Recently, she opened UC Baby in Mississauga, one of the first clinics in Canada to offer pregnant couples a three-dimensional ultrasound and real-time movies of their unborn babies.

"I'm proud of my clinic," she says, "but I still feel I'm overqualified for this."

She yearns for her true love. "I have met many smart, skilled people from many countries, and you know what? Many are leaving for the U.S., where doctors can more easily be integrated into the system."-- Marina Jimenez

A need to nurse

Milica Cerovsek, 46, was a nurse in a military hospital in Sarajevo for more than 17 years: She tended soldiers in the intensive-care unit, assisted with colonoscopies and tended to all manner of emergencies in the surgical unit.

She loved her job so much she sometimes volunteered to work double shifts, forfeiting a night's sleep to nurse patients around the clock, much to her husband's chagrin.

In 1992, conflict in the region spread to open war, people split on ethnic lines, and soon the city was under attack. Although an ethnic Serb, Ms. Cerovsek didn't want to fight; she wanted safety for her two young children. Using her daughter's illness as a pretext, she fled to Belgrade to see a skin specialist, knowing she would never return.

Two years later, she arrived in Calgary as a political refugee, and was soon joined by her husband, a professor of aeronautical engineering. As well as their homeland, they had lost their family, culture and status as respected professionals.

Ms. Cerovsek agreed to put her career on hold while her husband, reduced to delivering pizzas for $7 an hour, went back to school to retrain as an engineer. In 1997, she finally was able to enter the work force: she qualified as a massage therapist to pay for the long, arduous process of becoming a Canadian nurse.

Two years ago, she applied to the Alberta Association of Registered Nurses, gathering together the documents necessary to complete the Assessment of Eligibility for Registration. She had to get in touch with her nursing school in Sarajevo and pay to have transcripts of her marks sent directly to the AARN.

The association asked her to take a course in English proficiency, and spend $2,000 on a one-year refresher program in nursing at a community college. She did both, only to be told she lacked credits in obstetrical and psychiatric nursing.

"I couldn't believe it. They asked me to go back and do these courses after all my many years of experience," Ms. Cerovsek says. "They said, 'According to your papers, you lack 35 hours of obstetrical nursing training in Sarajevo.' But I had thousands of hours of experience delivering babies, giving injections, assisting doctors in surgery and doing all kinds of nursing."

Ms. Cerovsek also planned to pursue geriatric nursing, and had no intention of working in a delivery room, or a psychiatric ward. "I had to spend several thousand more dollars taking these courses. At that point, I really felt like giving up because it seemed so bureaucratic."

Donna Hutton, executive director of the AARN, sympathizes but says the association is responsible for maintaining standards and is working "with the government and educational institutes to develop bridging programs for international nurses."

The perseverance that saw Ms. Cerovsek through the upheaval of Sarajevo is helping her through her marathon quest to become a nurse in a province that needs them. (Alberta has a shortage and in the next five years see 10 to 20 per cent of its nurses will reach retirement age.)

She recently completed the two courses and is ready to begin clinical training and preparing for the national exam. The process has taken four years, and cost about $6,000.

"I know so many nurses from Sarajevo who would become nurses tomorrow, but it's too expensive and complicated," she says. "My daughter came home from school and said, 'There is a huge shortage of nurses. Should I study nursing?'

"I told her, 'You should only do it if you really love it like I have.' It's been like my third child and I can't wait to get back to it."

Disillusioned doctors take some class action



Sunita Doobay was at the Montreal airport when she spied a handsome stranger. "He didn't want to talk to me. I talked to him," said Ms. Doobay, a tall, dark beauty.

The stranger turned out to be a family doctor from Brazil who was spending six months observing psychiatry treatments at Montreal General Hospital. They began dating and soon after, Ms. Doobay, a lawyer, proposed marriage.

"I'm the one who said, 'Come to Canada. You're really smart. You'll make it.' "

Her father, a cardiovascular surgeon in Toronto, advised otherwise. He told the couple to leave Canada.

"I thought, 'That couldn't be right,' " said Ms. Doobay, 38.

Father knew best. For five years, while the couple lived in Toronto, her husband focused all his skill and experience on passing the battery of exams required to qualify as a doctor in Ontario. Twice, he scored well on written tests. Twice, he took the clinical test and was rejected. Now, Ms. Doobay is filing what is believed to be the first foreign-doctors' class-action complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. She is alleging systemic discrimination and asking for what she calls a "fair" exam, including videotaping the candidate during the clinical section, as is done in the United States. She also seeks punitive damages and compensation for suffering.

