Thank Folk's to encourage me .

i just like to add that i m not new in Canada, i have been in Canada for 10 years but i live in Montreal, QC and moving to toronto.

i think most of you know by reading my other post that i m in IT with mostly Tech and QA experience .

i plan to move in May -Jun this year.

Although market is not doing good but i believe there is always place for everyone , if u really are hard working and serious towards your goal.

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'Some goals are so worthy, it's glorious even to fail.' (Param Vir Chakra awardee Lt. Manoj Pandey)

http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2009/02/21/8473121-sun.html

Saturday, February 21, 2009 News Canada
Immigration tidal wave
But newcomers face barriers to employment: Minister

By BRETT CLARKSON, SUN MEDIA

Last Updated: 21st February 2009, 2:16am

A record level of newcomers were admitted to Canada in 2008, citizenship and imimigration minister Jason Kenney announced yesterday to a conference geared toward helping more immigrants land jobs in their professions.

\"We welcomed an unprecedented 519,722 newcomers to Canada in 2008, the largest number in Canada's history,\" Kenney said. \"This number includes over 247,000 permanent residents, 143,000 temporary foreign workers, and over 79,000 foreign students.\"

Kenney was speaking at the Progress Career Planning Institute's Internationally Educated Professionals (IEP) conference yesterday, an event that drew about 1,100 immigrants and new Canadians to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to network and strategize about how to overcome barriers to employment in their fields.

Many of the participants, including trained engineers, doctors, accountants and other professionals trained in their native countries, spoke about the hardships they face in trying to resume their careers in Canada.

Kenney said the federal government is working to ease the transition process for skilled immigrant workers. He referenced the prime minister's recently announced plan to build a national framework for foreign credential recognition -- which Kenney said will hopefully ease the red tape and provide more clarity for skilled immigrants.

\"We all know the tragedy of so many people, perhaps some of you, who have arrived in the country with the hope and promise of working in your chosen profession, who have ended up in survival jobs or being underemployed as it relates to your skill level,\" Kenney said. \"That is intolerable. Those days must end.\"

Conference chair Jane Enright said the event, which also brought out policy-makers and employers, cited numbers that allude to a disparity between foreign-educated immigrants and their Canadian-educated counterparts.

According to Statistics Canada, more than 50% of recent immigrants to this country hold university degrees, more than twice the proportion of university graduates born in Canadian.

However, unemployment among immigrants is 6.6%, compared to the 4.6% for Canadian-born workers. That unemployment rate jumps to 11.8% for immigrants living in Toronto.

\"One of the issues we have in Canada is that Canada is host to between 100,000 and 150,000 university-educated professionals each year, however the reality is they're not all getting jobs in their field,\" Enright said.

Kenney said the government will also \"substantially increase\" the number of foreign students allowed into this country, but didn't give a figure about how many would be permitted entry to study.

---

SECRET SEVEN

At yesterday's IEP 2009 Conference, Canadian Immigrant magazine publisher Naeem \"Nick\" Noorani spoke of his Seven Success Secrets for Canadian Immigrants:

1) Learn English. \"The most important thing is the language,\" Noorani said. \"I don't care how well-qualified you are. You need to know the language.\"

2) Stay Positive. \"It's so easy to become negative. Canada doesn't choose immigrants, we choose our future citizens.\"

3) Embrace Canada. \"This is your country for the rest of your life. You need to fall in love with your country.\"

4) Have a Plan B. In other words, don't put all your career options in one basket, Noorani said.

5) Move out of ethnic silos. \"Embrace all communities. The more people you have as friends who are outside of your ethnic circle, the more success you will have.\"

6) Take risks. \"We're natural risk-takers. We've left everything behind. We've left our families and our friends behind, but not just because we are risk-takers, but because we are visionaries.\"

7) Volunteer, Mentorship, Networking. Get to know as many people as possible while gaining as much Canadian employment experience as possible, Noorani said.

---

BY THE NUMBERS

519,722: number of newcomers admitted to Canada in 2008

247,202: number of permanent residents welcomed to Canada in 2008

193,061: number of temporary foreign workers admitted to Canada in 2008

79,459: number of foreign students welcomed to Canada in 2008

6.6%: rate of unemployment among immigrants across Canada

4.6%: rate of unemployment among Canadian-born workers in Canada

11.8%: rate of unemployment among immigrants in Toronto

$26,636: median income of average recent educated immigrant in Canada

$57,6565: median income of average Canadian-born person

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Sunny Leone a true Canadian DESI now back in India !.

http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandgta/2009/02/21/8473126-sun.html


Yale grad can't find work

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Sunny Leone a true Canadian DESI now back in India !.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Vandematram

http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandgta/2009/02/21/8473126-sun.html


Yale grad can't find work
By BRETT CLARKSON

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I was also thinking same , what this has to do with current market.

