Evidence of meeting #143 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was newcomers.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Carl Cadogan  Chief Executive Officer, Reception House Waterloo Region
Angela Mowbray  Acting Manager, Language Program, Westman Immigrant Services
Joy Escalera  Manager, Settlement Program, Westman Immigrant Services
Katie Rosenberger  Executive Director, Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC
Sabrina Dumitra  Settlement and Integration Manager, Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC
Ramez Ayoub  Thérèse-De Blainville, Lib.
William Sinclair  Executive Director, St. Stephen's Community House
James Grunau  Executive Director, Journey Home Community Association
Loren Balisky  Executive Director, Kinbrace Community Society

4:25 p.m.

Settlement and Integration Manager, Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC

Sabrina Dumitra

Yes, the lack of interpretation—particularly with medical appointments—is a challenge for some of our organizations, particularly in the rural and smaller centres. We've heard from our members that the ability for them to even have staff who are able to provide interpretation support, or have knowledge of the same language, is often non-existent.

It's a huge barrier that some organizations are facing. Clients are not understanding the medical appointments. They're not able to take part and fully receive the support they need. It also changes the family dynamic. The child is all of a sudden put in a place of power where they have to provide support and information to their parent. Often it's information that, as a child, they shouldn't be hearing.

AMSSA members have recommended that there be sufficient funding for accompaniment to medical appointments, or that there be a mechanism in place that guarantees that doctors' and physicians' offices—also outside the hospital—have access to free interpretation support, and that it be a requirement, not an option, that the doctor utilise it, particularly when English is not the first language of the client, or when the client requests it.

4:25 p.m.

NDP

Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC

I want to touch on hospitals as well.

Last week I had to take my dad to a hospital appointment, because there is no interpretation or translation available. The opportunities that even hospitals provide for that are very limited.

Could you expand on that?

4:25 p.m.

Settlement and Integration Manager, Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC

Sabrina Dumitra

In B.C. there is some interpretation in hospitals through provincial language support. However, it is at the discretion of the doctor to utilize that. It's often overlooked because there's not enough time, they don't know how to access it or it's a bother. It's often overlooked and they utilize the child or the person accompanying that individual, instead of respecting their wishes and their privacy and utilizing that independent interpreter.

4:25 p.m.

NDP

Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC

You touch on the issue around supporting people without status, such as irregular asylum seekers and so on, by whom British Columbia has been impacted. I think we are actually ahead of Manitoba in terms of numbers. The federal government has announced a $15-million injection for supporting asylum seekers, yet B.C. doesn't get any.

What are your thoughts on that, and what's your recommendation?

4:25 p.m.

Settlement and Integration Manager, Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC

Sabrina Dumitra

We don't understand. We are unclear as to how B.C. was left out of that decision.

I know that later on today you will be hearing from some representatives from British Columbia who work with refugee claimants. You will understand that we are in a pretty serious position here in British Columbia. I don't know if it's because there has been a lack of advocacy on the part of our provincial or municipal representatives. It is definitely not for a lack of trying by the sector. Two of the people you will hear from later on are a part of the multi-agency partnership that focuses solely on the betterment of supports for refugee claimants.

We have mobilized everything we can here in the province off the side of our desks to do the best we can for this extremely underserved population.

4:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

Thank you.

We're going to go to Mr. Whalen for just a few minutes.

4:25 p.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

I'll just stay with B.C. for a second.

Can you very quickly provide a recommendation on how to best address the issue of settlement support for asylum seekers?

4:25 p.m.

Settlement and Integration Manager, Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC

Sabrina Dumitra

On providing financial support to organizations that currently provide support to refugee claimants, through the multiple agency partnership, there are different organizations; however, they do not have sufficient funding to adequately support refugee claimants with the numbers that are being received in B.C. The number one key issue is housing support.

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

Thank you very much.

That's a really great, succinct recommendation.

I'll just go to the Manitoba group for a second there, I guess it's Angela. In Atlantic Canada, we have an Atlantic immigration pilot in which companies themselves have been tasked with determining their own labour market needs, but they need to provide a settlement services plan in conjunction with the settlement services agency to help the new economic migrants settle and help their families integrate.

The minister has recently announced a northern and rural immigration pilot project in a similar vein, and I'm wondering if they've reached out to your organization or if any perspective employers have reached out to your organization. What do you envision a privately funded program looking like in your neck of the woods?

4:30 p.m.

Acting Manager, Language Program, Westman Immigrant Services

Angela Mowbray

Thus far, nobody's reached out to our organization. I'm not sure if we're rural enough, maybe, to be part of this pilot project, but I have spoken to a couple of different people who have newcomers coming outside of Brandon, and they have been approached about it.

