Only one-third of skilled trade applicants obtained permanent residency in the first six months of a new immigration program, according to statistics released by Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

The federal government announced the new skilled trade category for permanent residency in January 2013 as a measure to combat skilled labour shortages in Canada. The Federal Skilled Trades Program had the lowest acceptance rate across the economic immigrant categories between June 2012 and July 2013.

By comparison, 96 per cent of applicants were accepted under the Live-In Caregiver Program for people taking care of children, the elderly and people with disabilities — the highest acceptance rate.

Ronalee Carey, an immigration lawyer, said the low acceptance rate could be because the government isn’t thoroughly reviewing its applications.

The skilled trade program requires applicants to have two years of work experience, proficiency in English or French, and either a job offer with a Canadian company or certification from a Canadian skilled trade education program.

An Australian couple contacted Carey to appeal the husband’s denial for permanent residency under the program. The husband, a certified heavy equipment mechanic, had two years of work experience and submitted a certificate of qualification with his application. The government told them he was denied because he did not have a job offer.

“It’s a new program and they don’t know their own regulations,” Carey said. “They’re denying applications they shouldn’t have.”

Amanda Lannan, spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Canada, said in an email that applications were rejected mainly because applicants did not have the requisite two-year work experience, or either a job offer or proper certification.

The program has an annual cap of 3,000 skilled trade applications across 43 occupations. Six months after the program’s launch, the government received 27 applications but only accepted 12.

According to Tyler Charlebois, manager of marketing for the Ontario College of Trades, some of the highest number of skilled trade workers immigrating to Ontario each year are electricians, air conditioning mechanics, auto body and automotive technicians, and plumbers.

The government program was designed to place an emphasis on practical skills, rather than formal academic education, in order to reflect the reality of skilled tradespersons, Lannan said.

However, Carey expressed concern that the program requirements do not reflect the skills of the prospective permanent resident. She said it’s unreasonable that tradespeople have to take written language tests.

Another client of hers is a mechanic and a native English speaker from the United Kingdom who is worried about the written English test.

“Mechanics don’t write essays,” Carey said. “They didn’t go to university. He’s going to fail the English test.”

The U.K. client and his wife have opted to abandon permanent residency through the skilled trades program, Carey said. They want to immigrate through the Provincial Nominee Program, which allows provinces and territories to nominate workers based on their economic and labour market needs, because they think the husband’s application will be stronger.

Carey doesn’t think these challenges will affect the number of applicants, unless they become common knowledge and ultimately, common concern.

“They’re going to look at blog posts of other people who have done it,” Carey said, noting that immigrants often share knowledge about the challenges of the system.

Carey said she was in the middle of trying to figure out how to complain to the government about her Australian client’s case. She said there is currently no recourse for administrative errors.

Carey said the next step for her client would be to dispute his case in federal court. She wants the files to be reviewed again before pursuing that course of action.

“I charge $2,500 just to do the documents for court,” Carey said. “They don’t want to go to court.”

Applications of Skilled Trades Being Accepted (Text)

By: Thomas Hall

North America’s largest coal-fired power plant, and biggest producer of greenhouse gasses, is burning no more.

Nanticoke generating station was once a critical piece of Ontario’s power supply. Since the late 1970s its eight massive boilers produced thousands of megawatts of power and consumed countless tonnes of coal.

Jack Gibbons, from the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, said they began their campaign to rid Ontario of coal power 17 years ago and the closure of Nanticoke is a significant win for the campaign.

“It was Ontario’s number one smog polluter and Canada’s number one greenhouse gas emitter,” Gibbons said. “It was also Ontario’s number one source of airborne mercury emissions, which is a potent neurotoxin.

In 2009 Ontario Power Generation began to phase out the plant, closing four of its boilers. In January 2014 its last fire burned out, almost a year ahead of schedule.

But the closure of Nanticoke wasn’t with out its opponents. It was one of the biggest employers in the region.

Craig Manley is the general manager of planning and economic development for Haldimand County where Nanticoke sits on the edge of Lake Erie. The area directly affected by the shutdown.

He said the closure was gradual, a few boilers at a time, which helped to mitigate the impact.

Note: The most recent data set is from 2012.

“As a major employer, it was an important part of our tax base,” Manley said. “And certainly we don’t see the degree of impact at this stage of the game, but we do anticipate that there will be a reduced revenue stream to the municipality.”

