I'd like to add that in terms of refugees coming to Saskatchewan in the past couple of years, the large group process done with the Karen refugees was highly successful. We've resettled a couple of hundred Karen refugees in Regina over the past year; as far as I know, to date not one has moved on. This has been a very good exercise to develop, and I think we need to do more of that.
In terms of the immigrant groups, I definitely agree that various regions of Saskatchewan will require immigrants with varying skill sets to meet the labour needs within that community. However, support must be there.
I'm disappointed in the provincial government. I'm not sure at this point what their vision is. It seems to change a lot. The way I see it is they've given seed funding for a couple of years for a bunch of volunteers in the community to come together to try to meet the needs of the immigrants settling there. I don't know if they envision that after two years everyone is just going to have loved it so much that they want to volunteer to do it for the rest of their lives.
The reality is that we have a strong settlement sector in Saskatchewan. It was small, but we were very involved provincially and nationally. I represent Saskatchewan on CISSA-ACSEI, a national organization. We've been attending all sorts of conferences and participating for many years, so I feel that what should have happened was that they should have built on the settlement sector in Saskatchewan.
We had proposed a vision whereby initially, when the numbers were small, we could have had an outreach worker in each agency overseeing a region and helping communities to develop settlement plans. That didn't happen, and now, as I said before, we're feeling a real disconnect. We have many groups contacting us and saying they need to come to our agency and learn what we do. We don't like to say no, but in reality it's draining us somewhat of our ability to really focus on our community when we're trying to assist all these other communities.
Had they simply been invited to join the settlement sector in places where a large number of immigrants were settling in Saskatchewan, I think they would have seen after a couple of years whether it was going to continue to grow or whether it would dwindle off and we wouldn't need an agency there. However, if there was an agency where it did continue to grow and the numbers were still coming in and there was a need for services and professional expertise, then I think settlement sector agencies should have been encouraged.
I'm still hoping we can pull this together.