Once again, thank you. I'm very thankful for the opportunity to speak with you this morning.
After hearing from Basil Luksun and me, you will hear two separate but very related presentations: one from Diana Mumford, a school trustee in Burnaby, and the other from Karen Roth, a community health nurse with our regional health authority, who just stepped off the airplane. They will give you more specific information about the challenges they are facing in serving refugees and immigrants in the health and education fields.
In my remarks I'll set the stage for our collective presentations. By citing the Burnaby experience, I intend to reveal how suburban municipalities have been affected by rapid increases in refugee and immigrant populations. I will also discuss an example of how we have tried to respond to the increases. Specifically, I'll talk about our multiservice health facility, a community-driven proposal for coordinating and enhancing service delivery for refugees and immigrants in Burnaby and adjacent municipalities.
Before talking about the Burnaby situation, I would like to state the obvious. Canada is a land of immigrants. We are admired internationally for our multicultural policies and proactive approaches to welcoming immigrants and respecting individuals and cultural diversity.
Indeed, Basil and I have experienced first hand the welcoming and generosity of our new home country. We both came to Canada with basically a suitcase and a few dollars in our pockets. We know only too well the importance of having appropriate supports in place to help newcomers adapt and contribute to Canada and the communities in which they live.
Burnaby is part of the greater Vancouver area and is situated immediately east of and adjacent to Vancouver. It's the third-largest city in British Columbia, with a population of just over 200,000 people. In 2001, nearly half of Burnaby's population consisted of immigrants. This is in marked contrast to 1986, when only 25% of the population were immigrants. Further, in 2001, 28% of Burnaby residents spoke a language other than English at home. Also germane to this meeting, in recent years the city has been receiving over one-third of all government-assisted refugees arriving in B.C. The main source countries for these refugees include Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, and Indonesia. These refugees present many challenges to our city and to the overall service delivery system.
Some of the key challenges we have seen relate to these refugees' low incomes, limited English language and literacy skills, health concerns, and emotional and physical trauma. In short, these refugees face enormous obstacles as they try to adapt to their new surroundings. Without appropriate support and understanding, their chances of success are severely compromised. This results in hardships for the individuals, while also hindering our efforts to maintain a cohesive, harmonious community. We cannot let this happen.
We believe that every refugee and immigrant has the potential to thrive and contribute to the betterment of our community and our country. In Burnaby, we want to harness and develop that potential. While we have an excellent array of community service providers in the city, they are stretched extremely thin and lack the funding or resources to adequately respond to the increasing needs in the community. It's our firm belief that the provision of sufficient resources and support for our service delivery system would be a sound investment in our collective future.
In time, our citizens, our communities, and our nation would reap the benefit of such investments. We should also be able to avoid the socially and financially costly consequences of a segregated society, as evidenced in France last year.
With the foregoing as context, I will briefly describe our multiservice hub proposal, a community-driven model aimed at helping us to respond better to the needs of our increasing immigrant and refugee population.
I believe that the committee clerk has provided you with the copies of a council report entitled “Federal Funding Proposal for Multi-Service Hub Facility in Edmonds”. In the time available, I won't be able to speak at length about the proposal. I'll just touch on some key points.
The proposed facility is to be located in the Edmonds area, in the southeast part of Burnaby, which has a large concentration of immigrants and refugees.
The City of Burnaby is pursuing significant upgrades to civic infrastructure in the area. A new firehall was recently constructed, and a new library will be built next year. In addition, we are currently in the design stage for a new recreation centre complex. These are all within a short walk of the proposed multi-service hub facility.
In the midst of these initiatives, extensive consultation was conducted among community members and service providers in the area. They asked what else could be done, and the multi-service hub facility emerged. It represents a collective vision of how best to meet the needs of the refugees and the immigrant population while at the same time helping to build the community and the city.
The proposal involves the establishment of a 30,000-square-foot multi-service facility on city-owned land. It is adjacent to a community school and a city-owned building that accommodates a range of community agencies.
The concept is to provide a welcoming place in which immigrants and refugees can meet, obtain services, and participate in programs. In essence, it will be a one-stop resource, one that's based on a collaborate model and offers a rich and coordinated range of needed programs and services.
A few of the many programs and services that would be offered from the hub include language and literacy classes; settlement services; public health programs; family, sport, and counselling services; youth services; and community outreach.
In addition to serving immigrants and refugees, the hub would also be a welcome community resource for the broader community. The aim is to promote community cohesion and ensure that we don't further isolate our immigrant and refugee populations. We believe that this facility will be a model for communities facing similar challenges.
The city is proposing to contribute the land for the facility with an estimated value of $2 million. We would be looking to the senior governments to provide the capital funding for construction. We would also be looking to the senior governments and non-profit agencies to deliver the services and programs from the facility.
Burnaby city council endorsed the proposal this January. We approached the federal and provincial governments for support. While acknowledging the merits and innovation of the proposal, the message we received was consistent: no capital funding programs are available for development of the hub facility. Therefore, we are currently at an impasse. We have an abundance of goodwill, and the city has committed all that is within our means, but there are no serious prospects for funding. In the meantime, the challenges faced by our refugee and immigrant populations continue unabated.
To conclude, I would like to thank you once again for the opportunity to speak before you today. I would like to leave you with three messages. One, suburban municipalities face very real challenges in trying to accommodate and meet the needs of refugee and immigrant populations. Two, despite a limited social service mandate, Burnaby has come to the table with innovative, viable opinions and options to help meet the needs of our immigrant and refugee communities. Third, we can't do it alone.
On behalf of the City of Burnaby, I strongly urge you to recommend that the federal government establish a capital funding program that will support a creative partnership initiative such as our proposed multi-service hub facility. By so doing, the government would not only be helping our refugee and immigrant communities, it would also be helping the broader community, as well as facilitating the establishment of a stronger, more cohesive, and vibrant Canada.
We are a suburban municipality with half of our population comprised of immigrants. Further, over a third of the government-assisted refugees arriving in B.C. move to our city.
We welcome immigrants and refugees to our community. We believe these people have the potential to make a positive contribution both to Burnaby and Canada. However, they need help and support as they prepare to make their contributions. We ask for your leadership, collaboration, and resources as we collectively help these people on the road to full and prosperous lives as contributing members of society.
Thank you.