Again, we know that our immigrant and refugee youth are facing tremendous pressures and facing tremendous differences in our 21st century culture in the achievements and the things that are expected of them. In addition to that, when you combine that with the cultural expectations, let me give you one example of my own culture. I'm Chinese. I'm in the Chinese culture. It's very much expected that one seeks professional training, education, and some kind of profession. Well, in Canada, as we know, the trades are an excellent profession. You could get paid well. You have a lot of flexibility. This is not something that culturally, within my culture, parents know they should direct their children toward, whereas it's something that, frankly, within the Canadian system would be a very positive thing.
When you look at what's happening within different cultural groups and their knowledge and expertise of what professions are even available in Canada, and what would provide a good income and a solid job for their children, there isn't enough awareness in certain first and second generation communities. That's one thing.
Secondly, as we mentioned earlier, a lot of refugee youth come with having experienced much more trauma than we've seen before in the past. That itself requires specialized programs and services, and I don't think we need to go into the detail of that.
When you combine that along with the large numbers that are happening in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto, then you're beginning to see cracks in the system. The reason I'm putting it that way is because then you have a Canadian school board system that is very used to providing the kinds of services and the kinds of teaching styles, etc., that they've been providing for the last 20 to 30 years.
The Canadian School Boards Association itself has this summer recently released a report on what they see as being the needs within the system, because they see this as an issue as well.
What I think needs to happen at the same time is to have settlement agencies across Canada busy working away with their local school boards--the Vancouver School Board, the Richmond School Board, the Hamilton one--to develop programs and services to assist and support these children. But it's still very much of a piecemeal approach. This is sort of happening in some communities and not happening in others. For example, if the school board is not open to that approach, not open to working in partnership, there's no directive that says they must. Therefore, some programs and services may not happen.
What we're calling for in our request for this study is some baseline information. We need to know what is going on out there in Canada for our immigrant and refugee children and youth, because these are our children; it's the next generation. These are our future citizens and taxpayers and voters, etc. If we're not doing a good job in terms of positive outcomes for them currently, with the kinds of resources, technology, information, studies, and researches that we have available to us, then I don't think we're doing as well as we can.