Good morning, everyone.
Thanks for inviting us to present before this committee. We have some good things to report from Manitoba. You have a copy of our presentation in front of you so I won't go over it verbatim, but I will provide a high-level summary.
I am here with my colleague Colin Lemoine, who can assist me in our other official language, if that's a preference for anybody. He's a policy analyst who is a key point person on our francophone initiative right now.
I am joined also by Lei Wang, who is joining us in Ottawa for meetings with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, our key partners in all of these efforts and part of our employment supports area for immigrants.
Just go back, with a little bit of the context that you have in front of you, the targets that we've set for Manitoba--7% for francophone immigration--are ambitious, but Manitoba is no stranger to ambitious targets.
Much of what we accomplish in the province in the area of immigration is on the basis of our partnership with Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Our bilateral agreement, the Canada-Manitoba Immigration Agreement, has really helped us through our provincial nominee programs and our devolved settlement agreement to accomplish the achievements we've made in immigration over the last decade.
I want to talk specifically about our francophone initiative, but I would like to put it in the context of a province that has moved on from 1998-99, or that area, as an immigration have-not province. We weren't on the radar for much of Canada, and certainly for much of the world, as an immigration destination of choice.
On the basis of this very creative and dynamic partnership, we have actually made Manitoba one of the premier immigration destinations in Canada, again, by setting ambitious targets that we have been able to meet: 10,000 landings by 2006 and a renewed target of 20,000 landings by 2016. Part of our challenge with the ambitious targets we've set for francophone immigration is that, although we made significant gains as our overall immigration totals increased, we need to catch up on the percentages a little.
That's the context for our immigration strategy in general.
Of course, we haven't done this by ourselves. I referenced the strong partnership we have with the Government of Canada. Key players in this have been the community stakeholders, with whom we work very closely. The presentation you have in front of you provides a list of the key agencies that we work with throughout our francophone communities, not just in Winnipeg, but throughout the province of Manitoba and our regions.
We are working towards a proportion now wherein 75% to 80% of our immigration is coming through our provincial nominee program and 30% of those provincial nominees are settling in regions outside of our capital area, outside of Winnipeg. We don't yet have a similar distribution with our francophone immigration, which is still predominantly urban. Nevertheless, our regional communities are active players in this strategy, through organizations like CDEM, which is le Conseil de développement économique du Manitoba.
I'm going to speak a little bit about the promotion and recruitment side of things and then about the area that is more important, which is what we do to assist people when and after they arrive.
Our promotion and recruitment campaigns have focused on la Francophonie in general, with certain countries being naturally more predominant than others, but certainly, no country with a potential francophone population interested in migrating to Manitoba would not be of interest to us.
We have worked very closely with our key partner, la Société franco-manitobaine, in promotion and recruitment missions. They are also a key settlement partner. The organizations listed in our brief--CDEM, ANIM, and so on--are affiliated with the SFM. We've participated with them in recruitment initiatives in France, Belgium, and West Africa. I guess that the populations of interest to us in many ways could be, broadly speaking, looked at in three categories.
International students, through the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface, have been a key element of the immigration strategy: the transition of international students to permanent residence status through our provincial nominee program. The international student movement has been an important component of our immigration strategy under the provincial nominee program.
Manitoba was the first PNP to introduce a category for international students to allow them to transition from temporary to permanent status based on securing employment after graduation. We continue to benefit from that movement to Manitoba. The Collège, as our largest and very successful francophone university, is no exception. In fact, in some ways I think the proportions coming from that institution are larger than others. There's a very successful movement coming out of that institution, largely with origins in West Africa--Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Mali.
We have made visits to our embassy partners in those regions to try to raise the profile a bit of our community and our institutions. One of the challenges when you are a province that's not recognized as a first choice or logical destination for francophone immigration is to put yourself on the map, to show that there are destinations outside of Quebec where it is possible to live and educate your children in French. We feel that Manitoba certainly is a very solid destination in that category, so we have partnered with those institutions in raising our profile somewhat in those target countries.
