Manpreet Kaur arrived in British Columbia from India in 2015 with all the knowledge needed to help Canada’s electrical sector transition to renewable energy. She had a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s degree in nanotechnology, a branch of science and engineering that includes creating cells for solar panels.
Such specialized expertise is at the heart of Canada’s ambitious renewable energy goals, a core part of the planned transition to a net-zero economy. But Kaur’s degrees aren’t from a Canadian school: she studied at India’s Amity University and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Even after earning a PhD in mechatronic systems engineering from Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University in 2019, Kaur faced significant hurdles to work as an engineer in Canada.
After completing her PhD, Kaur had to earn her professional engineering licence. This meant a huge amount of paperwork, which Kaur calls one of the most onerous yet least appreciated requirements for skilled immigrants in her field. It requires providing not just course descriptions or degree certificates from institutions overseas, but signatures from instructors continents away, sometimes years after study.
“You really have to look back in time and think about the examples where you have met those competencies. The process of initiating the application to submitting and getting the approval takes almost a year,” Kaur said.
Today, as an engineering professor at Simon Fraser’s school of sustainable energy engineering, Kaur said she “can see the demand in the industry” as she tries to find her students co-op placements. But despite this need, the hassles immigrant engineers must go through to obtain Canadian licensing mean the sector “prefers a candidate who has Canadian experience.”
The federal government has promised to double clean electricity generation by 2028, both to serve Canada’s growing energy needs and to meet internationally ambitious, legally binding commitments to renewable energy. To meet these targets, Canada will require 28,000 additional electricity workers by 2028, according to Mark Chapeskie, vice-president of program development at Electricity Human Resources Canada. The non-profit organization supports the human resources needs of the Canadian electricity and renewable energy sector. It has found that by 2050, Canada’s growing solar and wind electricity sector will need to fill 130,000 jobs, in part because renewable power is more labour intensive than traditional hydro or coal-fired electrical generation.
But qualified workers in the sector are already scarce, with retirements and demand outpacing the capacity of Canada’s economy. Between 2003 and 2023, the number of workers in electric power generation, transmission and distribution grew by only about 20,000 people, according to Statistics Canada. Kaur, Chapeskie and others say that, as with so many other fields, the length of time it takes for skilled immigrants to qualify to work here is a big part of the problem — and the issue will only get worse as the demand for green skills grows.
“The reality is that immigration is an integral component for Canada to be able to meet its labour workforce needs,” Michelle Branigan, CEO of Electricity Human Resources Canada, told The Narwhal.
The fundamental qualification for Canada’s electrical energy sector — the professional engineer’s licence, or P.Eng — creates one significant set of hurdles. No one wants to get rid of it, since it ensures engineers in Canada have fulfilled considerable health and safety training requirements. “We need people to meet a certain standard of performance and capability in order to perform in those roles,” Chapeskie said.
The problem, he said, is that the licence and its safety standards are administered at the provincial level, instead of federally.
“If you were to emigrate to another country for a regulated occupation, the first thing you would probably ask is, ‘What’s the national organization or body to get my credentials recognized?’” Chapeskie said. In the United Kingdom, for instance, two organizations — the National Inspection Council for Electrical Installation and Contracting and the National Association of Professional Inspectors and Testers — issue certifications recognized throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
In Canada, “We sometimes see labour market barriers for folks wanting to work from one province to the other, let alone international workers coming in,” Chapeskie said. Whether workers are born in Canada or abroad, transferring an apprentice engineering qualification between provinces can take as long as four years, he said.
“We don’t have good and consistent prior learning recognition in Canada,” Chapeskie said. “It’s hard for an immigrant coming in to identify ‘Where do I best fit?’ without having to go back to school to start all over. Four years is a long time to start over, especially if you’ve already been practising in your trade overseas.”
