Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 21st, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I call the meeting to order.

Before we welcome witnesses there are a couple of minor housekeeping items we should deal with.

You have a copy of the budget before you. You can see the amount there. We need to get this approved. We have witnesses coming on the 28th, so we'll need some extra moneys approved to get these witnesses before us.

Could I have a motion to approve our budget?

[An hon. member]

So moved.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

(Motion agreed to) [See Minutes of Proceedings]

Also, the Canadian Council for Refugees, as you're aware, are having their fall consultation on the weekend coming. I think most of our members will be going down to Montreal for the meeting. Just to remind you, we have an informal meeting set with Mr. Charkaoui, which is going to be held at 5 p.m. in the parlour adjacent to the chair's room. I guess the clerk will inform you a little bit more about that as time goes on. I look forward to that meeting in Montreal.

We're working on the draft report—for December 5, is it, Mr. Clerk—or starting on the fifth and subsequent meetings thereafter. The officials want to appear before then.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Mr. William Farrell]

The officials are supposed to appear on November 23, but because of the conference, I'm wondering whether we could hear from the officials on December 5, and then the draft report can be the next three meetings.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

That's the next three meetings after we meet with the officials on December 5. You are so informed.

We want to welcome witnesses from the Canadian Immigrant Settlement Sector Alliance who are with us today. We have two hours for presentation and discussion.

We welcome you here today. Maybe I'll pass it over to you to begin your presentation. We have two hours, so we'll have questions and discussion afterwards.

Thank you.

[Wai Young, Executive Director, Canadian Immigrant Settlement Sector Alliance (CISSA)]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name is Wai Young, and I'm with the Ottawa secretariat of the Canadian Immigrant Settlement Sector Alliance, which is a national umbrella organization for the 450 settlement agencies across Canada. Our vision is that CISSA, which is our acronym, harnesses the expertise of the immigrant settlement sector and is the sector's national voice to help build a Canadian society in which all immigrants and refugees are able to participate fully.

CISSA's mission is to advance public policies and programs that facilitate the settlement and integration of immigrants and refugees to Canada. You probably know that some of our agencies have been providing services and programs within their communities across Canada, some for 30, 40, 50 years. Our members are currently the provincial umbrella organizations from across Canada, as well as some national groups, such as the Canadian Council for Refugees, the sponsorship agreement holders, etc.

We're here today again to present ourselves as a national body, to identify issues, and to respond to any questions the committee has arising out of a letter we wrote requesting that the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration undertake three different studies.

One study is to do comparative study of services in the national immigration settlement programs across Canada. As committee members know, the immigration department provides a variety of programs across Canada. It is our understanding that there is a huge diversity in the kinds as well as the levels of programs and services that currently exist.

Specifically, in B.C., if you were waiting for a language training program right now, you would be waiting anywhere from eight to twelve months on a wait list before you could enter a language training program. If you were waiting in Ontario, you would be waiting six weeks. In addition to that, in B.C., if you were in that program, you would be able to get, free of cost, up to level three language training in English. If you were in Ontario, it would be level eight.

These kinds of disparities we feel need to be addressed in a national program such as this, and thus we are requesting that the standing committee undertake a white paper on comparative services across Canada.

This is just one example of the kind of disparity and variety found across Canada in programs and services, and we feel it creates a huge challenge for immigrants' and refugees' settlement and integration, depending upon where they enter and where they integrate and settle in Canada, which we feel is an issue.

Secondly, we've asked the committee to undertake a study on the outcomes of immigrant and refugee children and youth. As you've all read in the paper this summer, as well as over the last year, huge issues have now been identified regarding the integration outcomes of children and youth.

For example, in the city of Toronto, immigrant youth are dropping out at rates of up to 70%, much higher than the rates for their Canadian counterparts. Obviously, as refugee youth come through the system, they've witnessed war and all kinds of horrible situations, and the programs and services within our current programs do not address the kinds of trauma that currently children and youth are witnessing and experiencing abroad prior to coming.

We believe this program again needs to be updated. It's been a while since the refugee and immigrant service programs have been expanded to include the kinds of trauma and the kinds of issues that youth face today, in the 21st century. That's why we requested again another study on this.

Thirdly, we requested a study on smaller centres. As you know, many of our cities across Canada are experiencing population loss, as well as aging. This is a huge concern to the Canadian Federation of Municipalities, who have written us a letter requesting to work with CISSA in the areas of attraction and retention of immigrants and refugees to their smaller city centres. So we would again like to request the committee to undertake some work in assisting these smaller communities on how they can attract to and retain newcomers and citizens resident in their communities.

