How hard
 

How hard is it to get into Canada if you do not have a skill.

Re: How hard
 

Desperately.

Re: How hard
 

Or marry a Canadian!! Or try to find your long-lost Canadian mother!

Re: How hard
 

Finding a "long-lost" Canadian mother probably won't help now, unless you were born on 15 February 1977 or later on.

The transitional arrangements to register as a Canadian citizen by descent based on birth before 1977 to a Canadian mother were closed on 14th August 2004, and unless/until they are reopened by the Canadian government this option is not available.



Jeremy

Re: How hard
 

Unless you have lots of money - that always helps :)

Re: How hard
 

Lots of money only helps if you have a skill aswell!! I am assuming you are talking about Investor Category here - check it out, it isn't just a case of giving Canada your money - you have to have proved yourself and continue to do so in Canada.

Re: How hard
 

I debated whether to say something rude -- and then I decided why not? I think its pretty easy to get into Canada if you are a crook. These people come here and then they use the system and manage to stay for years. What was the name of that Indian man who had been involved in credit card fraud etc. etc. etc. He ran some pizza joint in Toronto or thereabouts. He managed to fight deportation for about 20 years before they finally got shot of him.

It really ticks me off that people like that get to stay for years but honest people who go about things the right way - its tough for them. I saw something on TV a few months ago. All about how many illegal immigrants there were working in the building trades around southern Ontario and how if they kicked them out, the building trades would come to a halt, so they were thinking of allowing them PR status. They were even saying how sorry they were for them becuase their kids couldn't go to school and they couldn't get medical treatment - something like that. Seems to me if they weren't illegal immigrants in the first place they wouldn't have those problems.

Sorry - I didn't mean you should be an illegal immigrant to get in. I also can't find anything about that building trades story on the Internet, but I know I found it at the time.

Re: How hard
 

It's probably easier to balance two greasy ball-bearings on top of each other.

Re: How hard
 

have a go at the CIC self assessment test - that will give you how many points you may have and then you can see.

Re: How hard
 

This last bit doesn't sound right. My brother worked here for years before he became legal, none of his colleagues were legal, most still aren't and their kids all go to school. I've come to think illegal immigrants are better for Canada than legal ones, they tend to work hard, stay out of trouble and claim no benefits. When there's no work here they go home or to the US costing Canada nothing. Above all, illegal immigrants have usable skills, they don't drive cabs and bitch that they should be doctors; they lay bricks or plaster ceilings.

Re: How hard
 

CIC also state that the requirements don't apply if you're directly selected by a province.

For example, Nova Scotia requires two years management experience (may be in a business, governmental, institutional, or other organizational unit, either for profit or not for profit) and $128K. They also fix you up with a six month contract with an approved employer worth $20K.

I know, because I thought about applying for it :)

Re: How hard
 

So did I, until I realised that you give $128k to then work for a company for six months to "earn" $20 k back.

I would be surprised if anyone was that keen on living in Canada. I wonder how many people they find that are happy to sacrifice best part of £60000.00 and six months of their life. The queue must be very short indeed, or they would have gold roads and gold pavements in Nova Scotia. :scared:

Re: How hard
 

That's what I thought before I landed, in hindsight I've lost more than $100K trying to catch up my career to the level it was back in the UK.

What you're paying for is the opportunity to network with local businesses - I don't know what Nova Scotia is like, but doing the same in Alberta without some sort of introduction is damn near impossible.

Like I said, it's "cost" me more than that and taken me a lot longer - if I had a set cost and a set timescale and the opportunity to immigrate again, I'd look at it a lot more seriously :o

Re: How hard
 

That's harsh! You think physicians and engineers who drive cabs shouldn't complain about this sad state of affairs?

As an aside: my daughters, both Canadian citizens who at the time lived with their mother in Europe, came to live with me about ten years ago. When I regsitered them is school, their immigration/citizenship status was the very first question that came up. I am not disputing that what you say about your brother's colleagues is true but if a person's not legal, going to school won't be easy or automatic

GTR

Re: How hard
 

We haven't got our visa's yet but my son has been going to school for 4 months now, we/he was never asked for residency status and friends of ours come over for a few months at a time as and when they want to, there son goes to the same school, again, no questions asked.
This is in NS so it maybe different policy from Ontario?

