Session 2.1: Important Ingredients of a Welcoming Community

Transcription

1 OMSSA 2013 Human Services Integration Policy Conference Municipal Human Service System Management: 15 Years After Local Services Realignment December 3-4, Toronto Session 2.1: Important Ingredients of a Welcoming Community Don Curry, Executive Director North Bay & District Multicultural Centre In contrast to the larger cities of London and Ottawa, North Bay s mayor and council got interested in immigration in 2005, only eight years ago. Then Mayor Vic Fedeli, now the Conservative finance critic in the Ontario Legislature, tells the story about mining company executives coming into his office demanding that he do something about the skilled labour shortage in the industry. They had mining professional and skilled trades jobs going unfilled because of the labour skills mismatch in the region. This is despite a fairly high unemployment rate. A few years later we brought in Rick Minor twice to talk about his study, People Without Jobs, Jobs Without People. The mayor spoke with the city s economic development director and he assigned a staff member to get something started on the immigration front. She advertised a meeting for anyone interested to attend and six of us, plus her, showed up and that was the beginning of the North Bay Newcomer Network, which received funding four years later as a Local Immigration Partnership. From 2005 to 2009 we had no paid staff and since then we have had one. The strategy developed was to do all we could to make North Bay a welcoming community for newcomers before the city launched an immigrant attraction program. There were no immigrants around the table so we organized a full- day symposium with round- table discussions and strategizing. Almost 90 people attended, all newcomers except for the organizers. They told us that the most important first step was to create an immigrant settlement agency. I was the executive director of an anti- racism and social justice nonprofit at the time and convinced my board to phase out those activities and fill the need identified by the city and its newcomer population. The city took a lead role engaging Citizenship and Immigration Canada and a conversation I had with the economic development director set the stage for future collaboration. He said the city did not want to get into the immigrant settlement business but it would do all it could to help me build the capacity of a new agency. That help took the form of the city applying for funding directed to municipalities and contracting with the agency to carry out the work required. That continues today with the immigration portal, that we keep updated for the city, and various projects through FedNor, a Northern Ontario economic development arm of Industry Canada.

2 The city did not want to be the lead for the LIP, and told CIC that it supported our agency being the holder of the contribution agreement. Leading both initiatives follows the city s original intent to help develop our capacity. We maintain our independence from the city with our own board of directors, with no city representative. However the city s economic development director often attends as an observer and appreciates staying informed of developments. The North Bay & District Multicultural Centre opened its doors in January of 2008 with a staff of 2.5. We expanded twice in the building we were in and March 1 of this year we moved to a larger and much more visible location in the middle of Main Street. We opened a Timmins office in 2010 and now have a staff of ten. The original economic development officer and I continue to co- chair our LIP, even though she left her position with the city about a year ago. Her replacement is very active with the LIP and sits on a number of committees, and the new director of economic development stays engaged. Our new mayor remains as involved and supportive as we want him to be. We serve 17 per cent of Ontario s land mass, from Parry Sound in the south to Hearst in the north. It takes eight hours to drive between those two points. Some of the centres in our catchment area that you may have heard of include Sturgeon Falls and West Nipissing, Mattawa, Temagami, Cobalt, Temiskaming Shores, Kirkland Lake, Iroquois Falls, Cochrane, and Kapuskasing. North Bay is the largest centre at 54,000 people. Timmins has a population of 45,000 and the region has 240,000 people. As I mentioned, work on immigration began only eight years ago and our agency is only six years old. I have lived in North Bay for 35 years and when I arrived there was no diversity whatsoever. We were literally about to change the face of the city. A few years into the project the North Bay Nugget ran a front page story and photo it titled The Changing Face of North Bay. The city led the way on the immigrant attraction side, and our LIP expanded to more than 60 organizations, representing the municipality, the district social services administration board, university, two colleges, four school boards, Employment Ontario, the social services sector, the health sector, city police and OPP, YMCA, Chamber of Commerce and many employers. The LIP now has an executive committee, Immigrant Employers Council, Welcoming Committee and a Settlement Committee. Each of those has numerous sub- committees. The city s attraction initiatives included building the immigration portal at northbayimmigration.ca, attending Internationally Trained Professionals conferences in Toronto and staffing a recruitment booth, advertising in the ethnic media in Toronto, appearing on Chinese television in Toronto, organizing an immigrant fall colours train tour to North Bay and Temagami, and more. In the early days there was some public backlash through letters to the editor and the mayor and I pounced on them immediately with written responses containing factual information about the jobs mismatch, baby boomer retirements, youth out- migration and a low rate of child birth. We built the immigration argument on economic development and after a few tag- team responses the opposition