Having said that, now I would like to turn the microphone over to my colleague, Morteza Jafarpour, who is from Hamilton, Ontario. He will speak a little bit about himself, his personal as well as his professional experiences, and what he brings to the table today.

Thank you.

[Morteza Jafarpour, Member, Canadian Immigrant Settlement Sector Alliance (CISSA)]

Good morning. My name is Morteza Jafarpour. This is a very interesting coincidence for me, because 17 years ago today I arrived in Canada as a refugee claimant. It was the day I came to safety, but at the same time there was a big shift in my career from being a medical doctor to becoming a pizza driver.

As Wai mentioned earlier, I am a member of CISSA and I also chair the Ontario caucus of CISSA. In real life, I am executive director of an organization with the long name of the Settlement and Integration Services Organization, with the short name SISO. We provide a variety of services for immigrants and refugees that include settlement services, volunteer services, a host program, a language assessment centre, and also employment services.

With regard to the kinds of newcomers we serve in our organization, around 80% of our clients are landed immigrants or independent immigrants or family class. Also, 20% of the clients we see are refugees. We have around 320 to 350 government-assisted refugees and we have been involved with many different groups who have come. Especially after changes in legislation, we have seen government-assisted refugees with different kinds of needs and history from what we used to see.

One of the interesting parts of being in southern Ontario is the number of refugee claimants we have seen in the last few years, although after the safe third country agreement we have seen a drop in that regard. But being close to Fort Erie, by the year 2003, almost 60% of our clients were refugee claimants. We also have worked very closely with a sponsoring group regarding the private sponsorship group. We have been involved in all these areas. Our agency has a staff of 60 coming from 45 different ethnic and country backgrounds. Our staff has the ability the talk in more than 50 languages right now.

Before I turn to Fariborz, I need to highlight one thing. Historically, the vision of the role of settlement services has been that their job is to settle and integrate immigrants or refugees. Settlement integration is a personal journey. The role of any institution is not to settle individuals. In fact, the role the settlement sector and CISSA is advocating is about creating conditions for immigrant refugees to settle and integrate. And creating that condition is providing services, working with emerging and existing interracial communities, and working with mainstream cultural organizations to make sure their services are accessible and available for new citizens and new immigrants, public education and definitely dialogue, and working in the public policy area.

Thank you very much.

[Fariborz Birjandian, Member, Canadian Immigrant Settlement Sector Alliance (CISSA)]

Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Thank you very much for the opportunity. It's a great opportunity and an honour to be here to express the work we do and maybe influence some of the decisions you're going to be making.

Like Morteza, I was fortunate to come to Canada in 1988 as a government-sponsored refugee. Since then I have been involved with refugee work and immigration. I went back to my past experience to give back what I received from Canada. It has made me devote my life to volunteer work, and I very much enjoy what I do.

I'm the executive director of the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society. We have a staff of about 160, and 800 volunteers. We offer about 62 programs, and annually serve about 8,000 people in Calgary. As you know, Calgary is becoming a destination of choice, breaking the trend of everybody going to Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Now people are also looking at Calgary as quite an exciting place to be. It's quite an exciting time for us in Calgary.

I'm also involved with the Prairie Centre of Excellence that does all the research on immigration and integration. We strongly believe in immigration in our community, so we have taken an initiative to start the immigration council in Calgary. It brings everybody together to make sure that when people come to our city they know where they are, and the community becomes involved in their settlement.

We also started an initiative a few years ago with Mr. Joe Clark, who was our MP in Calgary Centre, for a call to action. We feel very strongly that integration is the final key and the reason why people come here. We have to take it much more seriously than we have. As a result we have a task force in Calgary to try to see what happens. What are the trends and challenges? What is the involvement? What does it take, when people come to a city like Calgary or any other city, to make people feel they're part of that city?

So we have about 16 organizations as partners. We have identified health, education, justice, civic participation, and employment as the six major areas, and the leaders and decision-makers in those areas need to really be involved in the settlement and integration process, otherwise it will be difficult in the future.

Learning from other countries, I think Canada has done a great job of allowing people to come to this country, bringing immigrants and refugees here, and having great community support for immigrants and refugees.

As mentioned by my colleagues, we have tried to organize ourselves. I'm the chair of the Alberta Association of Immigrant Serving Agencies. We have 20 organizations across Alberta, and the prime mandate is to settle immigrants and refugees in Alberta. I have the privilege of working with CISSA representing Alberta.

There are two very important issues: the initial settlement when people come here, and long-term integration. Most of the programs that member agencies, including my own organization, provide are basically to make that happen. The fact that a single agency in Calgary has 800 volunteers shows the interest of our community in making immigration a positive experience for people who come to our city, as well as the community itself.