Re: How hard
 

I can't say I have very much sympathy for them, if you want to work as an engineer, then you should go somewhere where you are qualified to do so. It shouldn't be news that you can't practise in certain countries. I think it's bizarre that the government recruits such people, knowing they'll be underemployed and frustrated, while the country depends on people they won't legally admit, but then they're the government. What you gonna do ?

Thinking about schooling, my partner started college here while a tourist, she'd been going to school for some weeks before she obtained a study permit so I suppose she could have gone on indefinitely. Health is a problem for the unstatused, at least the poor unstatused, but I don't think education is. I'll ask in the pub, there are lots of tradespeople there, I know they're mainly undocumented and that several have school aged children, there must be some common arrangement.

Re: How hard
 

Touched a nerve here. Fair enough to expect people to check whether or not you will be allowed to practice in a contry before you go there and find that you can't find work.

But, the lack of recipricosity is damn ridiculous. A Canadian can practice as an Engineer in the UK but it doesn't work vice vera. This is even more ridiculous in the oil industry where almost every one works to US standards. It is not surprising that they are so short of chemical engineers in Alberta.

Re: How hard
 

I could be really cynical and suggest that's because the professional body are only interested in ensuring its members get paid top whack, but that would a very irresponsible comment to make and I'm not that cynical ... they're simply ensuring the quality of service provided by their members.

Re: How hard
 

I know a couple of civil engineers who moved here (Calgary) from the UK in the last year or so and neither have had to re-qualify, they just walked into CE jobs. They tell me that some regulations are different but that's all.

Re: How hard
 

Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks. It pays to check before you apply ...

Re: How hard
 

You don't have to requalify as such. Rather get one years experience under the supervision of an Albertan PE then take a work practice and ethics exam. I don't really have a problem with that, although some employers do. Many projects required experienced engineers to supervise teams of others, so you can't initially slot into these positions and the younger engineers aren't capable of filling these positions.

What gets my goat is having to be supervised by someone with 20 years less experience who has to have me explain basic engineering concepts to them.

Re: How hard
 

I spent my first year here being micromanaged by people without any relevant IT certifications - none of them would even get a look in nowadays if I was looking to hire - grin and bear it now, one day you'll have the opportunity for ample pay back ... that's the reward for working hard as an immigrant :cool:

Re: How hard
 

This has been covered several times already.

No, they shouldn't complain. As Engineers - Doctors etc, they should be intelligent enough to find out what they are getting themselves into by applying for immigration in the first place.

If they find these things out after they arrive, then they deserve everything they get .... or don't get, as the case may be.

Re: How hard
 

I duly asked in the pub and got a response, from a school vice-principal no less, that the TDSB has a policy of not asking about parental status so as to avoid discriminating against the children of the unstatused. At first this seems bizarre but, I suppose, it's not the children's fault that the parents don't have their papers in order. Toronto's a city of immigrants and, inevitably, many of them will have come to fill actual jobs rather than quotas, someone offered a job as a chef or a bricklayer today is not likely to put it on hold while he or she gets a masters in philosophy and learns French so as to be quota compliant. I'm sure there are unstatused people who come to be gangsters but the ones I've met came to fill an immediate vacancy.

I went on a search to try to confirm the TDSB policy and was hugely amused to stumble across the Ontario Human Rights Commision's musings that there is discrimination againsts students based on their immigration status :

http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en_text/consul...chools_9.shtml

The only reference to the TDSB requiring proof of immigration status I could find was here :

http://www.tdsb.on.ca/wwwdocuments/p..._Fall_2005.pdf

on close reading it says that, in the absence of proof of status, prospective students will not be refused tuition but a fee applies. I believe that's generally true as this search turned up the websites of various organisations lobbying for the fees to be waived in the case of students from various countries (Ethiopia and Somalia, for example).

My impression is that the big problem for people living here without status isn't finding schools but the risk of being involved with the police for some minor reason ; getting a traffic ticket, being mugged, something of that type, and incidentally being deported. That'd bugger up the domestic schedule, "cub scout meetings are suspended pending Akela sneaking back in to the country".

Re: How hard
 

For anyone heading elsewhere it is still worth checking. In York Region (the area north of Toronto around Richmond Hill and up to Newmarket) has a central school registration centre for all newcomers and immigration status is one of the things they are checking. The schools in this region will not accept a newcomer until they have been processed and checked by the centre.

Re: How hard
 

The Calgary Board of Education checks immigration status. The annual form sent home with your child has a box to declare immigration status (pre-printed from the central office) so your class teacher also has that information.