Who are the liars?
Some of them are business lobbyists and business-funded "think tanks" and NGOs of that ilk. They have lots of money, and it talks loudly and often. The same old story, "Shortage of skilled workers!"; "Looming demographic crunch as baby-boomers retire!", "Knowledge Economy is Coming!", "Hydrogen Economy is Coming!", "Biotech Boom is Coming!"...They've been shilling the same "shortage" story for the past twenty years or more, and I've NEVER seen an actual engineering shortage that extended beyond a few narrow areas of practice for at most a year or two.
Some of them are senior partners in engineering consulting firms: you know, consulting, that industry which pays salaries on average 20+% less than what the rest of industry pays engineers. These people are active in the national and provincial engineering societies AND actively lobby the Federal government- and they always know which side their bread is buttered on. Note- some senior engineering firm partners are great people in every sense and truly have the best interests of the engineering profession at heart, but some of them have been converted to "the dark side" and quite frankly have no clue what life is like for their engineering peons any more, nor do they care.
Others are "immigration consultants", those people who profit directly from the high hopes of potential immigrants, so needless to say they paint a very pretty and very inaccurate picture... Many of these operate in the home countries of the prospective immigrants and are hence completely beyond our national control.
Yet more are the management of universities, whose institutions profit directly through increased enrollments. I've NEVER heard a university call for decreased enrollments in ANY program, even when the market is flooded with its previous grads.
Yet others are organizations who profit from the recent immigrants once they're here, by providing them services, re-training etc.
Who are the ignoramuses? These are the ones who are spreading mis-information not out of malice or self-interest, but because they're uninformed.
Principal among these: Citizenship and Immigration Canada staff, who don't know any better and don't care to inform themselves. The preamble to the 2002 Immigrant and Refugee Protection Act spells it out in glorious detail- they've given up even trying to match supply and demand for skills because it's too complex. Instead they award points based on "skills", which they equate with education. So we're short machinists and bricklayers and overloaded with PhDs...Heck, we even deport people who have jobs and are totally satisfied working in the construction trades but who lack a work visa!
Politicians too- all they do is parrot what they've heard in the media and from the business lobby. I watched politicians and business leaders one after another, glad-handing this room full of recent immigrants (80% of whom were unemployed engineers) and telling them how desperately Canada needed their services, and how much money their "unrecognized credentials" were costing our society...
Add to that the recent immigrants themselves, the victims in all of this- and the media who tell their stories. They incorrectly assess their undeserved lot as one of "unrecognized credentials" or of the professional bodies denying them licensure by acting like a "guild", when what's really the problem is simple oversupply- they're being out-competed in an oversupplied market. Immigrants in their position twenty or even ten years ago didn't experience nearly the difficulty in finding work that this new group does, for obvious reasons- engineering immigration rates a decade ago were less than 1/12 what they are today.