We get about 1,100 refugees in Calgary and about 2,000 or 3,000 refugees in Alberta overall, so we have really good support from the community. You heard about the number of people on waiting lists. That was very unfortunate, because the budget for the settlement services was very much static for the past eight years. I have to recognize, on behalf of the sector, that the recent announcement of a funding increase is going to be a great help. Thank you very much to all of you for putting that on the agenda and recognizing the importance of settlement integration.

We have a lot of challenges. We bring in 265,000 people, I'm sure that in the future we're going to increase that because all the studies show we need more people. We need to really look at settlement and integration as a social science. We bring in so many people from 120 different countries and you expect them to become a part of your community, become Canadian. That takes a lot of work with the newcomers, and it's a lot of work for people who live in this country.

There's a lot of good news in what we do. There's the history of refugees coming to this country. Some of you are probably the grandchildren or the children of refugees who came to this country. The reputation and the positive face it puts on Canada internationally, and all those positive experiences we have with the settlement of refugees and immigration--that's why I think so many people want to come to Canada.

However, as you probably recognize, there's huge competition for the kind of people you're looking for. From a recent symposium in Canada, I learned that the Australians are doing a little bit better in competition with Canada and other countries.

So to make it work, I think we all have to work together. And good things are happening.

I'd like to stop here and hopefully get into a discussion.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you for your presentation.

We have a lot of interest in this particular topic, so I think we'll go to questions right away.

Madame Folco.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Merci, Monsieur le Président.

I'd like to welcome you to Ottawa, although this is not the first time you've been here.

First of all, let me say that I am fully endorsing the requests you have made to this committee on the three points--the comparative services for refugees, the study on refugee and immigrant children and youth, and the indicators for smaller cities in Canada.

To my first question, perhaps you would give me a fairly short answer, because I do have other questions. My question has to do with these three points, in particular the smaller cities in Canada. This is a big problem, which every province is dealing with. For instance, how do you manage to get people to come to your province or to the smaller towns in your province? Once they are there, how do you manage to retain them, not have them leave? Do you have any suggestions on how we're going to do this? I know you've suggested that we do a study, but on the other hand, very often the people who ask these things usually have some suggestions.

Again, I'd really appreciate a short answer on this. I do have two more questions.

[Fariborz Birjandian]

I'd like to respond to that.

When you look at the distribution of immigrants across the country, obviously you start with the provinces. We have three provinces across the country--Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia--that get the bulk of people, and I think that's where we have to start. If we want to do anything to change that trend, we have to take initiatives on a provincial basis.

Again, there is good news. I was at a conference recently in Atlantic Canada, and this is on the table. I think the provinces are getting the warning and are realizing the importance. They are quite involved in recruitment and attraction.

When you go overseas and ask people about Canada, basically what they know is Ontario, B.C., and Quebec. They would hardly know Saskatchewan or Manitoba. So the first step should be to market those provinces, because they have a lot to offer. When you look at what the Atlantic provinces have done in the past few years, obviously you see signs of success there. Manitoba is also a success; you know about Winnipeg. So I think we have to start from there.

In the provinces, yes, you get people coming to Ontario, but Ontario still has the same problem, in that 80% or 90% go to five different centres. In the case of Alberta, 95% of people go to either Edmonton or Calgary. That in itself could be quite unhealthy.

In terms of next steps, the communities have to take the initiative. In Alberta, for instance, Brooks or Red Deer or Medicine Hat or Olds have to understand why they need people to go there and what it takes to retain them. We have to make sure that the cities or municipalities are involved in their target-setting. Again, Brooks is a good example. I'm sure you've heard about it. They have about 3,000 people living there who weren't living there five or six years ago. Obviously the city was not prepared. I was quite involved with that, and I know it took some time for the city to get prepared. That's a good example we can learn from in terms of increasing the numbers in, let's say, Olds, a small centre in Alberta that has a lot to offer.

So I think we need community involvement, community recognition of the need for new people, and some serious institutional changes. If you are sending people from Africa, from Sudan, to Brooks, it shouldn't take five years for the school board to realize that these people are their customers. They should realize that even before they go there. Unfortunately, we always react to issues.

So I think the small communities have to be more proactive. We need them to be the ones to say that they want immigrants, and I think we should let them do the settlement.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Thank you very much.

I certainly agree with what you've just said. I was in Winnipeg recently, and last year in Saskatchewan, and this is the kind of thing they are looking forward to.

