Immigration policy needs a vinarterta

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/12/2015 (3601 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two weeks, ago the executive council of the refugee sponsors of Canada met in Ottawa with new Immigration Minister John McCallum. On everyone’s mind was the upcoming big movement of Syrian refugees to Canada.

But on the minds of the council members was the equal number of already-sponsored refugees from other countries who have typically been waiting to get here for five years or more. It didn’t seem fair.

McCallum mused that if the slice of the immigration pie were enlarged for privately sponsored refugees, what other slice would be correspondingly reduced in size?

A pie is the standard analogy for Canada’s annual intake of immigrants. It’s a pie that usually encompasses about 250,000 immigrants a year. It has several pieces.

There are spouses and children, nannies, new workers, nominees of the provinces, investors, fathers and mothers, ammas and afis (grandmas and grandpas), refugees, and the list goes on.

The demand in every immigration category is much bigger than its slice of the annual pie. When Jason Kenney was the immigration minister, he said total demand was at least triple what Canada was letting in.

But making that pie bigger would need a bigger oven — more capacity to process overseas and more capacity to resettle and integrate here. Is this doable? Are we managing an economy or are we building a country?

Perhaps we need a different analogy than a pie. How about a vinarterta? This multi-layered prune torte has been the traditional Christmas cake of Icelandic Canadians since they brought the recipe here in 1875.

Typically, there are seven thin layers of cake in a vinarterta and between each a layer of filling, about the same in total layers as the categories in Canada’s immigration program.

Instead of visualizing immigration as a pie, let’s see it as a vinarterta where each cake layer has its own importance, each having to be rolled out and cooked separately. We could look at immigration this way, too.

Clever vinarterta cooks have a trick up their sleeves. How do you get those perfect thin cake layers out of your typical cake pan, still intact? Simple. You turn the cake pan upside down, spread the batter on its bottom, and cook it that way.

Immigration policy, too, needs to be turned upside down, to be rethought in clever ways that do justice to the wishes of Canada’s people, ways that take a longer view than the short-term needs of the labour market, and that see the exciting potential in a more-populated Canada.

You don’t need a bigger oven for a vinarterta. Existing capacity will do. You’re building up.

 

Tom Denton is the executive director at Hospitality House Refugee Ministry.