BY TOBI COHEN, POSTMEDIA NEWS MARCH 29, 2012 Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced plans to hire an outside company to assess the educational credentials of new-comers before they arrive in Canada in a bid to keep foreign physicians from having to drive cabs when they arrive. Kenney said the government will issue a request for proposals within the next two months in the hopes of selecting a third-party organization that can begin conducting these overseas assessments before 2013. "The overall goal here is to better select and better support potential immigrants before they come to Canada so they can hit the ground running once they arrive by integrating quickly into our labour market," he told a business audience of professional regulators Wednesday. "Once this process is in place, we think this will result in a significant improvement in the points grid system we use to assess applicants to the foreign skilled worker program." Kenney said the idea ...

BY TOBI COHEN, POSTMEDIA NEWS MARCH 28, 2012 OTTAWA — Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced plans to hire an outside company to assess the educational credentials of newcomers before they arrive in Canada in a bid to keep foreign physicians from having to drive cabs when they arrive. On the eve of an anticipated austerity budget, Kenney said the government will issue a request for proposals within the next two months in the hopes of selecting a third-party organization that can begin conducting these overseas assessments by the end of the year. "The overall goal here is to better select and better support potential immigrants before they come to Canada so they can hit the ground running once they arrive by integrating quickly into our labour market," he told a business audience of professional regulators Wednesday. "Once this process is in place, we think this will result in a significant improvement in the points grid system we use to assess applicants to...

Immigration sponsorship of parents, grandparents under review by Ottawa March 27, 2012 00:03:00 Nicholas Keung IMMIGRATION REPORTER Ottawa is considering limiting eligibility of immigration sponsorship of parents and grandparents to those who are “widowed.” That is one option under review by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney as he launched his national consultations to redesign the program that reunites parents and grandparents with their families in Canada. Other measures under consideration include: • Raising the income requirements of the sponsors and binding them to lifetime financial support of the elderly family members in Canada. • Adopting the “balance of family test” where parents and grandparents must have at least half of their children residing permanently in Canada to be eligible for sponsorship. • Restricting eligibility to sponsors who are Canadian citizens; currently permanent residents are eligible to sponsor their parents and grandparents. • ...

Joseph Brean  Mar 16, 2012 – 10:14 PM ET | Last Updated: Mar 16, 2012 10:18 PM ET   “We are much more than a kind of postmodern, relativistic reflection of the world’s diversity,” says Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, who emphasizes the central role in his immigration reforms of civic literacy, the ideal that every Canadian should understand the country’s basic values, symbols and institutions. In satirizing the national character in his 1962 poem “Can. Lit.,” the great Canadian poet Earle Birney made the cutting observation that, unlike our ancient imperial homelands or even our closest neighbour, Canada is mostly unbothered by history. “We French, we English, never lost our civil war / Endure it still, a bloodless civil bore,” he wrote. “No wounded lying about, no Whitman wanted. / It’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re haunted.” Once a pioneer in a virgin land, by mid-century, Birney’s archetypal Canadian had com...

Immigration system overhaul is way overdue By Chris Vander Doelen, The Windsor Star March 16, 2012 Only weeks after Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that an overhaul is on the way for Canada’s broken immigration system comes a report that suggests the makeover couldn’t come too soon. The report, from two respected academics at the world-class Fraser Institute, is bound to raise the hackles of those who support wide-open immigration at any cost. But there is no doubt Canada’s immigration system is a corrupt and dysfunctional mess. From the human smugglers who make millions off the good nature of Canadians, to birth tourism and “passport babies,” to Canadians of convenience who live elsewhere and the one-million-applicant backlog, a lot of things need to change, the faster the better. It’s probably not a coincidence we have the first government in 25 years willing and able to tackle this prickly topic. The changes have already started. For instance, in 2010 Canada sudd...

By Ian Robertson ,Toronto Sun First posted: Friday, March 16, 2012 06:47 PM EDT Ontario Citizenship and Immigration Minister Charles Sousa. (Toronto Sun files) ...

BY TOBI COHEN, POSTMEDIA NEWS MARCH 16, 2012 Canada is planning to overhaul its popular Immigrant Investor Program that is so attractive to newcomers that some chartered private planes last year to be first to submit their application when the program opened after Citizenship and Immigration Canada capped intake at 700 cases in an effort to manage demand. Within 30 minutes the pro-gram - which fast-tracks permanent residency for those who can afford it - was closed for the year. In an interview with Postmedia News, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said the $800,000 minimum investment required under the cur-rent system is simply too low and that it's time to consider making it a permanent contribution to the Canadian economy rather than just a loan. Right now provinces that accept immigrant investors - predominantly Ontario and British Columbia - get the cash to invest in economic development projects but must pay back the principal five years later. Kenney said a lot of it...