Good morning, committee members. My name is Thomas Tam, and I am the CEO of SUCCESS, a multicultural social services organization that has been serving new Canadians since 1974. Our mission is to build bridges, harvest diversity, and foster integration.
Last year we served over 200,000 clients of diverse cultural backgrounds who spoke more than 20 different languages, including Chinese, Punjabi, Korean, Vietnamese, Farsi, and others.
Over half of our clients are new immigrants.
We have 26 service locations in metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, and northern B.C., and we have overseas offices in Korea, Taiwan, and China.
It's my pleasure today to share with the committee what's happening in British Columbia in regard to the committee's concern about the social impacts of the recent CIC funding cuts.
The funding model in British Columbia is a little bit different from other provinces. Under the Canada-B.C. agreement, CIC has downloaded most of the settlement and adaptation services to the B.C. government through the transfer payment. In other words, the B.C. government is the direct funder for most of the services provided in British Columbia.
Although most of the services are delivered by the B.C. government, CIC still maintains some direct funding projects in British Columbia, mostly nationwide or interprovincial programs. SUCCESS, our organization, as an example, has two very unique projects funded directly by CIC. The first one is the AEIP project--the active engagement and integration project--which is an overseas project in Korea and in Taiwan that serves prospective immigrants coming to Canada.
The other project is our airport reception project at the Vancouver International Airport. We receive and provide orientation for over 40,000 newcomers who arrive at the airport. Half of them will go to other provinces, mostly the western provinces.
These two projects are directly funded by CIC. At this moment, we haven't received any funding cut signals or a funding reduction message from CIC, so we believe that CIC will also look at these two very unique and innovative projects. We are very optimistic that CIC will continue to support these two projects.
To conclude my presentation, as a service provider in British Columbia, we haven't seen any signal about drastic funding cuts recently because of the unique funding model between Canada and the B.C. government.
I would be happy to answer any questions from the committee.