Thank you so much for that question, and it's a pleasure to be here today.
One of the things we are aware of happening in Quebec is that, again, they have not had their level of settlement funding increased for many years. In fact, some of the agencies are operating with a very weak infrastructure, as you have of course noted, as well as very old equipment. Some of the computers they're using are so outdated they can't even download the current.... That is a source of frustration and inefficiencies.
One of the members of our organization is La Table, which is the provincial umbrella organization, as you know, for Quebec. And they're very concerned as well in terms of how these new settlement funds are going to be applied to Quebec. Apparently they're under negotiations now, so they don't have a sum that has been established.
Secondly, the Quebec agencies really need a lot of support and an injection of resources. By that I'm not just saying money--money is not everything. However, money can supply certain things like efficiencies, things like training, as you mentioned. Earlier on we talked about various programs that can be expanded, I believe, to make smaller centres more successful in attracting and retaining newcomers, such as the sponsorship agreement holders.
We saw in the 1990s, with the Vietnamese boat people, a huge success story in Canada, where immigrants did go to many smaller centres across Canada and were successfully retained. I can name so many communities across Canada that now have a small Vietnamese community of people who have now lived there for 20 and 30 years, and I think that you all can as well. Why did that happen? Why are we not learning from that?
This is partly why we as an organization are coming to you and saying we need to study what's happening in our smaller centres so that we can learn from those things and capture that knowledge, because we know it works. We know it has worked here in this country. We know we do have programs in place like the sponsorship agreement holders that we can use as mechanisms to help these smaller centres. So it's a matter of developing more of a national approach to working towards this.
Earlier on I mentioned the fact that we are planning to work with the Canadian Federation of Municipalities. This is obviously an issue and a concern with them. So if we were able to get resources to develop a national approach on this, I think it would be a very strong initiative for Canada to undertake to help smaller communities like yours.