Merci. Thank you very much for having us here today on such short notice. I'm the executive director of the Moose Jaw Multicultural Council. Our agency has been active in our community for almost 35 years, providing settlement services to refugees and immigrants.
We prefer just to say “newcomers”, because there is not much of a difference between a refugee and an immigrant. They still have needs when they arrive in Canada. Sometimes they still need some language training; they still need some settlement services to overcome culture shock. They are new to our country and they need services.
We were sitting in the back and heard some of the comments of people who were here earlier. One of the comments that tweaked our interest was about the need for skilled workers. We're certainly not disagreeing about the need; there is a need in Saskatchewan for skilled workers. But I think the refugee population is overlooked as a viable source of labour pools.
A lot of our refugees come with lots of skills, lots of different qualifications. They sometimes have a language barrier, as do a lot of newcomers to Canada. The difference with refugee clients is that they are given one year and sometimes two years of assistance from the federal government to go to school to learn English and sometimes to go into an employment class and learn a little bit about the Canadian labour market and labour standards.
They may take a little longer to enter the work force or to become self-sufficient, but we certainly take great steps to ensure that they are well prepared before they go into the workforce or enter into further education or anything of that nature.
Another thing I want to comment on is the retention rate. Ms. Katerynych just indicated that the retention rate for refugees hasn't been that great.
A few years ago, we probably would have agreed with that. In the last four or five years, we've had really good success with retention rates because of some of the changes that CIC is making to the way refugee clients are destined to us: with group destination, with listening to the clients, putting requests in for their families to be destined to the same cities—instead of having family here and family in Vancouver or something, sending everybody to the same place—and building on existing communities.
At the beginning of the year, we usually sit down with our local immigration office and tell them what kinds of existing cultural communities we have and what their retention rates are like. Do we want more of a certain kind of clientele? Are we open to accepting new types of clientele? Are there services in place for these people when they come? Do they have people they can form friendships with? Do we have interpreters who are available?
We look at all these things and are trying more and more to make educated decisions when it comes to the destining and acceptance of the refugee clients in our communities.
Another thing is family reunification. I know the federal government is taking great strides to reunite families, because people are more likely to stay in a community if they have that family support. That goes for everybody.
Then I'll mention the existing cultural groups. We have a lot of cultural groups—16, actually—that belong to the Moose Jaw Multicultural Council, and all of them are very open to accepting immigrants or refugees and welcoming them. Our agency has been put in place to welcome newcomers to Moose Jaw, and as I said, I think for the past 35 years we've done the best possible job we can of providing services for newcomers, welcoming them into our community.
There are a lot of benefits to living in a smaller community—the cost of living and the transportation time and so on. Sometimes smaller communities are overlooked. I don't think they should be put aside or disregarded as a viable source for people to relocate.
Is that my five minutes?