On March 14, 2008 Canada’s Conservative government tabled a bill that proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA). Under the current law, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) is required to assess every Permanent Resident application received at a visa office, in a particular immigration category, on a “first come, first served” basis. The proposed legislative change provides the Immigration Minister with the authority to regulate the backlog of applicants. It allows CIC to select among the new applications received and choose those that it determines are best suited for Canada’s labour market needs.

Young, educated, and attuned to life in Canada, foreign students are Canadian immigrants of choice, with no settlement-integration cost and strong potential to contribute to the Canadian labour force. In December 2006 there were 157,000 foreign students in Canada - many from China, Korea, and the United States. The Canadian Bureau for International Education reports that the pool of international students in Canada could add as many as 30,000 skilled immigrants annually. They have called on the Canadian government to create a national strategy for international students.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada has been working with new EU countries in an effort to establish visa-exempt status for all EU member states. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Lithuania, are the most recent countries for which citizens traveling to Canada are no longer required to obtain Temporary Resident (Visitor) Visas.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) has been pumping funds into the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program, supporting English and French language training providers across Canada as they help newcomers transition into life in Canada. Additionally, the Quebec government has recently introduced new measures to improve and extend French language classes to immigrants. But is it enough? The latest Statistics Canada census figures show that a large number of Canada’s new immigrants are working in a native tongue that is neither of the country’s official languages.

Since it’s inception in 2002, Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) has stood for the principle that anyone is entitled to apply for permission to live in Canada and to have his or her admissibility considered fairly, according to purely objective criteria. This core value is now threatened.