Refugee health-care workers bringing strong skills, full hearts as they take on new jobs in a new land

Nine months following their arrival in Canada after being recruited from one of the world's largest refugee camps, Abdifatah Sabriye and Patricia Omar Kamssor are settling into life as health-care workers, taking care of elderly residents at a new nursing home in a coastal Nova Scotia town.

"I really love them. Any time I go home, I do miss them," Kamssor said of the residents in an interview at the Mahone Bay Nursing Home, located along Nova Scotia's South Shore.

"Honey, I want you to roll towards me," Sabriye said, already picking up the Maritime term of endearment as the pair moved one resident to her bed.

"In our culture, if someone's elder, they are like our parents, so I'm always treating them like my parents," he said in an interview.

Sabriye and Kamssor are among 300 people — 135 workers and 165 of their dependents — who have come to Canada through a federal program that aims to bridge the gap between skilled displaced people and labour shortages. It is not a humanitarian program.

CBC News first met Kamssor and Sabriye in March 2023 at the sprawling Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya, where they had been living for 11 and 14 years respectively, after fleeing violence in neighbouring African countries.

More than two years after they'd been accepted into the federal program, they finally arrived in Nova Scotia in October 2023.

MacLeod Cares, which owns the Mahone Bay Nursing Home, has hired 24 employees through the program from three different refugee camps — two in Kenya and one in Jordan. They are continuing care assistants (also known as personal support workers in some provinces), providing assistance to residents for such things as hygiene, feeding and mobility.

Two of those employees have already left Nova Scotia to join family or friends in other provinces.

The Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot (EMPP), which launched in April 2018, is unique in that refugees become permanent residents as soon as they land in Canada. That means they can move about the country as they wish and are not tied to a specific province or workplace.

All provinces and territories, except Quebec and Nunavut, are now participating in the program, although no candidates have yet arrived in New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Most workers were offered jobs in Ontario and Nova Scotia, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

Doug Stephens, chief human resources officer for MacLeod Cares, said his company's traditional recruitment efforts had not been as successful as they were in the past, which he attributes in part to the fact that some Canadians did not want to work in health care due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said the EMPP provided access to a new talent pool.

"It's made it a lot easier for us to transition to a new home, expand our workforce and have enough staff to run the facility," Stephens said.