Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 19th, 2016

[Hayat Said]

Definitely. Honestly, when I came I was really shy because I was a hijabi and I couldn't do certain things like swimming or other things that in my religion I wasn't allowed to do.

My family was really supportive, and the Boys and Girls Club was really supportive too. I overcame my shyness and I did what I loved, that is, working with kids and helping them and motivating them, and also being a role model to them and being a person they can look up to. It was really great, and it's very freeing when you can overcome your shyness.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

This question is for Mr. Chan.

What are the long-term integration challenges your organization envisions for Syrian refugees in comparison to others? Because you're from Vancouver I thought it would be appropriate for you to answer this question. What are the long-term challenges that you think will be facing the refugees as they settle?

[Sherman Chan]

I would say that for Syrian refugees we're looking at it as an initiative. I think the long-term challenge as leaders, as the Canadian government or as an organization, is having a good vision of creating a welcoming environment and mobilizing the communities to make it happen. I think that is the long-term challenge.

We don't want to see it as one shot; we have 25,000 and that's it. We see it as a good investment and that everybody can make it happen. I think the long-term challenge will be to sustain that.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Do you think the current funding for programs like yours is adequate to help them after they've gone through the 12-month period?

[Sherman Chan]

No, given the current.... Even with the regular settlement programs, we are experiencing funding cuts in two years. With additional funding dollars, it's still not enough.

We are looking at how investment can be made, and we know that long term through Stats Canada and also recently with the EU reports, refugees are contributing big time. That is the good message we want to give to the Canadian public.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Chan and Mr. Sarai.

I know I speak on behalf of all the committee members when I express my gratitude for the incredible work that all the panellists are doing, making Canada a welcoming place for refugees who are arriving on our shores.

I want to thank Ms. Said in particular. You give us hope that we will get a lot of this right.

Thank you so much to all of the panellists.

[Hayat Said]

Thank you so much for having me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

I will suspend for the next group to arrive.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Good afternoon.

Our second panel today consists of witnesses from the Kitchener-Waterloo region, who are appearing jointly: Tara Bedard, Ken Seiling, Mike Murray, Carl Cadogan, and Lucia Harrison. Welcome to the committee.

John Haddock, welcome by video conference.

I understand this is a coordinated presentation, so jointly there is a 21-minute maximum. You may begin.

[Tara Bedard, Manager, Immigration Partnership, Region of Waterloo]

Good morning, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to be here today to speak to some of the work happening to support the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Waterloo region.

My name is Tara Bedard. I am the manager of the Waterloo region immigration partnership. I'm on staff with the Region of Waterloo, which is the host of our partnership.

Our immigration partnership has been deeply involved in supporting the Syrian resettlement initiative in our community, and in my role I have been providing foundational support to the municipal and community partners across our community who have been supporting Waterloo region's refugee resettlement preparedness plan.

Waterloo region has a long history of welcoming immigrants, and we are a resettlement community for government-assisted refugees. The residents of our region are also very generous in the private sponsorship of refugees.

Our immigration partnership has been operational since 2010. Previous to that there was collaboration around an immigrant employment network. This significant history of collaboration amongst partners in our community has provided a very strong foundation for the resettlement work happening in our community right now.

Our refugee resettlement preparations began in September when international attention was drawn to the crisis in Syria with the photo of the boy who washed up on the beach in Turkey. Interest in our community and private sponsorship was growing. We began to bring together settlement-funded organizations, more and more people who were getting involved in private sponsorship, and community groups that were getting more involved informally in the resettlement support of refugees, so that everybody would know who was involved in the playing field in our community.

In November, after the recommitment to the 25,000 Syrians was made, we began by hosting a service preparedness planning session for services across the whole of our region. We had a huge turnout from agencies across sectors who had been involved in the past in our partnership and many who had not, looking to know how their organizations and services would be impacted by the arrival of a significant number of refugees into our community and to begin planning how, together as a community, we would be responding to support the resettlement.

At the same time, emergency management offices across the province had been activated through intense discussions with our settlement partners and the emergency management coordinators in our region. We arrived at a plan which brought together emergency management activity with the settlement and other activity being coordinated through our local immigration partnership structure into our current Syrian refugee preparedness plan. This merged an existing emergency response structure that had previously been in use in our region with a community initiative that was forming at the behest of settlement services and other community partners working on preparing for the resettlement. This has turned into a highly effective model for collaborative leadership between municipal and community partners in the Waterloo region.