For us, any partnerships we have with employers are only going to benefit our organization and newcomers in the community, I think. That pilot project to try to encourage people to settle in more rural areas is always something we look forward to and that we want to help support.

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL

Thank you very much.

I'm just going to share the last minute of my time with Mr. Tabbara.

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

Very briefly.

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

Marwan Tabbara Liberal Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON

Yes. My question is to Mr. Carl Cadogan.

You mentioned that you were working with 100 refugees per year, and it has increased to 500. Am I correct?

4:30 p.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Reception House Waterloo Region

Carl Cadogan

We were working with, typically, 250 to 300, and it increased to about 1,000. Now we're down to about 400 a year, and I wanted to comment on some of the things that happened, but I guess I was muted.

Yes, we are the hub for the settlement of GARs in the region, and I think all of the issues that were mentioned by others, the medical issues and the issues with hospitals and interpretation, are all issues that we deal with. They are issues that don't seem to be recognized by the federal government.

I know that hospitals are a provincial issue, and I know that hospitals have budgets for interpretation, but they don't use them, so we probably spend 70% of our time dealing with medical issues in our community, trying to help people connect to services in the community. We have very few resources for that, and the work isn't recognized.

I think that, as the government thinks about what it can do to support refugees, infusion of funds to support connection to services, particularly in Kitchener-Waterloo, primary care physicians.... We probably have about 90 families right now without a primary care physician, so trying to connect people to doctors is a big part of the work we do, and it's not recognized as an integral part of the overall settlement process.

In terms of the employers, we are trying to work with employers to better connect people to the employment sector. We're working with two employers in Kitchener-Waterloo right now where we provide language training, because there are waiting lists in LINC for ESL classes in our region, and we're working with employers who hire people to provide language training on the work site, so people are working at the same time as they're learning English. We think that more flexibility in the delivery of language services is needed in our community.

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

Thank you very much.

I'm going to need to cut this panel off and move very quickly to our next panel, which I'm trying to get in before the anticipated vote.

Thank you very much for joining us from B.C., Manitoba and Ontario. We'll say goodbye to you.

I'm going to suspend very briefly. I ask that people not leave so that we can have our witnesses from British Columbia and from Toronto be connected. Thanks.

We'll suspend for one minute.

4:35 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

I'm going to reconvene.

I'll just let the witnesses know that there's a good chance we're going to just hear their testimony and not have too many questions. We may get some questions, depending on the will of the committee.

I'm going to begin with Mr. Sinclair from Toronto, via video conference from St. Stephen's Community House.

Thank you for joining us today. You have seven minutes for an opening statement.

February 6th, 2019 / 4:35 p.m.

William Sinclair Executive Director, St. Stephen's Community House

Thank you very much.

My name is Bill Sinclair. I am the executive director at St. Stephen's Community House in Toronto, Ontario. Thank you for the invitation to speak.

St. Stephen's Community House is a non-profit charity and a community neighbourhood centre. We are one of the 500 community service providers funded by IRCC across Canada. Our mission is to serve everyone in our neighbourhoods. We were founded in 1962 to serve our largely immigrant community called Kensington Market, and still today immigrants account for up to 60% of the residents in our core neighbourhoods.

We partner with IRCC to deliver language instruction for new Canadians, LINC, and we offer settlement counselling for newcomers with staff who speak English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Farsi and Russian. We also are the lead organization for our local immigration partnership, LIP, for our region. This partnership includes settlement services and mainstream services such as the school board, health service, legal services, employment services and municipal services, for example libraries, police and public health.

Funding from IRCC accounts for about 10% of our organizational budget. We also partner with the provincial and municipal governments and charitable sponsors such as the United Way to create a service hub in our community. We serve our whole community with a bundle of services for children, youth, adults and senior citizens in our neighbourhoods. We provide licensed child care funded by the municipality, employment skills training and placement funded by the province, health and recreational services for youth and senior citizens supported by the city and province, and more. In each of these services, we consider the needs of the whole family, and newcomers to Canada participate alongside immigrants who have been in Canada for decades as well as people who were born here.

Let me give you an example of integration of services. One of our participants, whom we'll call Connie, is a young woman living in downtown Toronto with her husband, whom we'll call Andy, and their three children aged four years, two years, and four months. Connie first connected with us when she was pregnant with her first child five years ago. She and her husband had both migrated separately from China and met here in Canada. He was an immigrant, and she was an international student. They married. Later, her husband became a citizen and fortunately became a very successful chef in a high-end restaurant in Toronto. Connie and her husband both attended LINC classes when they first arrived, and Connie continues them now through the birth of her three children.