Only a handful of employees remain out of the 600 or so that worked at Nanticoke, said Manley. Their job is to keep Nanticoke from falling into ruin case Ontario Power Generation, which owns the plant, decides they need to convert some of the boilers to gas or biomass burners.

Something Manley said Haldimand County wants to see happen.

“We’ve always taken the perspective that there’s been a lot of public sector investment in both the facility and the transition network that leads into the province,” Manley said. “And we feel there are opportunities in the long term to reposition that for natural gas or biomass or combination thereof.”

But Gibbons from the Ontario Clean Air Alliance would rather see the plant torn down.

“It’s an old plant with old boilers and if they were to burn biomass it would be a very inefficient use of biomass,” Gibbons said.

Ontario Power Generation’s director of corporate relations and communication, Bill McKinlay, said there is a chance some of the boilers could be converted.

“It depends on the need for the electricity in the future,” McKinlay said. “It’s a decision that would be made by the Ontario power authority. But what converting to gas offers is very quick ramp rates, so you can bring a station on quickly to meet peak demand and then pull it back.”

McKinlay says that 95 per cent of Ontario’s energy comes from sources that do not emit greenhouse gas, including nuclear power.

Gibbons says he’s looking forward to the end of the 17-year struggle to end coal-fired power in the province.

“Ontario is virtually coal free. There’s still the Thunder Bay coal plant, which is going to be converted to biomass later this year,” Gibbons said. “But southern Ontario is coal free and all of Ontario will be coal free by the end of this year.”

Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank reported a significant decrease in monthly client visits between January and December last year, suggesting that Canada’s economy is improving after the recession in 2008.

According to an analysis of the food bank’s database, the visits fluctuated throughout the year but showed a decrease between 63,000 clients in January and slightly more than 42,000 clients in December. The food bank uses this dataset to determine how much food is needed to sustain their network of more than 200 agencies in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area.

The monthly totals are determined by the number of people in the household multiplied by the number of times per month they come to the food bank.

“They’re still not at pre-recession levels but they’re closer to that. I think that reflects what you’ll find in a lot of social assistance caseloads,” said Michael Oliphant, director of public affairs for the food bank. “If there’s a recession, they spike. They tend to kind of follow the ebb and flow of the economy.”

Despite the decrease in the number of people using Daily Bread from last January to December, experts say there are still many reasons to be concerned.

Graham Riches is director of the School of Social Work and Family Studies at the University of British Columbia. He said that food purchasing is easily changed if household income is low.

“You can buy more expensive food, less expensive food, you can go hungry,” Riches said.

“There are different ways in which people will ration their food budgets because they are flexible whereas other costs are not.”

In a report released last year, the food bank cited the high cost of living in Canada’s largest city as a significant contributor to the number of clients struggling with food insecurity.

“The cost of living in Toronto used to be much higher than outside of it. So you could get an apartment in Scarborough for much cheaper than it would be right downtown,” Oliphant said about the changing housing prices in the city. “But those housing costs now are really high throughout the whole region.”

Valerie Tarasuk, a professor at the University of Toronto said that food bank numbers can be challenging to interpret in the broader context.

“We’ve got measures of hunger and food insecurity in Canada and they bear little resemblance to the food bank numbers,” Tarasuk said. “So most people who are struggling to put food on the table in a community may never show up at a food bank and there are a lot of reasons for that.”

Some of these reasons are simply a feeling of discomfort with going to a food bank or lacking access to a food bank in one’s neighborhood in the first place.

Oliphant agreed with the realities of these barriers and that the numbers are not always clear indicators of those who are hungry in Canada.

However, he said the numbers can be useful to understand food insecurity and its relationship to the economy in a broader sense.

“We started to see big increases in food bank use in 2007, about a year before the recession hit,” Oliphant said. “There’s a bit of a canary in a coal mine kind of thing with the numbers and where the trends are going, more so than the absolute numbers.”

In the same report, the food bank said that the number of baby boomers who are aging but not yet eligible for senior benefits are a major demographic using the food bank’s services.

Daily Bread Who’s Hungry Report 2013 (Text)
Tarasuk said it is best to approach with caution when determining who is using the food bank from the data.

“I think it’s dangerous to infer anything very much about public policy issue from food bank numbers because they are just a snapshot of a much bigger problem and it’s a pretty blurry snapshot,” Tarasuk said.

Oliphant said Daily Bread Food Bank is expecting a slight decline in client visits this year as the economy continues to stabilize and recover.