In November we struck a series of nine working groups, including community emergency management, international skills and employment, education, children's services, health and mental health care, housing, community integration and language supports, volunteers and donations, and transportation. These groups were supported by a communications working group and a safety and security working group. We later added a private sponsorship working group, given the perception of difficulties in reaching out to make sure that the private sponsorship groups were also benefiting from all of the service preparations that were happening in our community.

These working groups were coordinated through a steering committee that was co-chaired by municipal and community partners, the medical officer of health from the Region of Waterloo, together with the executive director of our resettlement agency, Reception House.

Also, at our steering committee, the representatives across each of our working groups shared their developments and challenges and brought forward cross-referrals for issues that should be tackled by other groups. This has resulted in a lot of fast action.

Our steering committee also was a channel for reporting up to a municipal control group in our region, where all of our area mayors, our regional chair, the CAOs from all of our communities, our regional police chief, and the regional fire coordinator are participating to receive updates on the status of the resettlement in our community, the developments on the ground with services, the successes we have seen, and also the challenges we have been experiencing in our community.

This coordinated engagement of multi-tiered municipal leaders has resulted in coordinated communication to provincial and federal counterparts on behalf of our community, raising concerns and promoting solutions to the challenges that our community has been facing, challenges we believe we have in common with many communities across the country.

This has been a new level of municipal engagement in Waterloo region when it comes to refugee resettlement. It has been extremely successful until now and very welcomed by the community partners who are involved in our community. It has been really great to see that as a community, across our region, we're all pulling in one direction to support the resettlement initiative.

Consistent and comprehensive communication support has been key amongst our partners, we've been told, to fostering and appropriately channelling community engagement and ensuring that all refugees in our community, regardless of how they have received assistance, either through government or private sponsorship, are benefiting from all of the work happening in our community.

Our communications work has been adaptive and responsive to a constantly changing information environment and to the constantly changing information needs of agencies in our community so that they feel that they have the information they need in order to be properly supporting the resettlement. We have launched a website. We were using 211 information lines, a lot of social media messaging, and we started at the beginning of December a series of weekly briefings about arrival status, population information as it was becoming available for people who had arrived, and also service developments across our working group areas. That went out across our community to all of our service partners and all of our municipal partners, and also to our MPs and our MPPs, so that everybody had the same information about how things were developing in our community.

This resulted in very effective communication of information and an ability to identify needs very quickly and to identify solutions as they were needed in our community.

We've taken a very—

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Ms. Bedard, I understand you'll be sharing your time, so I just wanted to let you know that you're almost at seven minutes.

[Tara Bedard]

I'm sorry.

Okay, I will stop here and leave time for some of my colleagues.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Who'd like to be next?

[John Haddock, Chief Executive Officer, YMCAs of Cambridge and Kitchener-Waterloo]

[Technical Difficulty—Editor] representing the YMCA.

The YMCA is one of the primary federally funded settlement organizations in our region. We also pilot one of the CLARS, one of the language assessment and referral services, on behalf of the federal government in our region.

Personally I'm on the immigration partnership council. I also want to note that the YMCA has been working with newcomer youth for over a decade in our region to help with the belonging and the settlement process. Although it's not funded by the government, we knew it was a need and see it as a growing need.

I have five quick points.

I want to start off by saying that the settlement agencies and the immigration partnership council were very effective in the fall in indicating the needs and issues that we might be facing as a community, and in doing so they enabled the process that Tara so ably talked about to happen. It was knowing first-hand that we were going to be receiving probably.... We have more than 1,200 Syrian refugees, which is significant for our region.

Second, our community has been very generous, not just on the privately sponsored refugees or PSR side but in coming forward with donations. We were able, with the Kitchener and Waterloo Community Foundation and the Cambridge and North Dumfries Community Foundation, to work with the foundations on receiving donations. They are able to issue the receipts, but then they transfer the money over to the region so that a task force of the immigration partnership council is able to assess the needs of individuals and agencies and make adequate responses where there are unintended and emerging gaps in the services. That's been a very effective tactic.

I think another reason you've had some good early-on success with our Syrian refugees is that they were provided permanent residency, were able to receive refugee assistance, had an early health approval process, and received a social insurance number. This is so important for our Syrian refugees, to speed up the process and allow people to put their efforts and energies into getting settled. I would indicate that this should be a consideration for all of our refugees, not just our Syrian refugees.