If he has problem finding job in his own filed , that is different topic.

he has been facing this problem since couple of years , but market has been down for last two years.

This story doesn't represent the topic we are discussing.

NOTE: I WOULD LIKE TO MENTIONED THAT EVEN NON EDUCATED PERSON CAN GET JOB MORE THEN 9$ IN TORONTO. so many labor job payes 12-18 $ hr in Toronto, fork lift , plastic factory, wood factory and so and so .. also if someone has good communication skill then they can easily get job as support, customer service etc... remind u that pays more then 9$.

i have done that in past when i was fresh graduate from it course , my plan B was to survive until i find job in my filed and i hv done labor as well as tel marketing.

so, he dosen' have to mentioned about 9$

I AM MOVING TO TORONTO KEEPING IN MIND PLAN B ( which is support, customer service or tele marketing )

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'Some goals are so worthy, it's glorious even to fail.' (Param Vir Chakra awardee Lt. Manoj Pandey)

Hi,

I came in 07 and went back to India as it was more paying than in Canada. After that I came back in 2008 and again went back as jobs were bad in Canada and pays got much lower. Now I resigned from India job and came to Canada, thinking I didnt gave much time to Canada, and here its difficult to even get a floor cleaning job.

Locals/Whites dont recognize anything colored and there are gangs of every color around . Indian people dont like whites and wont let them in their homes, if you live in places with large Indian population you job applications are not even replied back. If you want to have a non-indian majority white/canadian address then rents are 5-6 times and houses are even worse- older enough to get you sick. All I got from 4 months of searching was a direct tele sales job which I left in a day as it was more of a scam. I give you mantra for Indian in Canada -

INDIAN "PUNJABI" - DRIVE A TAXI
INDIAN - "FROM USA" - should MUST BE INTO I.T.
INDIAN "NORMAL" - GO BACK TO INDIA

Dont make your and your children life miserable. 85% of persons who live in Canada are not happy and have no choice but to slog there. Majority of people are living on refugee visas and cant get out of it, more are here because they made less than $200 a month in India, and a few who have some problem going back.

So overall you will very remotely find someone genuinely immigrated and well settled. Dont get fooled by big cars and houses as everything is here on credit and one day u have it another u dont - basically nobody cares and no one has any prestige isuues here.

I am not depressed as one might say as I am well off to support myself here, but when you are ignored you cant take it. Until you have family relatives here who are willing to help and refer you DONT COME HERE.

People have spent there lives earning here and still are on measly incomes. Hard work is OK but in Canada hard work does not makes you rich it makes you a fool in the long run.

Aboveall this country has some of the deadliest diseaes imported from the world. Imagine there are ads TV warningyou of bird flu and hepatitis spread in your shopping malls. Sounds like home ?????????????

http://www.thestar.com/article/561188

A silent minority takes the wheel

MICHAEL STUPARYK PHOTOS/TORONTO STAR


FEMALE DRIVERS FIERCELY PRIVATE


Balwinder Gill is not the only South Asian woman who drives a truck. But she is the only one who would talk to the Star.

One slammed down the phone, another was livid with her employer for giving out her phone number and a third didn't want her photograph taken.

\"Don't you know people will talk even more?\" said a 25-year-old South Asian woman who drives for BNH Logistics, a trucking company in Brampton, before hanging up the phone.

Her employer, owner Nick Bhangal, says she rarely meets people and fiercely guards her privacy. Her nightmare is that no one will marry her if someone learns what she does for a living, he says.

\"In our community, some people still don't like the idea of women working,\" says Bhangal, also from India. \"If a woman is away from home for days, there can be all kinds of talk and the general perception is that she's of loose character.\"

Bhangal hired her about eight months ago and says she is as good as a male driver or better. She always delivers on time, he says. Her trips are mostly to Illinois, Iowa and Georgia, and typically last two or three days.

\"Women work harder than men and even more when they know they have a point to prove,\" he says.

Jaswinder Kaur, who drives a tractor-trailer with her husband, Avtar Singh, didn't want her photograph taken.

The 29-year-old started driving two years ago so she could spend more time with her husband, who was often away for days taking shipments to California. They had just immigrated from India and needed the money, even though the job wrecked their personal lives.

\"When you are new here, you have to do whatever comes your way and work hard,\" says Kaur, who had few options. \"I don't have any kind of training and I can't speak English,\" she says in Punjabi.