Her husband is not among the complainants. He has given up.

An estimated 4,000 foreign-trained physicians languish in Ontario, despite a doctor shortage that affects one in 10 residents. This year, accrediting bodies will choose 150 foreign doctors to practise in Ontario, compared with 75 last year and 50 in 2001.

The remaining thousands work at minimum-wage jobs such as delivering pizza or, if they are luckier, as orderlies in hospitals.

It's hard for us who scraped through high-school biology to understand their humiliation and despair. "We have been treating human beings in our country, not guinea pigs," said Dr. Rubeena Zafar, 45, a petite gynecologist from Pakistan. She and her husband arrived in 2002 to escape political strife. They wanted their four children to have a better future.

Canada encourages people such as Dr. Zafar to immigrate. But then it erects licensing barriers that take years to overcome, if ever. Incredibly, top scorers on the written exam aren't even guaranteed a spot in the subsequent round of clinical tests.

Take Dr. Emad Abdel-Malak. A year ago, the family doctor moved here from Cairo with his wife, also a general practitioner, and their two children. They bought a house in Mississauga. This spring, he quit his job pumping gas to devote himself to the written exams for family physicians. In April, he scored 77 per cent and his wife scored 73 per cent. The mean was 65.1 per cent.

Last month, the Ontario International Medical Graduate Clearinghouse sent him a letter. "Unfortunately, you have not been selected for an interview," it said, barring him from trying the second phase, the clinical test that includes taking patient histories, giving physical exams and providing diagnoses.

"I ranked, but they didn't choose me," said Dr. Abdel-Malak, 40. His wife wasn't chosen either. For her part, Dr. Zafar scored 77.9 per cent on the gynecologists exam, compared with a mean of 73.7. But like Dr. Abdel-Malak, she wasn't selected for the clinical stage. Ditto for another British-trained Pakistani gynecologist with 20 years experience, who scored 89 per cent.

"Every day I read in the papers that there is a doctor shortage," Dr. Zafar said bitterly. "What the hell am I doing here?"

Brad Sinclair, executive director of the Clearinghouse, wouldn't discuss individual cases. He said the criteria for proceeding to the clinical phase includes CVs, cover letters, medical-school marks, and research and teaching experience.

Surely, these documents were available to the Clearinghouse before the doctors took the written test. If it deemed them unfit to start with, why not cull candidates before the written exams and save them the grief? "It's a free country," Mr. Sinclair said. "They don't have to take the exam."

Ms. Doobay is hoping to obtain legal aid to pursue the complaint. "Otherwise, I'll do it pro bono," she said. "The case is important. It should be addressed."

She thinks she'll win too. In 2001, five foreign doctors, including two who staged hunger strikes, brought a similar complaint before the B.C. Council of Human Rights. In 2002, the council awarded compensation ranging from $7,500 to more than $60,000.

The Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, once an obstacle to foreign doctors, is now urging expanded accreditation. That is cold comfort to Ms. Doobay's clients. Dr. Abdel-Malak is planning to move back to Cairo regardless of the outcome of the suit. "All my doctor friends back home ask me about my experience in Canada. My answer in two words: big lie."

Dr. Basel Mohsen, another member of the suit, passed the written exams two times. Twice, he has failed the clinical test. At 34, he said he'll give the exams one last shot, then move to the United States if he doesn't succeed. In hindsight, he wishes he had followed his younger brother, who left Toronto for Philadelphia in 2000. Both are medical graduates of the University of Damascus. But while Dr. Mohsen's parents are still supporting him, his brother starts the third year of a residency program for neurology next month. "He said, 'I'm not going to waste time here,' " Dr. Mohsen said.

As for Dr. Zafar, she says her husband, an electrical engineer, hasn't yet obtained a licence to work in Canada. In the meantime, he put their joint savings into a Toronto grocery store. His partners were three other engineers like himself. "Being engineers, they couldn't run a grocery store. It went down the drain," said Dr. Zafar, who helped out there until she had to study for her exam. Now, they're both unemployed and trying to figure out how much money, if any, they have left.

Last week, Ms. Doobay put up a For Sale sign at her Beaches home. She, her husband and their twin daughters, who turn 5 this month, are moving to Brazil, where her husband has numerous job offers waiting.

Ms. Doobay, a graduate of Queen's University and New York University law schools, won't be able to practise law in Brazil. She speaks fluent Dutch, but not Portuguese. And like her husband here, she faces professional barriers there.

Still, she's trying to keep her law practice alive by commuting to Toronto once a month. "It's only 9½ hours, and it's at night," she said, "so I can sleep on the plane."