Citizenship and Immigration Committee on April 2nd, 2008

[Tara Blanchard]

I think Darcy hit the nail on the head. Basically, in the past few years we've seen a real fragmenting of services. As he said, our agencies started welcoming all the newcomers to Saskatchewan; we did not differentiate between the refugee clients and the immigrant clients. Now we have the federal government funding us to work more with the refugee clients; we have the provincial government funding us to work more with the immigrant clients.

What we need to do is forget how they came to Canada. It's irrelevant. And we have existing centres in place. Instead of reinventing the wheel, the services are in place. If you bring the people and they're served correctly and they're served in the best possible way and are given the tools they need to succeed, they are going to stay in our province.

Look at existing cultural groups; look at bringing their families with them. If the family is happy, then the person who was brought in to do the work will be happy. If they have a cultural group to support them and everybody is happy and satisfied and well-adjusted in their community, they're going to stay. And they're going to have an agency they can go to, where they can access services.

What's very difficult is that we're notified of the refugee clients, but we're not notified of immigrant arrivals. We advertise a lot in the community. What's very frustrating is to hear stories of immigrants who have moved from our community who say, “Nobody was around to help me.” Well, if we're not notified of their arrival and don't know they're in our community, how can we possibly help them, though we are here to help them?

There have to be a few changes put in place in that regard, such as notifying the settlement agencies of immigrant arrivals—we're already notified of the refugee arrivals—and giving them more information, before they arrive in the province they're destined to, telling them where to go and where to access services.

[Darcy Dietrich]

I'd like to add that in terms of refugees coming to Saskatchewan in the past couple of years, the large group process done with the Karen refugees was highly successful. We've resettled a couple of hundred Karen refugees in Regina over the past year; as far as I know, to date not one has moved on. This has been a very good exercise to develop, and I think we need to do more of that.

In terms of the immigrant groups, I definitely agree that various regions of Saskatchewan will require immigrants with varying skill sets to meet the labour needs within that community. However, support must be there.

I'm disappointed in the provincial government. I'm not sure at this point what their vision is. It seems to change a lot. The way I see it is they've given seed funding for a couple of years for a bunch of volunteers in the community to come together to try to meet the needs of the immigrants settling there. I don't know if they envision that after two years everyone is just going to have loved it so much that they want to volunteer to do it for the rest of their lives.

The reality is that we have a strong settlement sector in Saskatchewan. It was small, but we were very involved provincially and nationally. I represent Saskatchewan on CISSA-ACSEI, a national organization. We've been attending all sorts of conferences and participating for many years, so I feel that what should have happened was that they should have built on the settlement sector in Saskatchewan.

We had proposed a vision whereby initially, when the numbers were small, we could have had an outreach worker in each agency overseeing a region and helping communities to develop settlement plans. That didn't happen, and now, as I said before, we're feeling a real disconnect. We have many groups contacting us and saying they need to come to our agency and learn what we do. We don't like to say no, but in reality it's draining us somewhat of our ability to really focus on our community when we're trying to assist all these other communities.

Had they simply been invited to join the settlement sector in places where a large number of immigrants were settling in Saskatchewan, I think they would have seen after a couple of years whether it was going to continue to grow or whether it would dwindle off and we wouldn't need an agency there. However, if there was an agency where it did continue to grow and the numbers were still coming in and there was a need for services and professional expertise, then I think settlement sector agencies should have been encouraged.

I'm still hoping we can pull this together.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Thierry St-Cyr]

Ms. Grewal, you have seven minutes.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

What types of services do you give in your agency? Do you help with language skills, finding a job, or writing résumés?

[Darcy Dietrich]

We have people who do all of that. We deliver the resettlement assistance program for government-assisted refugees, the immigrant and settlement adaptation program, and the LINC program--language instruction for newcomers to Canada. We have about 200 adult newcomers on site.

Every day we have a day care. We're actually moving to two day cares soon to support our clients so that they can access language training and employment services. We want to make sure they have the support through day care so that they don't have to worry about their kids. They can stay in language training over the summer. We have all sorts of employment services, such as the ELT program. We have a very successful ELT program.

[Tara Blanchard]

We have all the same services that the Regina Open Door Society does, but on a smaller scale.