The City of Ottawa will clarify its policies about animals in Vanier parks this spring in response to complaints. In some Vanier parks it is currently unclear whether or not dogs are allowed in the area, and the changes will specify the rules.

Rideau-Vanier, ward 12, was associated with 780 bylaw services calls regarding animals in 2013, more than any other ward in Ottawa according to City of Ottawa Open Data records.

Source: “311- Monthly Service Request Submissions” by Ken Osmun, City of Ottawa. Available at http://data.ottawa.ca/en/dataset/311-monthly-service-request-submissions. 

City Councillor Mathieu Fleury, who is responsible for ward 12, said most of the calls he receives about animals are related to interactions with dogs. Fleury said many of the callers ask whether or not dogs are allowed to be in Vanier parks.

The City of Ottawa’s Animal Care and Control bylaw specifies that dogs are not allowed in parks that have a sign indicating that dogs are prohibited in the area. But some parks in Vanier have no sign at all, which creates confusion among park users.

“Because they had no designation it was ambiguous,” Fleury said. “And now we’re clarifying that.”

The lack of designation has been an issue in recent years.

“In Vanier, since amalgamation, none of the parks were ever designated or re-designated for animal uses,” Fleury said. “I know that in the past that’s created a lot of conflict.”

Michele Witteveen, who lives in Vanier, said it’s difficult to find a park that she can let her two dogs run around in off-leash.

“There are quite a few that aren’t dog friendly,” Witteveen said. “It kind of sucks because they don’t get the energy out that they need to.”

Some residents let their dogs roam the parks off-leash anyway.

“Even in the places where you’re not supposed to have dogs I see a lot of people with their dogs off-leash,” Witteveen said.

Fleury said he recognizes that dog owners need to have a place to go with their dogs.

“A lot of the reality is that if you live in rural areas your animal has a lot of space, and it’s probably on your property,” Fleury said. “In the urban core, chances are you live in smaller unit sizes and you need more of the green space.”

Richelieu Park and Riverain Park will both become more dog-friendly as a result of the new designations. Fleury said he hopes the changes will minimize conflicts between dog owners and other members of the public who use Vanier parks. 

While Rideau-Vanier was associated with the greatest number of bylaw services calls regarding animals in 2013, calls about animals were fairly even across the city. The calls associated with Rideau-Vanier accounted for only 8% of the total.

Animals were one of the main reasons for calls to the City of Ottawa last year. The City of Ottawa received 9,441 calls regarding animals, which represents 24% of all bylaw services calls made in 2013.

Animals were the second most frequent cause for report after noise, but not all of the calls were complaints.

Ken Osmun, the author of the bylaw services calls data, wrote in an email response that some calls about animals “are related to pet licensing (dog and cat tags), information about exotic pet ownership and animals on municipal roads.”

Fleury said his office is responsive to calls about animals.

“We follow up, we look at what the policy is,” Fleury said.

Fleury said he holds public information sessions to ensure people know the rules.

“We’re not there to slam on fines, we’re there to inform and educate,” Fleury said.

Click here to see a list of Vanier parks that are currently designated for animal use.

Click here for more information on City of Ottawa animal policies.

A heat map shows a large portion of the current bylaw violations in Vancouver are in the Downtown Eastside.

By Micki Cowan

A problematic housing unit on Granville Street has the most current bylaw violations of any licensed rental property in Vancouver, according to an analysis of the city’s rental housing database.

The database, which launched Jan. 15 2013, tracks the number of landlords with outstanding bylaw violations filed by tenants. The database listing is updated daily, with most of the unresolved violations occurring within the last three years.

The 73-unit Clifton Hotel at 1125 Granville St. topped the list with 60 violations on March 8. The issues range from a lack of smoke alarms to pest infestations.

Click on the map below to find out which properties have unresolved bylaw issues:

City Coun. Geoff Meggs, who sits on the city’s housing committee, said the database was created to address the quality of rental housing. Meggs said some landlords simply fail to repair their housing when a violation occurs and the database addresses that.

“What we’ve found is by posting these, particularly on the hard cases, it leads very quickly to better compliance, because people don’t want to be listed on this database,” Meggs said.

Since the launch, Meggs said the city’s seen a decline in the number of people with more than five infractions and landlords are fixing issues faster.

However, in the case of the Clifton, the city sought a court injunction in July 2013 to order the shareholders of the company that owns the building, Abolghasem Abdollahi, Zohreh Fazi-Mashhadi and Yahya Nickpour, to clean it up.

