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33 | O akville B eaver | T hursday,F ebruary 24,2022 insidehalton.com In 2019, Canada wel- comed about 870 new per- manent residents every day. But when we closed our borders in March 2020, immigration ground to a screeching halt. Thousands of families were unable to reunite. Refugees were prevented from reaching safety. Hun- dreds of thousands of peo- ple who had waited years to make a new life in Canada found their hopes stymied. But nobody talks about that, apart from the people affected. Instead, Canadi- ans have found religion on immigration because after decades of stagnant real wages, employers are final- ly being forced to give their workers a raise, a phenom- enon the business press de- cries as a "perfect storm" attributable in large part to reduced immigration. Now that workers are de- manding their due, employ- ers are pining for fresh meat willing to work for less. The labour shortage narrative reveals how we have instrumentalized im- migrants by reducing them to mere labour units. We seem to have forgot- ten the other benefits of im- migration: myriad forms of renewal and fresh thinking that newcomers infuse into Canadian society. Our fixation on immi- grants as labour signifies an underlying devaluation of immigrants as humans, which ironically boomer- angs right back into the la- bour market. Business councils across the land bemoan the shortage of invisible immi- grant labour -- from deliv- ery drivers to program- mers -- but our most ur- gent labour shortage is in health care. Yet despite a "catastrophic" surgical backlog, Ontario prevents approximately 13,000 for- eign-trained doctors from practising, including 3,500 who are qualified to prac- tise immediately. We clamour for immi- grants to help Amazon ship parcels that much faster, but cannot contemplate employing experienced im- migrant respirologists, even during a full-blown health crisis. These accomplished im- migrants don't fit our stan- dard immigration narra- tive of work hard, watch your pennies, and maybe attain middle-class com- forts one day. This narra- tive assumes immigrants always come with nothing. It can handle the beautiful refugee to riches story of Tareq Hadad, but cannot accommodate an immi- grant cardiologist passing Canadian exams and enter- ing the workforce at the top as a highly respected, high- ly paid public service pro- fessional we look up to and depend on. Post pandemic, we must rehumanize our precon- ceptions about who immi- grants are and what they can contribute. The biggest hindrance to immigrants contributing more lies not with them, but with Cana- dian society, which COVID shows is not yet ready to ac- cept the full array of bene- fits and advantages that immigrants have to offer. Daniel Bernhard is CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. A PARADIGM SHIFT ON IMMIGRATION, NEWCOMERS OPINION: OUR CHANGED WORLD 'WE MUST REHUMANIZE OUR PRECONCEPTIONS ABOUT WHO IMMIGRANTS ARE AND WHAT THEY CAN CONTRIBUTE,' SAYS BERNHARD DANIEL BERNHARD Column