Recently, the federal government announced sweeping changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program.
Most significant are a 300% cost increase to employers and the deletion of the Labour Market Opinion (LMO) with the new Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) and Transition Plan.
The purpose of the new LMIA application is essentially the same as the LMO:
a) to confirm that the employer has taken all reasonable steps to hire Canadian citizens and permanent residents first and has a legitimate need to hire a foreign physician.
b) to support an application by a foreign national for a work permit in Canada.
The three changes that will most significantly complicate the process for employers considering hiring foreign physicians are:
Cost – The fee payable to government has increased from $275 to $1000 per application. In addition, the complexity of the new forms warrants that employers must also consider hiring private Immigration Consultants or Lawyers at costs ranging from $1800 to $3600 per application. These are substantial increases for any employer, and can be a major burden for private clinics or rural communities in dire need of multiple physicians.
Processing Time – The federal government has promised to speed up processing to ten business days for the highest earning occupations, which includes physicians. My office filed our first LMIA for the employment of a physician as this newsletter went to print, so this will be a good test of this promised 10 day turnaround.
The “Transition Plan” – The government is now requiring that all employers complete a detailed transition plan explaining how they plan to transition to a Canadian workforce.
The government offers examples of things that an employer can do to transition to a Canadian work force including offering flexible work arrangement for employees, and reaching out to groups that have traditionally been underemployed, like recent immigrants and Aboriginals. Given the 8-12 year training period required for physicians, the latter is a pointless recommendation, particularly in the short term.
The government then asks what employers will do to train Canadians. Obviously, when it comes to educating and training physicians there are extraordinary limits on what employers can do, particularly private medical clinics, rural communities, community hospitals, and even some provincial governments.
The reality that the federal government ‘apparently’ doesn’t understand is that provincial governments have very few resources and private employers have no tools to impact the supply of Canadians trained in any medical speciality.
The reality that government should understand is that any ongoing shortage in one or more medical specialties, is a much larger policy question that must be co-ordinated among Canada’s medical credentialing agencies, university based medical schools and provincial governments.
In the absence of a specific physician centered immigration policy and process, Canadian physician employers can only hope that Employment Services and Development Canada staff will exercise common sense when reviewing the transition plans submitted by employers and communities struggling with dire physician service shortages.
David Nurse of David Hunt Nurse Law Inc. for CanAm DocZoNews, July 28, 2014
