Thank you very much.
As you know, on the issue of newcomers, from a demographic perspective it's not just your region but all across the country, in almost every part of the country. Any population growth that we have will be from newcomers as opposed to natural birth and so on. So it truly is a national issue.
One of our perspectives on this is a health perspective, and there's a very curious paradox—in fact a very troubling paradox—that newcomers come to Canada and typically are healthier than resident Canadians. This is partly because we just don't admit sick people to the country; we screen them out. Fair enough. But after five years, typically the health status of newcomers is lower than resident Canadians' health status. So something is happening in that initial settlement period that's driving health downward.
We're in year three of a project. We're looking intensively at a very dense neighbourhood that receives a lot of immigrants in downtown Toronto called St. James Town, looking at the whole combination of factors, whether they are employment and income-related factors, whether they are factors involving the physical environment, housing, and so on. We're looking at the kinds of connections, and it's a bit too early for us to offer some specifics on that.
Generally what we hear from community-based organizations that are involved in the very critical work of immigrant settlement issues is that they don't have the resources they need to meet the needs of the communities, and the resources should in fact be increased. I think this ties in, if I may say so, with our general proposition to this committee around community innovation, that many of these organizations are looking for new ways to effectively meet the needs of newcomers.