Publications, Research & Reports

This paper outlines places where technology can provide or is providing innovative approaches in the skills and employment ecosystem. It also details the ways in which technology can address the skills gap, including its potential for enhancing skills development and helping organizations improve and adapt.

This paper recommends ways to unlock the talent of internationally educated health professionals by addressing barriers related to three areas: immigration status, the registration (licensure) process, and employment opportunities.

The lived experiences of STEM-trained immigrant women in Canada are critically understudied; especially when examined through an overlapping economic and social lens at the intersections of gender, race, ability,  language, health, housing, isolation, access to critical services and market-related information... this study aims to present a pan-Canadian snapshot of the workfinding journeys undertaken by STEM-trained women who immigrated to Canada in the past 15 years.

The tinderbox of potential concerns on the part of immigrants from their lack of economic assimilation could turn into an inferno if it were also accompanied by negative reactions on the part of domestic-born Canadians if immigrants were having a negative impact on the labour market for domestic-born workers or on the macro-economy in general. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there is such a negative effect.

This Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) report provides insights on barriers to immigrant women’s employment and offers recommendations on how to better support their career entry and growth in the GTA.

This paper presents the current knowledge of how newcomers and migrants are being impacted by the pandemic, the responses of rural communities, and what this means for our understanding of rural immigration moving forward.

This article examines trends in the admission and labour market outcomes of economic immigrant principal applicants who intended to work in skilled trades.

This study focuses on the current state of funded ESL programming in Canada that interconnects with adult education for the economy and its relevance to supporting the integration and long-term settlement of adult Newcomers (Permanent Residents and Refugees).

As part of a project to work with small and medium employers to help them understand the benefits of hiring Newcomer and Racialized workers, ACCES Employment surveyed past program participants with an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) survey about their thoughts, experiences and recommendations, particularly around employment issues pertaining to racial and gender discrimination.

Canada’s economic immigration system focuses on highly educated immigrants, but this does not always correspond with the labour demand in essential sectors. This impact paper suggests several possible solutions.

This study looks at how executives can support middle management to be more inclusive – and what middle managers can do to pave the way for immigrant success in their teams.

The authors developed a flexible data-driven algorithm that assigns refugees across resettlement locations to improve integration outcomes.The algorithm uses a combination of supervised machine learning and optimal matching to discover and leverage  synergies between refugee characteristics and resettlement sites.

The importance of immigration for Canada will continue to grow and be an integral component of the country’s post-COVID-19 recovery. To succeed, it is essential to take stock, to re-evaluate Canada’s immigration and integration policies and programs, and to expand Canada’s global leadership in this area.

This study focused on how immigrant artists and creative sector workers are integrated into Toronto’s creative economy – and the services that help them do so. The study has two principal components: 1. Documentation of the services and programs offered to immigrants to Canada who may desire to integrate into Toronto’s creative economy, and 2. An analysis of the entry points used by immigrants to access Toronto’s creative economy.

This report summarizes the findings of a year-long study of promising, new or innovative initiatives that can help connect SMEs with the skilled immigrant labour pool.

In the late 1980s, the Task Force on Access to the Professions and Trades in Ontario looked into the requirements for entry to Ontario's professions, occupation by occupation. The Task Force undertook a detailed review of the organizational structures of regulated occupations in Ontario, with a view to determining not only if such structures are giving rise to discriminatory practices but also whether they have the potential to do so, depending upon their use and application.

This paper explores issues related to the problem of the non-accreditation of foreign-trained professionals in Canada. It touches on the major societal impacts of the problem plus the stages and barriers in the immigrant accreditation process. It also examines some policy initiatives presently being undertaken by the major stakeholders such as provincial and federal governments, post-secondary educational institutions, professional bodies and employers

This survey-based report explores diversity, inclusion and belonging (DIBs) in Toronto’s tech sector.

This report examines the Canada–U.S. differences in the occupational skill utilization and earnings of STEM-educated immigrant workers.

The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of the settlement experiences of immigrants, such as their use and satisfaction with settlement services and how these services may influence integration into educational institutions, the labour market and the wider society and to examine common trends within five Canadian data sets.

The researchers examined the nature of information in foreign-trained health professionals’ lives as they attempt to integrate into the North American labor market and the role that online discussion forums play in channeling the discussions.

This report examines how and why immigrants to Canada make use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) as they move through the stages of immigration.

This study examines the empirical relationship between immigration and firm-level productivity in Canada.

Using integrated data from the 2006 and 2016 censuses, this study examines persistent overqualification over time among immigrants and non-immigrants.

This study is intended to inform Canadian policy and practice with respect to skilled immigrants, and to increase awareness among prospective immigrants of the factors that are associated with labour force success.

This project aimed to uncover organizational practices and strategies to facilitate immigrant attraction, inclusion and retention.

This report provides a descriptive analysis of the labour market outcomes of new immigrants to Canada from 2006 to 2019.

This study found that recent immigrants were more likely than Canadian-born workers to move out of employment in March and April mainly because of their shorter job tenure and over-representation in lower-wage jobs.

This report suggests that fair treatment of Canada’s agricultural workers requires several urgent and significant reforms at both the federal and provincial levels.

This study focuses on the economic immigrants who were selected under Canada's Express Entry system in 2015 and 2016. It compares the degree to which Canadian work experience before immigration and pre-arranged employment at the time of application predict the initial labour market outcomes of these economic immigrants.

