Thank you very much.
Good morning, honourable members. My name is Salim Sindhu. I'm executive director of the Calgary Immigrant Educational Society. I'm also accompanied by my senior manager, Noureddine.
Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to talk about the immigration settlement and adaptation program.
The announcement by Honourable Jason Kenney, the immigration minister, about changes in funding to the immigration settlement program was long overdue, since Alberta has a number of secondary immigrants coming from Ontario. Also, as new immigrant statistics show, more new immigrants go directly to Alberta rather than to Ontario.
These changes have a great impact on the delivery of settlement services. They will enable us to improve or add more settlement services in the southeast area of the city of Calgary.
The Calgary Immigrant Educational Society started a LINC program in 1990. The LINC program was independent; it was not part of the settlement services until 2008, when the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration announced that LINC would be part of settlement services.
An increase in LINC funding was announced by the honourable minister, and our society is providing the LINC program with 30 full-time and part-time classes. In 2010, under settlement services, we added an after LINC program, called employment skills training, to help immigrants complete the LINC program and learn job-searching techniques. This program has become very successful and it is in very high demand. When I finish, I will invite the EST program manager to briefly present some details to everyone.
We could not become so-called settlement services over the past 20 years, as these services are restricted to a few selected organizations in the city of Calgary. The settlement services that are provided are located in different parts of the city. The majority of the organizations are located in the downtown area.
However, when it comes to evaluating the settlement program applications, geographic criteria do not seem to be considered. The Calgary Immigrant Educational Society is located in the southeast of Calgary, where a lot of new immigrants reside because of the affordability of housing. But settlement counselling service is not available in this area; they have to travel all the way downtown to access the counselling service.
In addition, under the LINC program, about 450 clients receive service from our organization on a daily basis. We have to deal with all kinds of different issues almost every day. Some clients request counselling and they have to be referred to other organizations. This has created a lot of difficulty for our clients. We have to face the same questions every day. Our clients constantly ask us questions as to why we cannot help them: “I'm already here. Why are you referring me to another place that is far away?”
We believe the changes in funding will have a positive impact on our organization. We hope additional funding will be allocated to Alberta in the near future and that our organization's request to add settlement counselling services will be favourably considered by CIC. Thanks to the increased funding support from CIC, our LINC program has increased the number of clients by 64% and child minding by 70%, compared to 2007 and 2008. This could only happen because of the additional funding for the program.
With the change in funding, we are very optimistic that immigrants' needs will be better met. As Honourable Kenney said, the changes do not represent significant cuts to funding but rather a redistribution of money to where it's needed most. Those funds are being reallocated to other areas that have evidence of greater need.
We believe there is obvious evidence of a great need for our organization to offer settlement counselling services to new immigrants, especially in the southeast area of Calgary. We look forward to witnessing the reallocation of funding to where it is needed in the city of Calgary as well as in Canada.
Thank you.
Now I defer to Noureddine.