\"I couldn't have done anything else.\"

But no one in her immediate family in India knows she drives along with her husband. \"They won't understand. They'll be very angry with me,\" she says.

The rain is coming down in torrents as Balwinder Gill pulls her silver Corolla into the Mattu Transport Inc. yard in Mississauga. She grabs an iron rod from the trunk and dashes toward a truck. She crawls between the front tires and knocks off chunks of icy snow beneath.

A mechanic tells her he has already checked the tires, oil and wiper fluid. Gill nods but checks the air pressure in the 10 tires anyway. And the oil. And the wiper fluid.

\"I trust him but I still like to check everything before I leave,\" she says, swinging into the cab to pick up her trailer and the load for Montreal.

Daljit Dhillon, the mechanic, watches her leave in a blur of rain and mist. \"Most drivers would've taken our word; not her,\" he says in Punjabi. \"She's good.\"

For reasons cultural and otherwise, Gill, 32, is one of the few South Asian women in the GTA who drive tractor-trailers – an industry increasingly dominated by Indo-Canadian men.

Women in general probably make up less than 15 per cent of truck drivers, says Doug Switzer, of the Ontario Trucking Association. \"Women driving trucks is a minority. South Asian women driving trucks is extraordinary.\"

Nachhattar Chohan, president of the recently formed Indian Trucking Association, says more than 65 per cent of truck drivers in the GTA are Indo-Canadians. Out of those thousands there are, probably, a couple of dozen women who drive with their husbands.

Few drive alone. A dozen, at most. Gill is one of them.

As a child, she took a long time to learn to ride a bicycle.

Gill, who grew up in a dusty village in India, remembers the red bike her father, Lashkar Singh, bought when she was about 9. She had begged for it, but she wouldn't get on it even though it had training wheels. \"I was petrified,\" says Gill.

It was months before she mustered the courage to ride it, and she never did learn to ride a scooter or drive a car in India.

When she came to Canada in 2000, she marvelled that everyone, just everyone, drove, and was convinced she couldn't, ever. She once told a friend Toronto's roads were like racetracks. It wasn't like the unhurried traffic in Punjab, where cars, scooters and bicycles share pot-holed roads with stray dogs, abandoned cattle and even pigs.

She worked at a plastics factory in Woodbridge. She bused to work from Brampton and didn't mind the hour it took. But the night shift was a challenge – she didn't know how to get home at 3 a.m. Sometimes she called a cab, or friends picked her up. Mostly she hung out till 5 a.m., when buses started.

Almost 15 months after arriving in Canada, Gill signed up for driving lessons.

It wasn't as frightening as she had thought. \"I knew it was necessary to learn,\" she says. \"It was getting really tough to manage without a car.\"

Truck driving happened by fluke, almost as a joke. She was visiting a cousin in Rexdale one day in 2005 when she saw forms on his table for a trucker's licence. \"I don't know how it happened, but I told him that I would apply for it,\" says Gill.

He laughed, saying women don't drive trucks. It wasn't a dare, just a matter-of-fact statement. \"That's when I knew I would. I wasn't angry, just determined,\" says Gill.

She bought the rules booklet, and within a week had taken the written test and signed up at Hi-Tech Driving School in Mississauga. For three months, she took lessons five days a week while working full time.

It was tough: There were 15 gears; turning left required more accuracy than she had imagined; and reversing with a trailer was a challenge that reduced her to tears.

The first time she took the driving test, she could not reverse correctly. The second time, she got nervous and could not change gears. The third time, she got it. She quit her factory job the same evening.

A few days later, Narinderjit Singh Mattu hired her.



MATTU OWNS 27 trucks and 40 trailers and employs 28 drivers. Gill is the only woman.

Mattu signed her up minutes after taking her for a road test. \"I also thought that if I hire her, other (South Asian) women will also think about it,\" he recalls.

That didn't happen.

South Asians tend to consider driving even a cab not \"suitable\" for women. Among India's 1 billion citizens, there are very few – possibly none – who drive trucks or buses, points out Chohan.

The stigma attached to it means even women who drive with their husbands rarely admit to it, he says. \"Women don't want to be known as truck drivers. It's not counted as a great profession; there are too many misconceptions about it.\"

While there are advantages to such non-traditional careers for women, there are hurdles. One is discrimination, or even harassment, on the part of co-workers. Chohan recalls an incident where a female driver was verbally harassed by a group of South Asian drivers at a truck stop. It upset her enough to make her want to quit, but with a family to support, she couldn't. \"She stopped telling people she drives a truck.\"

Gill doesn't tell anyone about it unless she's asked.