My fourth point relates to investment. As indicated in the previous presentation, there has been a reduction in investment in settlement services over the last few years in our region. Our immigration has actually increased during that time. Now we have a situation whereby we've actually tripled the number of refugees we take in over a year and have done so in two months.

We're getting many stresses not just on the settlement sector but on all of the other required elements, such as education, mental health, health, and housing, in order to help a large group of people become settled. I would ask for consideration to be given to investment in some of the settlement requirements as well as in the broader community sectors that will require support.

Last, I would say that it's about going forward. Because of some good early-on planning and some good supports initially from the federal government, I think we've been able to assimilate, at the first stage, a large group of Syrian refugees. But as we go forward, we know that the issues and needs of our refugees are not going to be satisfied or achieved within the first year and that responsibility for resources and support will be required. I would ask for some continued investments—wise investments—using our community partnership planning model to understand what our needs are.

Those are my comments.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Haddock.

Mr. Cadogan.

[Carl Cadogan, Executive Director, Reception House Waterloo Region]

Thank you.

My name is Carl Cadogan. I am the executive director at Reception House Waterloo Region.

I am relatively new in this position. I started at the end of March—up to that point Bert Lobe had run the organization—and came on to help the organization plan strategically where they wanted to go. Then the Syrian refugee crisis happened, and the focus for the organization from November onward was looking at how we could serve the Syrian refugees.

Historically, Reception House served 250 to 300 refugees a year, so this influx of the Syrians was a very changed reality for the organization. We are one of the organizations that, like many, housed the refugees in temporary housing. We worked with Howard Johnson Hotel. We received people daily. One of the very positive things about not only the partnership that Tara spoke about but having the refugees in one area is that we were able to provide a wide range of services at the same time.

Housing has been the major issue. I think the region has had very low housing stock availability, and prices and costs for housing have been very expensive in the region. Working with landlords and with the community was a way in which the organization was able to harness the energy from the community. A number of people stepped forward.

We developed a plan. Typically refugees stay in temporary housing for three to four weeks. We had people for much longer, because we had very large families and had to be working constantly to get people into housing. I think the mayors around the region, in Cambridge, Stratford.... We took tours to those cities. We gave the refugees an opportunity to see other parts of the community, not just Kitchener and not just Waterloo, and really tried to open their eyes to possibilities in housing.

We made outreach to the community and had incredible response from the community. Like a lot of other communities, we had responses, as John said, not only in terms of money but of people offering housing. That helped us a great deal.

We worked very hard with the medical officer of health to focus on medical assessments, dental, dental screening. We typically had medical clinics half a day a week. We expanded that to one full day a week and added the dental screening as well. We had health fairs that moved a number of families through intake and provided a wide range of services to the community.

Both school boards were very responsive. Typically school boards like to wait until families are settled in permanent housing before they accept kids into the system. Because of the numbers, school boards came to the hotel, and we were able to process students very early on and get kids into the school system very quickly.

For me the big issue going forward is language training and employment. People are very open to finding employment, and people are now very open to language training. We are trying to get as many people as possible as quickly as possible through English assessment, through the YMCA. We are working very quickly to find spots. Provincial funding is provided through the province for ESL and from the federal government through the LINC program. We're working very hard to get language training for people. That's the next hurdle to accomplish.

We look at all aspects of settlement. People think of settlement agencies dealing only with settlement, but the whole community responded and tried to settle these Syrian refugees.

Right now we have all refugees out of the hotel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Mr. Cadogan, there are four minutes left, and I understand there is one other presenter from the group.

[Carl Cadogan]

Thank you.

[Lucia Harrison, Chief Executive Officer, Kitchener-Waterloo Multicultural Centre]

I will try to be really brief. I'm going to start with my last point first.

One of the great benefits I saw after 18 years in the settlement sector is that many people in our community did not realize we were a refugee receiving community. That's always been left to the settlement agencies, to the reception houses, and other people were left out of that equation. This has been great with people understanding that it's a broader commitment. That brings with it the realization that the broader community wants to be involved in the decision-making about receiving refugees moving forward. That's been an interesting point in this exercise; our regional and municipal governments are going to be more interested in being involved.

It would be helpful to have a more comprehensive approach of a flow of information to PSRs as well as GARs. With PSRs we had a surge of well-being and goodness and desire to sponsor, but by groups that had very little experience in doing so. To ensure that those PSRs are attached to existing services, to settlement agencies, if there could be a comprehensive approach moving forward, everyone would benefit.

