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This paper addresses the overeducation of recent immigrants in the Canadian labour market. Data from the 1999 Workplace and Employee Survey are used to explore the determinants and earnings consequences of overeducation. Although a well-developed body of literature examines the earnings consequences of overeducation, this paper presents the first Canadian estimates of returns to years of schooling that are contingent upon perceived job requirements. Compared with Canadian-born workers, recent immigrants are found to have a relatively high incidence of overeducation and to earn relatively low returns for surplus schooling. These are shown to be major contributors to the earnings gap between recent immigrants and workers born in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares employment match rates for immigrants educated in a regulated profession with those of their Canadian-born and -educated counterparts. In particular, it examines Statistics Canada data for 2006 and 2011, analyzing trends and provincial comparisons over the five years following the implementation of Ontario's fair access legislation. Overall, the findings support a continued role for fair access legislation to hold regulators accountable, stronger engagement with employers to promote immigrant hiring and retention, specialized advisement and training for alternative careers, and thoughtfully designed pre-arrival initiatives that reduce time away from professional practice without increasing barriers to immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the effects of occupational licensing in Canada on the earnings of immigrants and nonimmigrants. The econometric model is estimated for immigrants and non-immigrants as well as between joiners and leavers from occupationally licensed jobs using a large panel data set. The results suggest that occupational licensing raises wages more for immigrant workers than for non-immigrants with similar observed characteristics. However, the probability of being in an occupationally licensed job is lower for immigrants as compared to non-immigrants. The implications of these findings for whether immigrants gain or lose from occupational licensing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2006, Ontario made history by passing legislation to address licensing barriers experienced by internationally educated professionals. While registration requirements have been slow to change, regulators demonstrate increasing openness to alternative ways that individuals can develop or demonstrate professional competencies. This paper reviews acceptable alternatives for meeting academic requirements in 38 Ontario professions and compares local experience requirements and alternatives for three professions in Canada and Australia. Acceptable alternatives improve flexibility and remove artificial barriers by focusing on competency. However, ongoing investment is needed from regulators and government to ensure that alternative routes to licensing are accessible, affordable, and sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, many Western countries have implemented restrictions on immigrants' access to welfare programs, thereby creating new lines of exclusion between immigrants and the native-born. Canada is commonly seen to have resisted this trend. This view overlooks, however, that exclusion can come in different forms. In addition to direct formal exclusion from welfare programs, immigrants can also have more limited access because of indirect or informal mechanisms of differentiation. Reviewing five core welfare programs, this paper shows that direct, indirect, and informal types of exclusion exist in the Canadian welfare state, albeit with different consequences for different categories of newcomers. While this conclusion is not meant to suggest that immigrants face as much exclusion as they do in some other Western countries, it does demonstrate the need to avoid the complacency regarding immigrants' social rights in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether Canadian immigrants are particularly vulnerable to mandatory retirement (MR) rules. Because of their relatively late entry into the Canadian labour market, many immigrants have less time to accumulate sufficient savings for retirement if forced to retire at a specific age. We utilize the General Social Survey (Cycle 21 2007) to examine the extent to which MR has been a binding constraint on the retirement decision of Canadians. We find a significant “MR effect,” especially for late-arriving immigrants, who are more likely to suffer financial hardship when they are forced to reitre. Accordingly, recent legislation restricting the practice of MR can be expected to result in important welfare gains for many older workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey to compare the utilization of general practitioners by elderly immigrants to that of Canadian-born elderly people. The study employs count data regression methods to take into account that the number of visits to general practitioners is a non-negative integer variable. The study estimates models using the overall sample as well as subsamples of males and females separately. The results suggest that there is no significant difference between elderly immigrants and Canadian-born seniors in their utilization of general practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of community characteristics on volunteering using data from two cycles of the Canadian Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (2004 and 2007). Controlling for many individual factors, we find evidence that in 2004, volunteering was decreasing in population, income in equality, and shares of foreign-born residents. For 2007, there is no evidence that any of the community characteristics had significant effects, suggesting that Canada’s large communities were coping increasingly well with rising income inequality and birthplace diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To encourage more even dispersion of economic immigrants throughout Canada, the federal and various provincial governments have developed the Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs). In this paper, we provide an overview of these programs and assess their impact on the flow of immigrants to smaller provinces, which have struggled to attract and retain skilled newcomers. We find, after controlling for provincial economic conditions, that the Nominee Programs of Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick were associated with significant increases in immigration flows to these provinces. We also find that one-year retentions rates of immigrants did not decrease for any province after the introduction of the PNPs. In fact, retention rates for immigrants through Nominee Programs were higher in most provinces than for economic class immigrants arriving through the federal programs. We conclude that PNPs were effective as a means of both attracting and retaining immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares changes in relative wages of university educated new immigrant workers in Canada and the United States over the period 1980-2005 and finds that outcomes were generally superior in the United States. Wages of university educated new immigrants declined relative to domestic born university graduates over the study period in Canada but rose between 1990 and 2000 in the United States. The university wage premium for new immigrants was similar in both countries in 1980 but by 2000 was considerably higher in the United States. Accounting for compositional shifts did not alter these basic results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Canadian retirement incomes by focusing on the dynamics of gender and immigration. We demonstrate that elderly women living alone and post-1970 immigrants are more likely to rely on the means-tested component of Canada's pension system, the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), which is an indication of their restricted capacity to maintain an autonomous household. The strong reliance of the Canadian pension system on both public and private earnings-related pensions accentuates the disparities within the labour market, causing both women and immigrants to have lower earnings in retirement. In addition, immigrants suffer from the residency requirements attached to basic pension programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]