An injunction is a court document that allows the city to ask the court to order a landlord to adhere to city bylaws and fix their property, according to Meggs.

Meggs said the city only seeks an injunction in “really egregious” cases, but that injunctions are generally an effective way of dealing with landlords who don’t comply.

“We seek a court order that he’s got to comply with the law and if they fail to, they can be in contempt of court but also pay a fine,” he said.

Meggs said they don’t seek an injunction if the landlord is making progress or confronting their problems, and the Clifton’s injunction was the first case since the database launched in January.

Click below to hear Coun. Geoff Meggs explain what renters get out of the database:

The Clifton’s company shareholders have since been involved in their own court case, as they bicker over who has the rights and responsibilities to the property.

According to Abdollahi’s lawyer, W. Gerald Mazzei, the court case is holding back renovations at the Clifton.

Mazzei said Abdollahi already spent more than $200,000 in repairs to the property since taking over management in March.

“His plan is to fully renovate the hotel,” said Mazzei of Abdollahi. “It’s just that with all this litigation going on, he’s only been able to do sort of the bare minimum to look after the immediate concerns of the city.”

Bob Nicklin is CEO of the nonprofit Affordable Housing Societies, which owns and manages low- to medium-income rental housing in B.C.’s Lower Mainland.

The group owns one property in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside that’s listed in the database. The 84-unit building at 43 Powell St. has four unresolved bylaw infractions, which include a general maintenance issue and the need to inspect and test all emergency lights.

“We want win-win solutions and that’s what we strive to achieve,” Nicklin said. “I wouldn’t pretend that all 3500 of our tenants are happy with us either, because you just can’t keep people happy all the time.”

According to Meggs, most rental bylaw infraction are sorted out within a few months, although not always.

“There can be cases where they last a while for legitimate reasons,” he said. “That’s the kind of case where you have to be patient.”

The following annotations on this document from the City of Vancouver points out interesting ideas behind the database’s development.

Eggspectation in Old Montreal has the highest number of food violations, according to an analysis of Montreal’s restaurant-inspection database.

The violations include complaints of insects and rodents, contamination, and improper food storage. The 201 Saint-Jacques St. location has been forced to shut down.

Head office intervened and closed the franchise, but not before a long court battle.

According to a food-safety expert, this court case exposes a weakness in the city’s restaurant inspection system; it is too difficult to close down repeat offenders, and there is no way to warn customers.

That restaurant ­– part of Canada’s Eggspectation Franchise – closed down last January.

It took three years to close it down and half a million dollars in legal fees, said Pradeep Anand, head office manager. “It took so long because he legally resisted.”

After several complaints from employees and customers, head office decided to bring the franchise owner to court.

In 2008, head office was legally able to stop the franchise owner from operating the restaurants. But the owner appealed and obtained permission to continue operating.

Anand is disappointed the city did not try to permanently close down the restaurant.

He said the city should make a greater effort to close down repeat offenders. “It should be something that is incremental depending on the severity of infestation. If there seems to be no attempt to rectify then they should close down.”

The city fined the restaurant $26,000 in food violations, the second highest total amount.

The $26,000 is more than 14 times higher than the median fine of $1,400.

A city spokesperson Valerie Degnagner said there’s little it can do to permanently shut down repeat offenders, the real power rests with the province.

“If they don’t confirm to what Montreal city inspectors are asking, we can close down their establishment for five days. But over that is has to be the Quebec government.”

The city did close down the restaurant for two to three days at a time.

Food safety expert, François Décary-Gilardeau said Montreal needs a better restaurant inspection system, perhaps one modelled on Toronto’s Dinesafe program.

The current system is a lengthy and difficult process. He said it can take years before the city has the power to temporarily close down restaurants.

And because of that he said Montreal should look at cities like Toronto and make food inspection violations more readily available to the public.

With DineSafe, each inspection results in a pass, a conditional pass or a closed notice. “It’s really great because you have a Google map and you have all the little dots. Green for pass, yellow for conditional and red for closed.”

Décary-Gilardeau said this kind of system is one step ahead because the results are publicized even before they receive a fine. “I think it will give a lot of interest for restaurants to improve the management of their food.”

As of now Montreal does not have this kind of system in place.

A map of restaurants that have received food violation fines in Montreal. Source: City of Montreal.

The map shows a large portion of food violations in Montreal are in Chinatown.

In 2012, there were over 10,000 food inspections in Montreal and over 2000 infractions.