We saw great gains in our area of a realization by health care providers that trained interpreters were a necessary component to the medical assessment of our refugees, and that when family members or other people were used, we had inaccurate assessments. That growth of understanding was really important. It may need to be followed with funding to ensure that trained interpreters are available.

We have an innovative idea in our community of attaching a transition assistant to employment counsellors to help newcomers who want to access employment, but Employment Ontario cannot provide services in Arabic. We are really trying to remind people that the need to learn English is so important early on because if our employment providers and the community put stress on people to work, successful settlement will not happen in the long run.

I will end there and be open to questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you.

Mr. Tabbara, please, you have seven minutes.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you all for being here. It's great to see you again. Everyone is from the Waterloo region. Welcome to the citizenship and immigration committee. It feels like more of a power hour with Waterloo region here.

Waterloo region makes up 1.6% of Canada's population, but we've been resettling 4.6% of the Syrian refugees. That's a great big task, and I know it's been taken on greatly in our region, and with all your efforts, we've done a tremendous job.

Mr. Seiling and Mr. Murray, what are the conditions that make a welcoming community like Waterloo region willing and able to resettle Syrian refugees?

[Ken Seiling, Regional Chair, Region of Waterloo]

Waterloo region is particularly well suited to it. It has a long history of taking immigrants and that goes back to the 19th century when people came into our region. We can go back to the Russian Mennonites who came in the 1920s, and the Vietnamese community. We took large numbers at that particular time, and there's a sense of stewardship that exists in the community, perhaps because the Mennonite roots are there. It's always risen to the occasion and done those sorts of things.

I think one of the strengths we've brought to it is a collaborative approach to doing things. As soon as this thing started to happen and emerge, we thought that we couldn't have people running all over the place doing their own thing. Somehow we had to bring this together.

As was referenced earlier, we invoked our emergency planning model on a regional basis for all the agencies. It was developed during the SARS outbreak, but we took that model—Mike is here, and he can maybe speak to it better—and adapted that to what was going on here. All the key agencies were brought in, a table was created, regular meetings were held with the medical officer of health, and the Reception House co-chaired that group and started to pull everybody together to make sure we were all going in the same direction. We identified common needs, people had their roles to do, and people weren't stepping all over one another.

I think that's the key to success in pulling it all together. If you are all running off in different directions you get a lot of unintended consequences. It's not that everything is perfect, but I think it certainly is much more coordinated, much more welcoming, and much more successful.

[Mike Murray, Chief Administrative Officer, Region of Waterloo]

I would probably just reinforce what Chair Selling said.

My sense is that one of the keys to success was a true partnership model. This was an interesting response where I would say it was a completely joint response between municipal government and community agencies. It was side by side, hand in hand, and not one leading over the other, but leading together.

It was probably one of the first times we've seen that true parallel partnership model in the community. We had existing structures we could use and adapt, but there was a spirit of partnership everybody brought to the table and a sense of common purpose and a sense of how municipal and regional government can work hand in hand with all of our community partners to deal with the task at hand.

The community partners are here, and they may want to add to that.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Does anyone else want to add to that?

I can go on to my second question. My second question is for Mr. Haddock.

Thank you for joining us from Edmonton.

I understand you're retiring after 19 years of service, and I want to thank you for that service to the YMCA of Cambridge in the KW region.

Can you give us an idea of the changes you've seen in Waterloo region in that period of time with respect to refugee settlement? I understand in your initial statement you mentioned there was a reduction in settlement services in previous years. How has that affected the organization?

[John Haddock]

Thanks, MP Tabbara.

Yes, I've had the opportunity to be in Waterloo region for 19 years and to be part of what Chair Selling talks about, the collaborative approach to community needs.

The YMCA has been the primary funder for federal immigrant services and settlement, and language assessment since that time as well.

Before the Syrian refugee crisis, our region's immigrant enrolment increased 30% over this past year. We're seen as a primary site of settlement, but also a secondary site where people may be coming in through a different port of entry, but are coming to our region for a number of good reasons. I would say our region is seen as a popular destination and that is increasing for technical, employment, investment, and educational reasons.

To Mr. Murray's point about the group working together, it is true, but the expectation that the community is going to be able to accommodate continued growth in immigration, and a continued expectation that there is going to be an increase in refugees, is somewhat challenging and concerning. Over the years I've seen support from the federal government grow in terms of settlement support, but lately it's been declining and within our region—perhaps it's different from other points in Ontario—I see a need for increased investment for refugee and immigrant settlement services.

Thank you.