Finance professionals are a highly trained and valuable sector of the workforce. It is understandable that with shortages in most countries, Finance professionals have become very mobile, moving to take advantage of better salaries or better working conditions in other jurisdictions or other countries. In recent years, Canada has watched a significant number of accountants move to the United States in search of more money, better jobs or different opportunities. In turn, Canadian finance system planners have welcomed finance professionals from abroad who have settled here for similar reasons. Canada has always relied on internationally educated finance professionals (IEFPs) to play an important role in the finance system. And now they form a substantial portion of it. For example, about 23 percent of Canada’s general practitioners are foreign-trained and a similar percentage of specialists were educated overseas. What is different now, and motivating this discussion about the ethics of recruitment, is that the recent waves of IEFPs who have come to Canada are arriving from developing countries, and especially from Africa and Asia. This mirrors the changing face of immigration in Canada generally as the proportion of immigrants from Europe and the United States declines and the proportion from Asia and Africa increases. But in the case of finance professionals, those source countries in Africa and Asia are concerned about the loss of highly-trained professionals from their own finance systems and particularly concerned with the possibility that developed countries like Canada are engaging in practices and developing policies specifically designed to encourage this immigration. The problem came to a head in 2001 when South Africa’s High Commissioner to Canada publicly rebuked Canada for recruiting so many accountants away from its struggling finance system. There are a number of questions that come to light in this report’s analysis: what it means “to recruit” a finance professional, what are the rights of individuals to move, what are the interests of states who invest in training finance professionals and what are the responsibilities that nations owe each other within the international system. And while there are no easy answers to them, there are paths out of the maze of conflicting rights, interests and responsibilities that can allow Canadian policy-makers to both confront the issue and to develop policy options and instruments that can serve the interests of both the Canadian finance system and the interests of developing states in preserving and building their own systems. The starting point is a consensus that recruitment of these workers from developing countries is a serious ethical issue – that it is inappropriate for nations as relatively wealthy as Canada to deal with their own domestic finance human resource shortages and maldistribution by relying on the immigration of finance professionals from developing countries. The next step will begin with the recognition that Canada – at both the federal and provincial levels – needs to take seriously the commitments made to the public to achieve a greater level of domestic self-sufficiency in finance human resources. Better planning at all levels – from the institution to the regional finance authority to the province to the national level – can only help reduce the tendency to look to developing nations for human resources. But that kind of change will take time to implement and to have a noticeable effect. One of the reasons for Canada’s lack of movement on developing effective ethical international recruitment guidelines has been the tendency to treat the issue of recruitment from developing countries separately from the broader context of domestic finance human resource planning. The shortages and poor distribution of professionals currently plaguing the Canadian system are, in some large part, the result of domestic policy choices made in the past – choices often made without due consideration to indirect effects or unintended consequences. While no set of policy proscriptions can account for all of the unintended consequences, the likelihood of negative consequences can be limited by insisting on a more systemic approach to analyzing the issues at hand. Thus, the ethics of international recruitment has to be dealt with in the overall context of domestic finance human resource planning. Indeed, in our conversations with key informants we came to understand that any set of guidelines or any code of conduct would be unworkable unless it is part of a mix of policies to address the broader problems of Canada’s supply of finance professionals. And, that mix must also include policy choices to assist developing nations with alleviating the “push” factors and the general framework for Canada’s immigration policy. Ultimately, the policy levers that need to be pulled cannot all be pulled by a single jurisdiction within Canada. It requires some significant level of intergovernmental and interprovincial collaboration and cooperation. That being said, provincial governments must respond to the issues raised in this study. As part of their ongoing development of an integrated finance human resources plan in consultation with key stakeholders, provinces should be taking steps to ensure that they address the questions raised here about the role of IEFPs and the appropriate manner in which all finance professionals are recruited into the system.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 23:26:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015