Thank you.
As a city councillor, I act as chair and convenor for discussions with our organizations. We have a Syrian local immigrant partnership table that has been working on a plan to strengthen our ability to settle refugees and to employ our refugees and immigrants.
Over the years, organizations have had cuts, and they've also had a change in contracts from the provincial level to the federal level. Understand that they all had contract applications in at the federal level when the Syrian refugee announcement was made; the federal government at that time held off on decisions about funding for their contracts, but we were assured intermittently that there would be extra funding available for our schools, for our ESL classes, and for our organizations to be able to take in the increase in Syrian refugees.
I know that all the organizations in our city could use extra funding for ESL training and apprenticeship training. Those are the two areas that I think would most benefit Surrey. We have local organizations with expertise, organizations that have been here, as I have, for over 25 years. They're well regarded in our city and well supported by the community.