The Northern Policy Institute is lobbying for more immigration to northwestern Ontario.
The President and CEO of the think tank Charles Cirtwill says northwestern Ontario doesn’t have the population base to fill all the jobs that need to be filled.
“The basic message is around the idea there are too many immigrants coming in… for areas like northern Ontario and rural areas across the country, that’s not true,” Cirtwill said recently.
“Even if we had full employment, which means everybody living here now, was working, we would be still short of employees.”
Cirtwill adds the federal government’s decision to cut back immigration levels is hurting this region.
“We had a national solution to an urban Canadian problem, and so we did across the board cuts that applied a solution everywhere, except we didn’t have the problem. In rural and northern Canada, the crisis that was being responded to, did not and does not exist.”
The Northern Policy Institutes has drafted a report and suggests the Ontario Immigration Nominee Program needs to be enhanced for this region, not cut back.
The report also shows that this region needs at least two thousand people a year just to maintain our current workforce.
The full report can be read here