You talked about community leadership. This is something I very much believe in. I wonder whether we can go further with community involvement and talk about community private sponsorship of refugees or immigrants. This is something I'd like to be more involved in, because I've had requests from people in my riding, either as a community or a church, to sponsor a number of families, not one family, in countries such as Iran. These families could be refugees on the grounds of religious persecution.

Do you have any suggestions we could make to the government to make it easier for such groups to sponsor several families at a time, or these kinds of immigrants or refugees—which is what I'll call them for the time being? Do you have any strong suggestions to make? This is an important topic for me particularly.

[Fariborz Birjandian]

First of all, I'm sure you're aware of the sponsorship agreement holder arrangements. At the agency I work with, we are a sponsorship agreement holder.

I think of the Alberta situation. There are not many sponsorship agreement holders in our smaller communities. In Medicine Hat, Red Deer, and Brooks, there are a few organizations. So I think a lot of communities don't even know about that. I think you have to find people, and that's actually what we have done in a project called “Touching the Hearts of Albertans”. We went around Alberta and talked about refugee sponsorship.

I agree with you. It is fantastic. I think the positive response we get is amazing. However, people really need to realize this process exists. There should be community awareness. A lot of them don't know. At my agency, I sign on behalf of Bishop Henry—which is an honour—but we also do sponsorship for southern Alberta. I know in southern Alberta there are only three or four groups that do that. They could have 50 groups doing that.

I think the issue for the communities is to campaign, basically, and to raise awareness that this exists. And then there obviously needs to be the training and support to make sure they are able to do it.

Again, historically, the religious faith organizations have been leaders, and I think they are still the best to become a champion in smaller communities.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Can you make recommendations as to how the system could be made better in order to bring more people into this country faster?

[Fariborz Birjandian]

We know about the backlog and the problem we have with the backlog. At this point I think we have about maybe 6,000 or 7,000 or 8,000 sponsorship calls every year, and only about half of them come to Canada. It takes a really long time. With the waiting lists, for instance, in Russia, if somebody's an Afghani in Russia or there is somebody in Turkey, it takes about three years to come here. So I think we really have to change that. Again, this is a system issue. I think we have a backlog. I think there has been a lack of resources for the past eight or ten years. The CIC has really reduced their staffing overseas. Now, hopefully, they will increase it.

So what they need to do, basically, is to make sure.... In our case, we submit about 200 applications for refugees coming from overseas. It probably takes—and we are one of the luckiest ones—

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

I'm talking about sponsorship here.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We have to go to our next one.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

We'll talk about it later.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We're down to eight and a half minutes.

Madame Faille, please.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Your presentations, this morning, have been very interesting. Of course, the province of Quebec has a different approach because of the Canada-Quebec Agreement, but I would like you to tell us about criteria. In Quebec, newcomers get different services from other immigrants on a five-year basis. Newcomers in the province are entitled to certain services for a five-year period. After that, they will be offered other services. It is not the same range of services.

Did you undertake a study to determine what services should be offered as a priority, from the beginning, and which ones should be offered on a longer term, as well as to determine where are the major gaps?

[Fariborz Birjandian]

I think there's a continuum of services, from initial services and settlement to settlement, integration, and civic participation. Initial settlement is really a physical thing. It's about housing, schooling, getting a bank account, learning how to drive here or getting a driver's licence, getting all the documentation, health issues--all those things that happen in the first six months. After that the issue is how they are going to get engaged, especially entering the labour market. That is huge. In all the studies we have done, the top three priorities are English or French language, employment services, and services related to children and youth.

Initial services are well established. There are community organizations like ours that help them find apartments and schools. We help them with the initial challenges they have. There are two different ways to thinking across the country. In Quebec I know you have a particular system, but we really don't believe they should be separated from the mainstream. After the initial services and some special services they need, we really need to make sure our institutions have the ability to serve newcomers, at least after they've been here for six months. So we really need to look again at two-tier services for newcomers, because over five years we get almost 1.2 million people in this country, and our main institutions should be able to serve them.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

As concerns immigration services, 80% of immigrants settle in urban centres and 20% in rural communities. The province of Quebec has made huge efforts to regionalize immigration.

Do you think that the relationship between the newcomer and the department, and the fact that services are offered in urban centres are discouraging quite a few people to rapidly settle outside major centres?

[Fariborz Birjandian]

Lack of services is one of the reasons. There are a number of issues with people not going to smaller centres. We have to recognize that we're bringing people from countries where they're used to living in cities of more than eight million people, so they like to go where people are. Services and readiness of the community can help. We also have to really market secondary migration among people who have been here for some time, and look at the opportunities they may have in the smaller centres.

[Wai Young]

May I also respond to that?

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Yes.