3 dried up. Anti- immigration sentiments are still out there but I think people realize that if they go public with their beliefs they are going to get slammed in public. I did a series of radio programs on immigration, including one segment with the mayor, and they are all available as podcasts on our immigration portal. We took every opportunity available to us to get the immigration story in the media and received tremendous support from them. I moved a program I had been running since 1989 over to the LIP, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It involves students at all four school boards, two colleges and the university in anti- racism education and culminates with an Evening of Applause on or about March 21 each year. We celebrated our 25 th anniversary of the initiative this year. More than 7,500 people have attended the Evening of Applause alone, and thousands more students have been exposed to the program. North Bay is often cited as a role model for smaller municipalities wanting to launch immigration initiatives. With Brockville and Chatham- Kent we were part of a pilot program a number of years ago sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. Our LIP earned two Newcomer Champion Awards from the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration. Our agency was named nonprofit of the year by the North Bay & District Chamber of Commerce and won a prestigious entrepreneurship award from Northern Ontario Business. Renfrew and Lanark Districts and Owen Sound have reached out to us for assistance getting started, and we have been working with them over the past few years. Recent initiatives with the city to help create a welcoming community include using the city s facilities to create a cricket team for newcomers. This past summer North Bay hosted the first ever Northern Ontario Cricket Championship. Thunder Bay went home with the trophy, defeating North Bay in the final. Their players had an average age of about 20, while ours is closer to 40. We use the city s arenas for learn to skate activities for newcomers and we partner with the Y and the city to offer learn to swim programs. North Bay is bordered by two large lakes and many newcomers told us they were afraid of the water. We work with Canadore College recreation leadership students and professors to organize snowshoeing and hiking expeditions. We are now working with the city and its business centre to create a downtown business incubator for newcomers and a micro- lending service for immigrants with no Canadian credit history. Both would be operated by the multicultural centre. Two Nipissing University professors serve on our LIP, one on the executive committee as chair of the Welcoming Committee. He completed research on the role of sports and recreation as an integrating factor and the other professor is just winding up a housing study, completed in cooperation with the District of Nipissing Social Services Administration Board. We are plugged in provincially, as I serve on the board of directors of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) and federally, as I serve on the board of Pathways to Prosperity, a national

4 immigration research organization that developed from the Welcoming Communities Initiative at Western University. I am active with its Agency of the Future project, which has a national team researching what settlement agencies should look like after the series of rapid changes to our immigration system fully take effect. We partner with Skills International of London for our HR North project, which we describe as a head- hunting service for purple squirrels those very hard to find individuals with a particular skill set. Right now millwrights are purple squirrels in Northern Ontario. You can add doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and welders to the list. Skills International has a database of more than 15,000 internationally trained professionals and we add Ontario university and college graduates to the mix. Over the years we have tackled, through both our agency and the LIP, most of the factors cited by the Welcoming Communities Initiative in 2010 as determinants of a welcoming city. They named 17 factors employment opportunities, fostering social capital, affordable and suitable housing, positive attitudes toward immigrants, cultural diversity and the presence of newcomers in the community, presence of newcomer- serving agencies that can successfully meet the needs of newcomers, links between main actors working toward welcoming communities, municipal services and features sensitive to the needs of newcomers, educational opportunities, positive relationships with police and justice systems, safety, opportunities for use of public space and recreation facilities, and favourable media coverage and representation. Part of our future vision is to better include the smaller communities in our catchment area that I mentioned earlier. We know there are many newcomers not accessing our services because they don t know we exist and we have a strategy to create a much higher profile in those communities. We need to engage employers in the smaller cities and towns to educate them on the coming Expression of Interest program, where, starting in January of 2015 employers can pick immigrant employees from a database of those interested. We have a project on the drawing board now that would involve up to four municipalities (two have passed council resolutions in support of the project) in a pilot project. The project would extend settlement services to the four municipalities through monthly visits by our settlement counsellors, establish immigrant employers councils in each of the municipalities, provide resources for our HR North person to travel regularly to the four municipalities, launch an advertising campaign for the entire region to both set the stage for increased immigration and advertise our services, and to have the project evaluated by Pathways to Prosperity. While North Bay and Timmins have moved quickly on immigration initiatives it is just hitting the radar in the smaller surrounding communities. We held an immigration symposium in Temiskaming Shores October 1 for the region and for many attending it was their first exposure to immigration issues. Many government funders attended and in a subsequent meeting they had immigration was a major item on the agenda, for the first time. Municipal strategic plans do not mention the word immigration. We are also working in North Bay to add missing settlement services, such as federally- funded language classes complemented by child minding facilities. We have an ESL class but there is a need to offer more.

5 Since the Northern Ontario CIC office closed in Sudbury, only an hour- and- quarter drive from North Bay, our clients have had to travel to Toronto or Mississauga for government services as simple as renewing a Permanent Resident card. We are working with CIC to have CIC officers visit North Bay on a regular basis. Previously citizenship ceremonies were held in Sudbury, and this year we had one on Canada Day in North Bay. We are working to ensure that continues. In the future we need to diversify our funding base, expand our fee for service enterprises, expand our Timmins office, expand our HR North operation, get smaller municipalities in our region excited about the possibilities of attracting immigrants and much more. Strong partnerships, with the municipality and other players, are what got us to where we are now and it is our goal to continue building partnerships for years to come.