We met Connie when she was pregnant, as we have IRCC-funded settlement workers who are physically located at five different community health centres to support pregnant women in the perinatal programs that are offered. Health Canada funds the food and transit for these group programs. The province funds the nurses, dietitians and midwives for the program, and IRCC, through us, funds the settlement workers and the interpreters. We see over 300 pregnant women a week at the five sites. We saw 900 women overall last year.

As each child was born, Connie went back to LINC classes, which had on-site childminding, but now all three of her children are in our fully licensed child care spaces alongside newcomer children and Canadian children of all incomes. Connie is eager to improve her English and to work. She'll be accessing our provincially funded employment program when her children go into kindergarten.

We believe in integrated services where immigrants and Canadians receive services together wherever possible. We believe in settlement and mainstream organizations working together for better settlement outcomes.

I want to congratulate IRCC for maintaining this robust and responsive network of community organizations to welcome and support newcomers all over the country. I want to congratulate them on their efforts, especially in recent years, to modernize our relationship with better partnerships and better contribution agreements. I would like to congratulate them particularly on the service delivery improvement projects, SDIPs, that you've heard about from other people, which have really been a great source of innovation and are really moving things forward with new approaches and working with vulnerable populations.

I have five recommendations.

First, settlement services should be part of multiservice community hubs. It would help greatly if IRCC allowed its service providers to work with people before and after their permanent resident status. We should have blended services, where temporary residents, refugee claimants, permanent residents and citizens can receive services together. This happens in our perinatal program that I just mentioned and that helps all the pregnant moms, the fathers and the children.

Second, we know this committee is seeking a way to measure settlement success. I urge you to use the LIP network. You fund 77 local immigration partnerships across the country to help communities define and measure success locally. LIPs work with mainstream and settlement organizations, large and small organizations, urban and rural neighbourhoods. There's no cookie-cutter approach. They should set goals for what success looks like and measure the goals together LIP by LIP. It's a case of where no one size fits all.

Third, please continue these service delivery improvement projects with a strong focus on working with vulnerable newcomers: women, youth and LGBTQ+ communities. It's an excellent innovation. It's only just begun and there will be a lot of good things coming out of it.

Fourth, our organization is committed to decent work and fighting the precarious nature of most non-profit work. We believe that our government contracts should support equitable and living wages for our employees, sick time, health benefits and retirement benefits. The success we all want for newcomers is not going to be achieved by a high turnover of staff and by a labour shortage of workers to work with them.

Finally, the majority of immigrants and refugees now and in the future are from racialized populations. Canada must address systemic racism through strong anti-racism laws and policies, including employment equity. Access to employment and professional accreditation will remain a challenge that we'll be talking about until we can counter systemic racism in the professions.

4:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

Thank you very much.

I'm going to go immediately to Mr. Grunau from the Journey Home Community Association. You've asked Kinbrace to join you as a witness. You have about eight minutes for the two of you together.

4:45 p.m.

James Grunau Executive Director, Journey Home Community Association

Thank you so much.

Honourable Chair, vice-chair, and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be with you today and for the work you are doing on behalf of newcomers to our country.

My colleague and I both work for refugee claimant serving organizations in metro Vancouver, and the current study under way on settlement services across Canada is a very important activity. We're grateful to have a chance to provide some input for you today.

Just over a year ago, a study indicated that Vancouver was the least affordable city for housing in North America, making housing unbelievably difficult for the 2,300 asylum claimants who have been arriving in our city annually.

Unlike government or privately sponsored refugees, asylum claimants have no one to welcome them on arrival. As a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention, Canada has an international obligation to provide protection and a refugee hearing, but also has an obligation to provide help for asylum claimants in their access to basic human needs upon arrival.

For a combined 33 years, Journey Home Community and Kinbrace Community Society have been stepping into that gap by providing a wraparound plan for housing, support and accompaniment for these new arrivals.

We've learned some things in our work. First, living with and assisting refugee claimants all these years has helped us to understand the sector and develop some well-designed communities that have been effective in helping refugee claimants integrate well.

Secondly, we've learned that asylum claimants arrive with incredible skills, education, professional and business backgrounds, and have a strong desire to move forward with their lives and make a difference in their community, just the kinds of new Canadians we hope for. With a little assistance up front, we can set them up for success, and help them become strong, contributing members of our communities.

