Any resemblance between media coverage of government activity and reality is usually coincidental. Such was the case with MacLean’s recent story on Canada’s immigration system.

The gyst of the story was that Canada was “profiling” immigrants, favouring source countries with more skilled, better educated applicants. The “smoking gun” was an internal government document extracted by an immigration lawyer through access-to-information.

While it may serve journalistic purposes to suggest  a clandestine, Harper-driven, ruthless approach to immigration; that’s just simply not true. As the article itself says, down in the rhubarb, source countries like China and India have seen increased imigration, at the expense of regions like the Caribbean, since at least the 1990’s. Why? Well, the Liberal government implemented a point system for prospective immigrants, loosely based on the “human capital” model. This placed heavy emphasis on education and English/French language skills in ranking applicants.

Regardless of which criteria one uses, because conditions from country to country and region to region vary greatly, some regions will benefit be favoured by the criteria, others won’t. There’s nothing clandestine about that.

But that still doesn’t prevent various bottom-feeders trying to use oscillating immigration data to pin the discrimination label on the government. When I was in the department, every time we released landing data by country, the reaction was predictable. Landings from Lower Slobovia down? An opposition MP would rise and indignantly proclaim “evil Conservative government hates Lower Slobovians!”

The problem with the point-system, as implemented by the Liberals is that - as one disgruntled Conservative minister put it - its criteria rank Ph.D.s in medieval english literature highest. This at a time where Canada needs highly educated immigrants, but also skilled tradesmen workers of all descriptions. The demographic crunch alluded to in the story is very real, and Canada will need to draw heavily on external labour sources in the coming years. We will of course als obe competing for this labour with other desirable emigrant destinations, like the U.S. and Australia.

Understanding the need to sell magazines and all that, it’s still unfortunate that Charlie Gillis decided to play the profiling card. For those in the know, interviewing Jim Karygiannis, Judy Sgro and Richard Kurland basically shows just how serious he was about getting the story right.

What the Conservative government has been faced with is undoing the mistakes of the Liberals last big imigration law, the “Immigration Refugee Protection Act” (IRPA). One provision of this law obliged the government to process every application that was submitted. This was like the Italian train reservation system, where you can reserve a seat for free whether you plan on travelling or not, resulting in a lot of empty “reserved” seats. So it was that by 2007 over 600,000 applications were sitting in piles around the world, waiting for someone to look at them. The department was spending considerable man-hours just answering inquiries on these dormant files.

That provision was changed in legislation passed in the budget of 2008; so the paralysis by applicastion is being lifted. Jason Kenney is now tightening up serious loopholes in the refugee determination parts of the act. Unfortunately, court rulings over the last 25 years have made it increasingly challenging to deal effectively with many aspects of immigration policy.

All this spade work reforming immigration legislation makes for much less exciting reading than accusations of our government favouring some countries over others. We can only hope that the current government is granted a few more years to correct the many past errors, whether it makes exciting copy or not.