This article examines the role of two-step selection in explaining differences in the short-term and medium-term outcomes of economic immigrants in four major admission programs: FSWP, PNP, QSWP, and CEC.

This paper provides some context regarding the care crisis in LTC facilities, in particular its relationship with the type and skill mix of labour, including the degree to which immigrant workers are represented in this sector.

In this article, the author explores why during the Corona Virus Pandemic that Canada suffers from a shortage of health care professionals, it cannot benefit from its own immigrant professionals who immigrated to Canada as skilled workers?

This study found that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) owned by immigrants were more likely than similar enterprises owned by Canadian-born individuals to implement a product or process innovation (2020).

The evolution of the Canadian labour market threatens to aggravate the challenges facing resettled refugees. This report proposes six recommendations for the Government of Canada to better support Government Assisted Refugees (GARs) to succeed in the labour market (2020).

World Education Services (WES) conducted a survey-based study to examine predictors of skilled immigrants’ career success. They examined the demographic characteristics of skilled immigrants as well as their experience and education, and studied how these factors affect their labour market outcomes.

Choices about post-secondary education (PSE) launch individuals onto their future educational and career paths. These decisions are vitally important to Canada’s economic prosperity as well to many individual and social outcomes. Against this backdrop, this joint LMIC-EPRI report provides extensive new evidence on the labour market earnings of PSE graduates.

The authors call for greater attention to this critical population and make nine recommendations that would contribute to solutions in each major issue area impacting the education of Canadian immigrant youth and their entry into the workforce.

Examining the strengths and weaknesses of objective and subjective measures of language proficiency is crucial for good integration policy, as is understanding the relationship between these measures and earnings, a key indicator of economic integration.

This paper uses 2016 census data to paint a portrait of income inequality between racialized and non-racialized Canadians. It also looks at the labour market discrimina­tion faced by racialized workers in 2006 and 2016. Racialized workers are more likely to be active in the workforce than non-racialized workers, either working or trying to find work, but this does not result in better employment outcomes for them. From 2006 to 2016, there was little change to the patterns of employment and earnings inequality along racial and gender lines in Canada.

The rate of working poverty in Canada, Ontario, and the Toronto region is increasing. The growth in precarious employment and the gig economy have all come together to increase the number of people who are working for wages that cannot sustain them and drawing incomes too low to lift them out of poverty.

This study highlights two main themes that illustrate the implicit and complex mechanisms that can structure migrant agricultural workers’ workplace climate, and ultimately, endanger their health and safety: (1) authorities that silence; and (2) ‘I will not leave my body here.’

Based on the 2016 Census data, the study ‘Skill Utilization and Earnings of STEM-educated Immigrants in Canada: Differences by Degree Level and Field of Study’ compares the likelihood of immigrant and Canadian-born workers with a degree in a STEM field to be working in a STEM-related occupation.

Using comparable data and three measures of over-education, this study found that university-educated recent immigrants in Canada were much more likely to be over-educated than their U.S. peers.

This report looks at income trends between 1980 and 2015, as well as the income gap between young people, immigrants, racialized groups and the rest of the population in Peel, Toronto and York regions. The findings paint a stark picture of who has access to the opportunities to succeed, and who is being left behind because of circumstances they can’t control. 

This chapter documents changes from 2006 to 2016 in the number of physicians, registered nurses (RNs) and practical nurses (PNs) in Canada. It identifies those working in each occupation as well as those reporting relevant educational credentials but not working in the occupation.

We investigate how economic immigrants in Canada negotiate their identity in the process of “becoming Canadian” through an analysis of public texts. Drawing on the master narrative framework, we examine the interplay between individual and societal narratives as immigrants grapple with the tension between notions of “desirable” immigrants as those that are well integrated professionally and the reality of facing career related barriers.

This report examines the varied forms start-up visas take and their role within national (and occasionally regional) immigration systems. Though many of these visa programs are only a few years old, the report offers early insights into whether they are meeting their aim of attracting immigrant entrepreneurs, as well as some lessons learned for policymakers—among them, the value of involving industry experts in evaluating visa applicants’ business ideas, of embedding start-up visas within broader innovation strategies, and of supporting risk-taking.

This report provides a profile of immigration in Waterloo Region by presenting data on both recent and established immigrants as well as temporary residents. The purpose of the report is to increase the understanding of immigrant populations in Waterloo Region to ensure that as a region and community, appropriate services and strategies are planned to include the broader needs of this population.

This paper provides a summary of the EMPP, the partners, and government branches involved in its implementation, and the lessons that have been observed thus far. It explores the policy dimensions and implications of merging two distinct, and traditionally separate worlds, and the innovative partnerships integral to the successful implementation of complementary labour pathways in the long term.

This report explores the implication of the changing world of work for immigrant selection systems, highlighting key challenges such as figuring out how to anticipate future labor-market needs, balance employer demand with human-capital considerations, and build an element of regional variation into selection processes.

In order to assess the occupational integration of immigrants, this report asks whether immigrants and the Canadian-born have equal access to jobs that incorporate high levels of occupational skill.

What are the labour market outcomes – in this case defined as average hourly wages – for currently employed immigrants, based on the source of information used to find their job?