Screened Out at Home

The Government of New Brunswick runs a hiring programme called GNB Mosaïk. Its own website describes it as a newcomer hiring programme for those not born in New Brunswick. Its published values include a commitment to “screen in, not out,” and to make decisions based on values rather than merely rules.

I was born in New Brunswick. I got the rules.

I am forty-four years old. I have taught for twenty years. For fifteen of them I owned and operated an English language school in Taichung, Taiwan — incorporated, licensed, staffed and profitable, with me as sole director from 2009 until 2024. I taught four-year-olds to decode their first words. I taught executives to negotiate in a second language. I built a curriculum, hired teachers, made payroll through a pandemic, and answered to a foreign regulator in a foreign language for a decade and a half.

I came home to New Brunswick because it is home. I spent roughly a year and a half knocking on its doors.

I am writing this from Southeast Asia, where I am looking for teaching work — because this part of the world will have me and New Brunswick has no route for me at all.

That sentence should embarrass someone in Fredericton. It should embarrass someone in Ottawa.

The rest of this is the evidence.

The pipe fitter and the teacher

In Back Bay, New Brunswick, there is a full-time schoolteacher who spent his working life as a pipe fitter.

I want to be very clear: good. I mean that. A tradesman who has mastered something real and can hold a room of teenagers is exactly who should be in a classroom. I have no quarrel with that man. My quarrel is with what his existence proves.

Because it is not an anomaly. It is policy. Under New Brunswick’s Policy 612, a person holding an approved Red Seal can be recommended by a school district for an Interim Teacher’s Certificate 4 and begin a Bachelor of Education while already teaching. The province looked at a career tradesperson and concluded, correctly, that mastery of a craft plus supervised practice equals a qualified teacher. It built him a bridge, wrote it into policy, gave it a form number, and charged him seventy dollars.

Now hold that up against me.

Twenty years teaching. Fifteen years running a school in the field. A 110-hour TESL certificate from Toronto. A methodology certificate from an institute in Fulda, Germany. Fifty-four university credit hours from Acadia. A specialty in early reading for ages four to seven — the single hardest and most consequential thing to teach in the entire system — and a second specialty in business English for working adults.

There is no prior learning assessment pathway for me. There is no form. There is no fee I can pay, because there is nothing to pay it toward. My fifteen years exist nowhere in the system. They are not worth zero — zero would at least be a number. They are simply not a category.

The door that was built, and the door that wasn’t

Let me be precise about what Canada has built, because it is genuinely impressive and I do not want to be misread.

New Brunswick nearly tripled its provincial nominee allocation to 4,250 for 2025. It agreed to receive 400 asylum claimants over two years, backed by $14.1 million in federal funding for housing and settlement. There is an Immigrant Settlement Support Funding Program that pays non-profit organisations to move newcomers into the local labour force. There is a Multicultural Grants Program. There is the Atlantic Immigrant Career Loan Fund, which lends up to $15,000 toward tuition, exams, materials, travel and living costs so that a newcomer does not have to start their career over from zero.

And for teachers specifically, there is Pathways to Teach Canada — a streamlined national process through which an internationally educated teacher can have their credentials and language competency formally assessed and sent directly to the New Brunswick Office of Teacher Certification.

Then go looking for the returning-citizen equivalent. Search the Government of Canada for a repatriation programme and what you will find is guidance on returning Indigenous ancestors and cultural belongings to their communities. That is necessary and honourable work. It is also, remarkably, the only thing that word means in Canadian federal policy. There is no reintegration service for a citizen coming home after fifteen years abroad. No prior learning assessment. No credential recognition fund. No liaison. No file. No number that leads anywhere.

Canada has spent a generation building the most sophisticated inbound talent machine in the developed world, and has not built a single door for the people it exported.

What I was actually told

I did not walk into a WorkingNB office demanding a job. I walked in asking to be trained.

I said, plainly: tell me what I need and I will go and get it. Map the route and I will walk it. I am not proud and I am not owed anything. I needed somebody to draw the line from where I stood to where the work was.

What I was told, in a meeting with a caseworker and her supervisor, was that one hundred and eighty days without work is normal.

That is the service. Six months of nothing is within expected parameters. Here is a pamphlet.

I was also informed that I was permitted to volunteer.

Nobody drew me a map. Nobody said: here is Policy 612, here is what prior learning we can assess, here is a Local Teaching Permit that would put you in front of a class as a substitute next month without any certificate at all. That last one exists — school districts can issue Local Teaching Permits to people holding no teacher’s certificate whatsoever. Nobody mentioned it once.

The problem is not that New Brunswick is rigid. The problem is that its flexibility is reserved for the people it is trying to attract, and withheld from the people it assumes it already has.

Who I am not blaming

I am not blaming immigrants. Not one of them.

I teach an online class every week, free, to students around the world. One of them is a twenty-five-year-old woman from Brazil. She works full-time for the Government of Canada in Fredericton. I like her enormously and I teach her for nothing because she is worth it.

She told me recently that she is frustrated. She can see waste in the office she works in. She has thought about it, worked out solutions and brought them forward. Her manager’s response was, in effect: wait until I retire.

Sit with that. Here is a young, capable, motivated person inside a Canadian government office, generating exactly the kind of thinking every minister claims to want, and the answer she receives is that improvement has been scheduled for after somebody else’s pension vests.

And here is where it becomes genuinely absurd. I found myself wanting to tell her: leave. Go where I went. There is more room for you there.

That is the whole indictment in a sentence. A Canadian, shut out of his own province and job-hunting on the other side of the world, advising a talented young immigrant that her ambition would be better served somewhere other than Canada. That is not a country attracting talent. That is a country processing it.

She did nothing wrong. She responded rationally to incentives that a government designed, funded and advertised. If a state builds a wide, well-lit, well-funded road and posts signs to it in twenty languages, you do not blame the people walking down it. You look at who built it, and you ask why they never built one going the other way.

I have no interest in the national sport of resenting the person behind the counter at Tim Hortons. That is a coward’s target and a stupid one. The people who owe an answer here are the ministers and deputy ministers who wrote a population strategy in which “population” quietly came to mean “people from somewhere else,” and who have never once been asked, on the record, what the plan is for a citizen who comes home.

So let me ask, on the record

I would like these answered. I suspect no one has ever been asked.

Why this is bigger than me

New Brunswick’s own population strategy rests on a projection that roughly 140,000 New Brunswickers will retire out of the workforce within a decade. The province is right that it needs people. It is right that immigration is essential and it should keep going. Nothing I have written argues otherwise.

But New Brunswick also has a diaspora. Thousands of people born in that province who left, built real skills somewhere else, and would come home tomorrow if there were any route back into the workforce that did not require starting from zero at forty-four.

They are the cheapest talent acquisition available to any government in Canada. They already speak the language. They already hold the passport. They already want to be there. They cost almost nothing to attract — and they are being repelled by an administrative indifference so total that it does not register as a failure, because nobody is measuring it. There is no statistic for the Canadian who gave up and went back overseas. There is no exit interview for a citizen.

I am one data point. But I am a data point sitting eleven thousand kilometres away with a résumé that reads twenty years teaching, fifteen years sole director, English language education — looking for work in a country that will have me, having been told by my own that six months of nothing is normal.

Fix the door. Or at least have the honesty to admit you never built one.