Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I'd like to start by thanking you for having invited us to testify before your committee. I'm very pleased to be here.
I'm going to talk to you about our organization which is located on the south shore of Montreal, in Brossard. We are a community organization made up of approximately 25 people, professionals working full time in the intake and integration of immigrants. Our organization is 35 years old. In fact, we'll soon be celebrating our 35th anniversary over the coming months, and we belong to a network of community organizations that are located in the Greater Montreal area and throughout Quebec. There are organizations involved uniquely with immigration that have been around for a very long time. I think this is a unique characteristic of Quebec, compared to the rest of Canada and to the rest of the world.
The organization's mission is to welcome and support the integration of immigrants, but also to create intercultural bridges. That is the hardest task of course. The third part of our mission is to advocate for immigrants' rights from the day of their arrival, and for their training. Our organization's mission is therefore threefold.
From the very beginning, our organization wanted to provide a type of single window for immigration services. When I say single window, I mean that the organization offers practically all the services that are necessary for newcomers. That involves language training, employment assistance, integration, and social services, as well as other services. Besides these fundamental services, we also create projects. Our organization often operates on a project basis in order to meet, when possible, particular requests or particular needs on the part of our clients, whether they be youth, or immigrant women, to help them, for example, integrate into decision-making networks, decision-making centres. For example, we assist young immigrants, along with Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, to find jobs very quickly. We therefore have an enormous number of projects. On average, we have four or five ongoing projects that may be repeated or that may change from year to year.
We are located in the Montreal south shore area which is an area that is receiving more and more immigrants for various reasons. People leave downtown Montreal in order to settle on the outskirts, whether that be the south shore or the north shore. This is a phenomenon that we have observed. Therefore we are feeling more and more pressure because we are the only organization providing general services in our area. We have sister organizations that are more specialized, for example, a small organization that is responsible for the Chinese community or an organization that provides specific activities and deals with immigrants. However, we are the only comprehensive organization that deals specifically with immigration. Obviously, we are starting to feel the pressure of increasing demand and our resources, our means, our expertise and our ability to intervene are not increasing at the same rate as demand. This is a serious problem.
We welcome approximately 2,000 clients per year, approximately 50% of those are new clients and 50% are former clients who continue to use our services for several years, actually. Within those clients, we deal with a specific category, that of state refugees. These clients are more fragile than the others given their migratory background. They come from refugee camps throughout the world. They arrive under emergency circumstances having experienced very dramatic, rather tragic, situations over the past few years. These clients arrive here, come to see us, and, in partnership with the Government of Quebec, we settle them in the region.
Generally, our clientele is made up firstly of a large group of people of Chinese origin, people from Afghanistan, Latin America and the Middle East, in that order. Our organization finds funding in all kinds of ways, but not enough funding. Our one million dollar yearly budget comes from the Government of Quebec, the federal government and a variety of organizations that support us financially for individual projects. I will come back to the issue of funding but it is a serious problem for organizations that support integration and that have suffered from chronic underfunding for years.
In Quebec and throughout Canada, immigration levels are rising and integration issues are becoming more and more complex. If you look at the issue as a spectrum, as my colleagues pointed out, it is an issue that brings into play other issues of economic integration, employment, family, young people, isolation, etc. Therefore if we are serious about helping individuals integrate as quickly as possible so that immigration becomes a resource and not a problem for society, then we have to rethink funding in order to make these organizations professional organizations and give them the means and the tools to be able to intervene appropriately.
The problems related to immigrants, to the clientele that we deal with, are problems that have already more or less been raised here. First, there are the issues of access—in my view this is fundamental—to public services. Integration cannot happen without public services playing an important role. To the extent that they produce equality, these are the services that grant equality of access to resources and wealth. They also produce meaning. And yet, overall, whether because of language reasons or lack of knowledge about the system, immigrants have very little access to public services, which are, by definition, integrating factors. If immigrants or other sections of a population are excluded from access to public services, then there is a serious problem.
There is also a language training problem. There are government programs to assist people in learning French and English as quickly as possible. However, there is room for improvement. As long as people are not familiar with one language or, ideally, two, they will experience problems in finding work and having access to other resources in our society.
Another serious problem is that of social isolation which was raised earlier. Immigration represents a fracture in a path, in a life. People have broken with the social network they belonged to previously and they have come here to begin a new network. The problem is that if we do not help them quickly create a new network in society, a social network, a network of mutual assistance and well-being, then there is a risk of turning inwards, and of cultural, social and urban ghettos being created. That is a serious problem.
As I already pointed out, we have a holistic approach but we try to help people become independent as quickly as possible, through employment programs and other programs even if those are, of course, insufficient.