Yesterday, I sketched out the likelihood of Canada joining the Erasmus program; now I wanted to address the issue of labour mobility. As a couple of news outlets breathlessly reported during the whole EU thing last week, a new agreement might allow Canadians to “live and work visa-free” in Europe (and vice-versa, although no one seemed to want to dwell on that). But how likely is this?
So, we can’t know exactly until something is negotiated. But precedent is pretty clear here from the few instances where the EU has negotiated visa-free work mobility with other countries, including Canada under the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement, and indeed from the Canada-US Free trade Agreement of 1989.
So, first of all, the good news: there is no problem with respect to the mobility of credentials. Canada is a signatory to the Lisbon Convention, which governs such things. This means Canadian academic credentials are already assumed to be roughly comparable to European ones in the sense that our bachelor’s and master’s degrees are similar to theirs. But – note this for further down the discussion – this wasn’t something the Canadian government decided on its own. All ten provinces and three territories need to OK it, too.
Now the less-positive news.
There are two distinctions that you want to make when thinking through this problem. The first is whether or not we are talking about regulated professions and unregulated professions. And, with respect to regulated professions, there is another distinction between the right to obtain a visa, and the right to actually work. They ain’t the same.
So, the first has to do with visa-free mobility for people not in regulated professions. Canada has never extended this treatment to any other country; Europe has extended it to a very select group of small, rich countries, namely the four members of the European Free Trade Area (Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and mighty Liechtenstein). The price for this was that these countries had to agree not only to adopt huge swathes of European legislation on labour and other matters, but also agree to keep up with changes in European legislation – in effect surrendering a pretty large chunk of national sovereignty and autonomy. I have a hard time imagining Canada signing up for this, so I suspect this is not actually on the table (or rather, it might be on the table at the outset, but I suspect it will be off the table pdq).
That brings us to regulated professions. Again, EFTA members have access to the EU because they have agreed to be abide by something called the EU Professional Qualifications Directive, which Canada has not. We could do so, of course. Personally, I don’t think it’s all that onerous (the most important thing is that everyone agrees to enforce minimum training periods/years of experience for internationally mobile citizens and I am pretty sure we could meet that). But from the Canadian perspective, that would mean getting all provinces and territories on board in advance because they are the ones who have constitutional responsibility for that aspect of labour market regulations. I would not bet the farm on getting unanimity on that kind of surrender of sovereignty.
Now what that leaves us with is a second option for mobility, which is what Canada negotiated in the CETA. These are called “Mutual Recognition Agreements” (MRAs). Basically, what happens is that all the regulatory groups on both sides of the Atlantic (national and provincial governments, as well as the relevant professional agencies) all sit down and agree to a set of regulatory standards which everyone agrees amounts to a level playing field. Once that’s signed, professionals in that field can go back and forth with no problem.
Easy right? Well, no. CETA was signed ten years ago next month, and the number of MRAs that have been concluded is exactly one (for Architects). Multinational negotiation of standards is hard.
There’s another twist to consider here, which is that not all professions are equally regulated at the national level – occupations like teacher, real estate agents, stockbrokers, accountants, etc. Every country has its own regulations. The most a treaty might get Canadians is eligibility to be treated like a European in taking the exam. There won’t be an automatic right to practice or anything.
All of which is to say: being given the right to work somewhere is not the same as being given the ability to work there. We might make some progress on the former, but it’s not obvious – to me at least – that there will be much progress on the latter, no matter how chummy Mark Carney and Ursula von der Leyen happen to be this week.