[Darcy Dietrich]

We could leave a couple of calendars of our ELT project, just to show you how successful it is. This project is serving highly skilled immigrants in getting them back into their field of work. We have high-end employment services. We also have basic services. We have an introduction to employment and Canadian work culture, a program called Steps to Employment. We have a family services unit that we are building. We have an unusually high number of refugee clients with complex needs. There has been a lot of wonderful jointly assisted sponsorship.

We have a vision. When the changes were made to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, it was decided that we would deal with more compassionate and humanitarian cases. But the money wasn't available for it. So we set up on site, without funding, a health assessment clinic with Public Health. We have a formal partnership with the Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region and the Regina Community Clinic to deliver specialized and culturally sensitive health care. We have initial assessments done with all our refugee clients. Now we are getting some funding through the United Way to have a full-time social worker on staff to help our settlement staff. Some settlement caseworkers don't have the education or the skills to deal with some of the complex situations that come up, so the United Way has helped us. We can now refer clients from our settlement unit to our family services unit.

We have everything from airport reception to services for highly skilled immigrants. There are still some gaps—we're trying to do more for children and youth. But we would like our province and our nation to be proud of the hard work we've done. We want to serve everyone at the same level, and we don't want to see barriers obstructing those of us who are trying to help and welcome newcomers.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

On the one hand, you have people who are looking for jobs. On the other hand, there is a shortage of workers. Are you coordinated with the construction industry, the hospitality industry?

[Darcy Dietrich]

We have just received funding to hire somebody to deliver a special bridging project within our employment services. It's looking at sector-specific training. We have a meeting coming up in a couple of days with career and employment services, Can-Sask. They would like us to entertain the idea of partnering with some other community-based agencies, such as aboriginal family service agencies, to deliver some trades training.

They wanted us to look at the idea of opening some of our services to non-immigrants and refugees. Of course, that is not our mission, and we have to be careful about mission drift. Within the bridging project, we are looking beyond the hospitality and cleaning industry. They are important and we have clients who need those jobs, but we are also looking at some of the higher-skilled positions and trades, because we want to try to get more newcomers into trades in Saskatchewan.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

What is the success rate for getting people jobs in the construction and the hospitality sectors?

[Darcy Dietrich]

It is high. I've been at Regina Open Door Society for 20 years, and I've been in this position for seven. I remember when I was employment services manager doing the cold calls, trying to open doors for newcomers. But now, with Saskatchewan's economy growing, there is a great need for more people to fill labour shortages, and there is a huge turnaround. We now have employers and government, the City of Regina, knocking on our door asking for a better way to refer clients. They want to adapt so we can include newcomers in our workplace.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

What is the total number of new immigrants in your agency?

[Darcy Dietrich]

On a yearly basis?

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Yes.

[Darcy Dietrich]

We served 190 government-assisted refugees, but beyond that we are dealing with about 2,000 clients a year. That's growing. In the past year, it was much higher. That's everything from people who need intensive services for two or three years to those who need only a résumé.

[Tara Blanchard]

Last year we received 57 government-assisted refugees and another 20 to 25 immigrants. So it's about 100 a year.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

How do you deal with the people who don't have basic English skills? Do you have interpreters?

[Darcy Dietrich]

Yes.

[Tara Blanchard]

We have local interpreters who volunteer to help them out.

[Darcy Dietrich]

And we get some funding for interpretation.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Thierry St-Cyr]

Thank you.

We have six minutes left. Two people can speak for three minutes each.

Mr. Carrier, you wanted to...

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Is it a full round?

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Thierry St-Cyr]

You will have another three minutes.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Okay.

[Robert Carrier, Bloc, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

I will be brief.

We were in Alberta yesterday and there was a lot of talk about the problem of temporary workers who were exploited by their employers, mainly in salary and housing. Their rights were not respected like those of other workers. The matter was so serious that the representative of the Alberta Federation of Labour said that Canada's reputation was at stake.

We touched on the matter a little this morning, but we did not hear from people as close to the workers as you are. I would like to hear what you think. This morning, we were told that it is not a problem here, and that in Saskatchewan, it was not as widespread as in Alberta. Is there a danger that the situation in Saskatchewan will get worse and that people will be exploited as well? Do you have assurances from your provincial government that labour standards will be fully upheld? It is not the federal government's role to oversee that. I would like to hear your comments.