\"I don't hide the fact, but I don't advertise it, either,\" she says. She recalls a wedding reception in Brampton in July when a casual conversation about her driving experiences turned heated. Someone told her in Punjabi: \"It's not what girls from good homes do.\"

She was livid. \"No one talks about women being beaten up by their husbands, but this ... people are so quick to judge you.\"

But Gill, who knows she's being watched in the community, is careful about how she conducts herself.

\"I don't hang out with other drivers,\" she says. \"I take the load to Montreal, unload it and get another load back to Toronto. That's my life.\"



IT'S ABOUT 6 P.M. and Gill is pulling into a loading yard on Tomken Rd. in Brampton, where dozens of trailers are parked.

Her 16-metre trailer is ready. She reverses the truck gently. There's a loud grating noise as it locks onto the trailer. Gill, who is five-foot-six and muscular – she works out at LA Fitness in Brampton every weekend – slips on a woollen cap and thick right glove and deftly climbs between truck and trailer to secure the three thick cables that run the lights, air brakes and signals.

She takes her time; she's heard too many stories about trailers getting unhooked while on the road.

Her cargo can be anything from hospital supplies to dry food. Today, she's taking a shipment for Shoppers Drug Mart.

She climbs into the cab to complete paperwork – the only annoying thing about the job, she says. An hour later, she's on Highway 401 bound for Montreal.

Truck drivers call Gill's rig \"the road plane.\" They say the 18-wheeler glides on bumpy asphalt roads – not because it's new and automatic but the way she drives it: smoothly.

Gill, who goes to Montreal five times a week, says that when she started long-haul driving a year ago, it was tough physically.

A typical run to Montreal takes six to seven hours, but up to 12 hours during a blizzard, causing cramps and body pain: \"My eyes used to hurt from looking straight ahead for hours.\" And she missed being home – a basement in Malton – every night.

Now, it's a piece of cake.

She's passing through Bowmanville. It's raining steadily and the wind is howling as the truck cruises at 100 kilometres an hour in the centre lane. Suddenly, an SUV changes lanes right in front of her. Gill swears loudly, then gently presses on the brakes.

\"Car drivers don't understand that it takes a truck some time to stop,\" says Gill. If she slams on the brakes, the truck can jackknife – every driver's nightmare.

She's never crashed, but has heard the stories. The closest she came was in 2005, a few months after she started. She was taking a load to Cambridge, when the trailer got stuck turning left. Drivers stopped, looked and took a detour, but no one could help her. An hour later, when she was ready to call a tow truck she could barely afford, the manager of a trucking company who was passing by told her he was sending the company's tow truck.

She didn't have to pay a cent.

But that was the last time she needed help. Except in the case of a breakdown, she's never needed help. \"I've learned to do everything myself – I don't want to be dependent on anyone.\"



SHE REACHES Laval, Que., a few minutes past midnight. There's a thick layer of ice as she arrives at Sonar Transport's dockyard. Deftly, she reverses toward an open dock. There's a loud thud as the trailer docks. She jumps out to tell the night staff they can unload.

Language can be a challenge for Gill, a high-school dropout. She speaks enough English for basic communication but in Laval-Montreal, where everything's in French, hand gestures do wonders.

An hour later, the trailer is empty.

Gill usually sleeps in the cab, picks up a new load around dawn and heads back to Toronto. There are two bunks, a tiny refrigerator and space for food, clothes and shoes. Gill takes out her dinner – veggies, lentils, yogurt and Indian flatbread – and heats it on a small stove.

\"It's not an easy life. There is a lot of struggle but it's steady money,\" says Gill, who earns $50,000 to $55,000 a year. That can change anytime. In the past eight months, she's seen the number of trucks on the road decrease and feels lucky she still has work five days a week.

She sends money monthly to her parents in Punjab. They know she drives a truck and are proud of her. \"My father used to work in a factory where truck and bus bodies were built,\" she says, curling up in bed.

She barely has five hours before she's due to pick up a load of shopping carts from Montreal.

Gilles Jolicoeur is waiting for her at Cari All, a warehouse on Industrial Blvd. The first time she met him, he gawked and asked her if she really drove the truck.

\"She was the first South Asian (female) driver I'd met,\" says Jolicoeur, adding that, unlike most drivers, \"She's very punctual and professional. If she says she'll be here at 6 a.m., you can bet she'll be five minutes early.\"

As the carts are being loaded, Gill quickly makes tea on the stove and sips it standing outside. \"The first time I came to Montreal, I remember looking at the trailer after it was unloaded. I couldn't believe I'd driven it here. I still have the same feeling sometimes.\"

Minutes later, she's on her way to Toronto.

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Sunny Leone a true Canadian DESI now back in India !.