And as the process rolls along, Branigan, too, finds the bureaucracy excessive. “The paperwork — its time and effort — is so overwhelming that [skilled immigrants] feel that they don’t have the time to deal with it,” Branigan said. “It’s one of the biggest barriers I see for employers who may be interested in trying to support newcomers.”
Mehran Ahmadi is also a professor at Simon Fraser University’s school of sustainable energy engineering. He earned his master of mechanical engineering at Iran’s Tehran Polytechnic before arriving in Canada in 2014 for a PhD fellowship, which included a brief placement with the B.C. engineering consultant firm Stirling Cooper.
Without that placement, Ahmadi said, his journey to find work in the Canadian electricity sector “would have been hugely different” and “very challenging.” Networking is “the most crucial part of finding a good job, being an immigrant,” Ahmadi said. Even a short stint at a Canadian company means “you will see way more opportunities,” as well as gain a better understanding of how work experience abroad applies here.
Electrical engineering is universal enough that qualifying in another country, let alone another province, should be relatively easy, Ahmadi said.
“Medical sciences have different practices in different countries. But in engineering … the science is really the same,” he said. The fundamentals of a Canadian bachelor’s degree in engineering are entirely the same as his curriculum in Iran, he said, aside from lessons on Canadian engineering law.
By the time Kaur’s training and paperwork were done, she had found it far easier to obtain work as a professor than in Canada’s electrical engineering sector.
That sentiment was echoed by respondents to another 2023 Electricity Human Resources Canada report examining newcomer perspectives on working in Canada. Nearly 60 per cent of respondents found the electrical sector hard to get into, while 46 per cent said they had difficulty obtaining Canadian credentials.
Networking came up, too: 36 per cent of the 500 newcomer respondents said not knowing others in the industry was a hurdle. A quarter felt they were disqualified because of their language skills, while 20 per cent said racism and discrimination kept them from entering the field.
“I’m not blaming Canada or the Canadian system,” Ahamdi, who has heard anecdotes that support the report’s statistics from students and peers, said. “But there are these unconscious biases that we live with.”
Branigan said Canada’s electrical engineering sector is taking steps to address non-governmental issues. She said one large engineering company told her it was increasingly relying on technology and pictures to address language barriers for newcomer employees.
Others are piloting engineer “training programs” to hasten their employees’ acquisition of the engineering licence. They see internationally accredited engineers working under a direct supervisor to earn the Canadian experience required. “They’re doing engineering work, but they can’t sign off on any of the designs without having somebody who’s got their certification,” Chapeskie said.
As of July, B.C.’s International Credentials Recognition Act requires 18 regulatory bodies to remove barriers from dozens of trades professions under the guidance of a provincially appointed superintendent. “Skilled professionals from around the world move to B.C. hoping to put their skills to good use, but instead face huge obstacles and an often-confusing process to get their credentials recognized,” Premier David Eby acknowledged in a press release.
Ontario, for its part, is experimenting with methods to improve the province’s registration and retention of tradespeople. Last year, Queen’s Park introduced a program meant to streamline recognition of interprovincial qualifications. But when it comes to easing the transition of skilled newcomers into the Canadian job market, Chapeskie said no province is “doing any better than any other.”
In rural regions or less populous provinces that have fewer immigrant services, “it can be very challenging,” Chapeskie said. The solutions being pioneered by private companies demonstrate the need for better electrical engineering skills recognition standards at the federal level, he said.
The addition of skilled immigrants, such as Kaur and Ahmadi, to the country’s electrical energy sector is a global advantage Canada shouldn’t take for granted, Chapeskie said. Immigration has allowed Canada’s population to grow faster than its G7 peers in recent years.
“Most of those [G7] populations are actually going to head into a decline. Unless you can figure out how to boost the productivity of your population, [other G7 countries] are actually looking at some significant social challenges in the future,” Chapeskie said.
“Canada is uniquely positioned in that our population continues to grow. We have a competitive advantage internationally. Unless we sort out our internal challenges around integrating internationally trained workers, we could lose that.”
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