Who Drives a Taxi in Canada?

1. Introduction

Immigrant underemployment has been a hot media topic in Canada in recent years. PhDs and MDs driving a taxi has become a classic media example of the phenomena that highly educated immigrants perform low-skill work after arrival in Canada.

Exactly, how serious is the issue of employment down skilling of immigrants in Canada, particularly in the taxi driving occupation? Although, there have been frequent media reports of taxi PhDs and MDs, there have been few serious inquiries into this issue.

This document uses 2006 Census data to examine the participation of immigrants and the Canadian born in the taxi driving occupation. Specifically, it asks to what extent highly educated immigrants are employed in this occupation and how this compares to their Canadian-born counterparts. The document also draws a general portrait of taxi drivers in Canada and for eight major CMAs in terms of their immigration status, landing period, country of birth, educational attainment, field of study, and location of study.

1.1. Data, scope and definition of the analysis

The population of this analysis is made of the Canadian born and immigrants who were 15 years old and over in the 2006 Census and reported taxi and limousine drivers and chauffeurs as their major employment in the 2006 Census^{Footnote 1}. Hereafter, for succinctness, we will just use taxi drivers to refer to this occupational category. To compare immigrants who landed during different periods, we classify immigrants into the following three groups: very recent immigrants (who landed between 2001 and 2006); recent immigrants (who landed between 1996 and 2001); and established immigrants (who landed before 1996). Due to the need to protect confidentiality, the frequency numbers in this analysis are all rounded to the nearest zero or five.

Footnotes

Footnote 1

The 2006 Census collected occupational information for persons 15 years old and over. A person’s occupation is determined by the kind of work and the description of the main activities in the job the person was doing in the reference week of the 2006 Census or the job of longest duration since January 1, 2005 if the person did not have a job during the census reference week. Occupation is coded based on the 2006 National Occupational Classification (NOC 2006). NOC 2006 distinguishes 520 occupational unit groups (four-digit code) and four occupational skill levels (A, B, C and D). The skill level of an occupation is determined based mainly on the amount and type of education and training required to enter and perform the duties of an occupation. Skill level A occupations usually require a university degree (bachelor’s, master’s or doctorate), while skill level B occupations usually require college education or apprenticeship training. Skill level C occupations usually require secondary school and/or occupation-specific training. The lowest skill level (D) corresponds to occupations where only on-the-job training is necessary. Taxi and limousine drivers and chauffeurs are classified together as one occupational unit group (code 7413) and are identified as a skill level C occupation. We can reasonably assume that most people who reported their occupations in this category in the 2006 Census are taxi drivers.

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Date modified:: 2012-05-28

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Who Drives a Taxi in Canada?

1. Introduction

1.1. Data, scope and definition of the analysis

Page details