Today we come with some community-based solutions for how we can change the current reality into a cohesive plan for new arrivals. Our organizations are part of Vancouver's multi-agency partnership, which is a network of some 40 agencies with non-profits; businesses; all levels of government, including IRCC; the Immigration and Refugee Board; and Canada Border Services Agency. We meet monthly and the focus of the network is exclusively refugee claimants. There is a strong spirit of collaboration and goodwill.

Our vision, as a partnership, is that newly arriving asylum claimants would experience a cohesive approach for support along the whole housing continuum from arrival to something more permanent, and that no refugee claimant be without supported housing. Our immediate dream is that we develop a refugee claimant reception centre, a landing place for new arrivals where they can receive housing, orientation and support for the first few weeks of their journey, and then supported pathways out of the centre into the wider community.

Such a dream is garnering strong community interest and stakeholder support. It will take all levels of government and private funding. We have begun to see such support coalesce in Vancouver.

Allow me to read a short excerpt from a support letter of one stakeholder, BC Housing, British Columbia's crown corporation for social housing. This is from one of the associate vice-presidents of BC Housing:

It was a pleasure meeting with you to discuss Journey Home Community's desire to develop a Reception Center for refugee claimants and housing as part of this vision. We would very much like to commence exploring suitable housing options for these individuals and to that end we may be able to offer some program funding to achieve this.

4:45 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

I am sorry to interrupt you. We have bells ringing. They're 30-minute bells, and I'm going to suggest, if we have unanimous consent, we finish the witness testimony and that we do a quick two, two, and two-minute round of questioning. That will still give us 15 minutes to vote.

Luckily we're in this building, but it's actually the foresight of the clerk that we're in this building, because we expected votes today.

Is that okay? Can we continue with the testimony and have two-minute rounds?

4:45 p.m.

NDP

Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC

Three-minute round? It's just upstairs.

4:45 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

It takes you three minutes to do a two-minute round. I give her two minutes, she'll take three. I'm saying a two-minute round, and we'll see how we're doing.

Please continue, Mr. Grunau.

4:50 p.m.

Executive Director, Journey Home Community Association

James Grunau

Thank you.

Secondly, they state that they “will be requesting Journey Home Community to approach and garner partner assistance from municipalities, the Federal Government and other sources to create as much equity as possible for this housing project.”

Additional parties interested in such a concept include three churches with possible available land, private investors and a large significant foundation.

We have experienced an incredible spirit of co-operation and innovation from multiple stakeholders in Metro Vancouver as we have been pursuing this dream.

A few weeks ago, Journey Home was able to assist an asylum claimant father who had arrived in Vancouver with four young children under the age of four. He was wandering the streets of Vancouver on a winter night with four young children in tow, searching for help after he had run out of funds for hotel space. Our church partner volunteer, who had lost touch with this gentleman, had left her phone number with the hotel in case he called back. Fortunately, he did, and they were able to connect and bring him to the house for a safe night's rest, but not without considerable stress for the father.

Or I think of the family we were notified of about a year and a half ago. The family arrived with the father, so a pregnant mother and two children. They were split up between two shelters, men's and women's, and not allowed to visit each other in the shelters. Again we were able to provide a housing unit and actually reunite the family.

These situations should not happen in Canada, and they don't have to. Providing some basic level of compassionate care for newly arriving asylum claimants is neither a partisan issue nor a political issue. It's a human and moral issue, and Canada can respond.

We were encouraged with the announcement last week of federal funding becoming available for housing costs for refugee claimants. We recommend that the federal government join us in this opportunity to forge a new way for asylum claimant arrivals. We recommend that a new approach include the implementation of a reception centre, to be jointly funded by government and private funding, and that the federal government support this plan as we prove its viability in the Vancouver setting. This kind of centre is both transferable and scalable for other regions in Canada. Journey Home Community, in collaboration with the Multi-Agency Partnership, stands poised and ready to move forward in Metro Vancouver.

Will you partner with us? As this approach to assisting newly arriving asylum claimants continues to gain momentum in Vancouver, we urge you to lend your approval as it comes across your pathway. Better still, would you look for ways to approve and support such a plan?

As we finish today, if I may, I will just say that we would love to engage with any of you at a more personal level for your feedback and input. Loren and I will be around tonight and all of tomorrow and would welcome the opportunity to connect.

Again, thank you so much for the opportunity today. Both of us are here to answer any questions you may have.

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

Mr. Balisky, do you have anything you'd like to add for a minute or two?

4:50 p.m.

Loren Balisky Executive Director, Kinbrace Community Society

It's included in that.