Other key partners in these efforts have been the embassy in Paris, the visa section, and of course Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Events like Destination Canada and the funds that flow to those initiatives from the federal government have been very important for all provinces to provide a platform to promote ourselves as destinations, again, for potential immigrants from France, Belgium, and francophone-speaking areas of Europe, to consider as an option. It's different from what Quebec offers, which is obviously the first choice for many francophone immigrants, but it's an environment where you, your family, and your children can work and live in both official languages. Certainly, through our immersion programs in schools and post-secondary institutions, you can educate your children and live in French.
I think those promotion and recruitment efforts are still very much, while successful, a work in progress. I've taken the opportunity of being here in Ottawa to meet with my colleagues, both international and local, in Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and to think how we might come up with new strategies and initiatives. I'd be happy to talk about those a little more.
We've achieved what we've achieved in Manitoba by putting ourselves on the map and generally by taking new approaches: partnering with communities and institutions, federal governments, and international offices overseas to do things in ways that weren't done before, while maintaining, of course, the integrity and quality assurance standards that immigration requires. For us to continue and to be more successful in attracting francophone immigrants to destinations outside of Quebec, we're going to continue to need that creative and innovative approach to partnership.
Immigration often tends to focus on the attraction and the numbers side of the equation, but we feel that an essential part of our success in Manitoba has been what we do with individuals at arrival and after arrival through our settlement programs. We fund a wide variety of language training, settlement and integration programs, and employment support programs for newcomers, and we feel that is a key part of our success in retaining immigrants.
One of the things about the provincial nominee program--and it's important to remember that it distinguishes us a little bit from our colleagues further west--is that it's not based on a temporary foreign worker movement. We select our potential candidates on something much closer to a human capital model, something closer to, I suppose, the philosophy of the federal immigration program, on which we based on own selection criteria. This means that most individuals are coming without pre-arranged employment. We do have a temporary foreign worker component, but 70% of our intake is made up of individuals or families coming to us without pre-arranged employment.
The success we have achieved in terms of the very high labour market participation rates of immigrants is among the highest in Canada. We have one of the highest retention levels in the provincial nominee programs. It is in the 80% range, give or take, depending on the state of the economy. Nevertheless, it's consistently high. It's based on the interventions that we make with individuals at and after arrival.
Our francophone immigration is no exception. We work very closely with our partners to ensure, through L'Accueil francophone and other agencies, that people are welcomed at arrival, receive guidance and orientation to the programs they need to begin the early stages of settlement, and then, of course, are connected through to language training and employment opportunities.
The francophone component--and I should emphasize this--is part of our bilateral agreement with the federal government, which was renewed in 2003 and is in the process of being renewed now, to make francophone immigration a key priority. I sometimes forget to mention that part of our agreement, because we would do it anyway. It's an important part of what we do in Manitoba.
It's an important reflection of our community composition. It's an important strategy and priority for our government itself. So while it's been an active and successful partnership with the federal government, and we partner in the funding of some of these agencies, we feel that we have achieved significant results so far, and some of those numbers are sketched out in the presentation.
What I guess energizes us in the division and in the communities--I met with a number of my partners before coming here--is the work we are still doing, the work we have done such the Destination Canada job fair in November, for which a large team made up of not just government agencies but all community agencies, urban and rural, went to France to interview families, to tell them about Manitoba, and to tell them about our francophone communities.
Right now, we're looking at a very successful result of that. Thirty families who had previously probably not had Manitoba, St. Boniface, or our francophone communities on their radar or even on their maps, were interested in Canada and are now submitting applications. Some of them have been approved and many have made visits to our province.
It's that kind of approach: working on the ground in countries where people are interested in Canada, convincing them that Manitoba is a destination of choice, and then engaging with them consistently throughout, from the time of selection, through arrival, and afterwards, to ensure the success of their settlement.
I suspect that I'm out of time. I kind of ran over a bit, so I'll stop there. I'm happy to answer your questions.
