Satire

It's Tuesday, March 25th.

Ottawa is proposing to overhaul Canada's immigration system ... giving the immigration minister more power to decide who gets into Canada and who doesn't, based on what the country needs at the time.

Currently, Priority will now be given to people who actually WANT to drive taxis for a living.

This is The Current.

Immigration Overhaul - Minister

With little fanfare, the Federal Government in early March 2008 proposed an amendment to Canada's Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. It was tucked away in the bill to implement the federal budget, and is designed to tackle the enormous backlog of immigration applications -- more than 900,000 of them according to the government. But critics say the changes could end up overhauling Canada's entire immigration system and that they would give the Immigration Minister unprecedented power.

Diane Finley is Canada's Minister for Citizenship and Immigration, and she joined us from Ottawa.


Immigration Overhaul - Panel

For their thoughts on where Canada is and should be heading with our immigration policy, we were joined by two people: from Hamilton, Ontario by Atif Kubursi, who teaches Economics at McMaster University; and from Kingston, Ontario by Arthur Sweetman, who is a labour market economist and the Director of the School for Policy Studies at Queens University.


Listen to The Current:Part 1



The Current: Part 2


Who Owns Canada?

They are few in number. Most of them are men. Their holdings and companies are household names in Canada. But most of their own names are unknown. They are the country's top billionaires: people who go about their business quietly, and leave large footprints, both in Canada and around the world.

In 1986, journalist Diane Francis went in search of the people who controlled Canada's economy. She found a couple of dozen families and a handful of corporations. Twenty-two years later, she went back to see who was left standing.

Her new book is called Who Owns Canada Now. In it, she interviews some of Canada's richest and most powerful people, many of whom have never spoken to the media before. And she describes an economy that has been transformed in a generation.

Diane Francis was in our Toronto studio.



Listen to The Current:Part 2



The Current: Part 3


Late Motherhood

Across North America, women are having children later and later in life. According to Statistics Canada, the average age of women giving birth in Canada is just under 30, and the number of women giving birth when they are 35 or older is four times what it was a generation ago. Many of those women say having children later gives them a chance to gain some stability in their careers, their financial situations and their personal lives. But they're also often bombarded with the argument that they are fighting a high-stakes, and ultimately losing battle with biology, and that every year they wait means less chance of conceiving and higher odds of having a baby with a birth defect if they do get pregnant.

But some say a lot of that angst is unfounded, even misguided. Elizabeth Gregory is one of them; she is the Director of the Women's Studies program at the University of Houston. She's also the author of the new book, Ready: Why Women are Embracing the New Later Motherhood. Elizabeth Gregory joined us from Houston.


Listen to The Current:Part 3

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