How can Canada’s economy have an effect on migrant workers?
Overall, the economic outlooks shows strong employment growth over successive few years with several opportunities for newcomers.
At the start of the pandemic, immigrants who had landed within the last 5 years faced higher unemployment levels than Canadian born staff.
However, over the course of the pandemic, that shifted.
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As of January 2022, the employment rate for newcomers is currently 7% higher than its pre-pandemic average.
“Immigrants had this major decrease at first in their total employment levels,” says marc Desormeaux, senior economist at Scotiabank. “But there’s been a quick recover since – quicker than the bounce back for Canadian born staff. migrant staff are currently well higher than where they were before the pandemic.”
Desormeaux expects this to continue and sees it as a decent sign for future immigrant job growth.
Canadian labour shortages
What’s concerning Desormeaux is that the mounting labour shortages all sectors are presently experiencing.
“Labour shortages are a true constraint on economic process and therefore the economy’s ability to get over COVID-19,” he says.
Labor shortages, that occur once businesses would really like to produce a lot of or operate a lot of hours however aren’t able to do therefore as a result of they can’t hire enough staff with the talent set they have, limit profit and economic process. within the latest survey by the Canadian Federation of independent Business, regarding half respondents indicated that a shortage of trained labour was holding them back.
“Canada had regarding 913,000 job vacancies within the third quarter of 2021. That was the best ever recorded range for a single quarter,” says Desormeaux. “That rate isn’t typical — that speaks to the actual nature of this downturn. Normally, labor shortages are one thing that emerges after a amount of extended growth. We’re seeing these terribly tight labor markets with a great deal of labor shortages fairly early within the economic cycle.”
While no sector is proof against the difficulties of finding workers, Desormeaux reports that some sectors are experiencing higher rates.
“We’re seeing the tightest conditions in what we call ‘high contact sectors’ like accommodation, food service, and live performance or different industries wherever economic performance is most closely tied to people’s ability to congregate in teams,” he says. “But this can be constant story across most industries. money services, technology, and construction have a great deal of job shortages still.”
Desormeaux believes that a number of the labour shortages are the results of lockdowns within the high contact sectors, throughout that staff moved on to different fields or went back to school. however even before the pandemic, researchers were talking regarding skills shortages in areas just like the tech sector, and large-scale investments in infrastructure revival is refueling construction skills shortages. Desormeaux expects immigrants to play a key role in serving to Canada solve these skills challenges.
“Typically, economic immigrants have created up around 60 minutes of admissions to Canada,” he says. “These are people selected based on their ability to contribute to the marketplace. Newcomers have talent sets that are valuable which are missing among the Canadian economy, which contributes to stronger economic process and a lot of profit for corporations.”
According to Desormeaux, the tech sector are a specific focus for immigration going forward, with shortages within the tech marketplace set to cause important problems within the trade if talent isn’t found elsewhere. He additionally sees construction as a key space of economic immigration.
“The housing industry is presently managing job shortages, and we’re going into a amount wherever infrastructure is being engineered at the national and provincial levels as a part of pandemic recovery efforts,” he says. “We’re additionally building a lot of and a lot of homes to undertake and cope with affordability challenges.”
Housing affordability can improve with the proper policy
“Our view at Scotiabank economics is that managing affordability is regarding obtaining supply and demand to align more closely,” says Desormeaux.
But that’s tougher than it should appear since catching up with a lagging housing offer will take years, and current international offer chain disruptions are inflicting construction delays. Desormeaux advocates for policy changes to extend supply, like eliminating division rules that ban townhomes and flats in certain areas, increasing housing density around transit stations, and increasing the pace of construction.
He says that Scotiabank economics recently calculable that Ontario would want a minimum of 650,000 a lot of homes to align its per-person housing stock with the rest of the country — and that’s only 1 province. to own constant dwellings to population ratio as our international peers, it’d take a minimum of 1.2 million additional homes.
“We suspect it’ll take some time before housing value growth becomes more property over the longer run,” he says. “But fortunately, we’re not anticipating housing costs beginning like they did at the peak for the pandemic, that happened, in part, as a result of not enough supply was coming online due to restrictions.”
A positive outlook for newcomers
Overall, Desormeaux reports a positive outlook for newcomers.
“We have pretty robust immigrant employment growth engineered into consecutive few years,” he says. “For newcomers to Canada, crucial what kind of lifestyle you’d like and what reasonably region you’d wish to settle into may impact your expertise, however we’re fairly optimistic regarding the general economic outlook for the country.”
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