The first challenge is that a lot of these immigrants are coming without actual jobs. We need to do a better job of matching the job opportunities in the community to the immigrant population that's coming in. That's the first thing we need to do.
The second thing we need to do is a better job of retaining these immigrants. I think that is a challenge for a small community, because it doesn't have the kind of ethnocultural community groups, infrastructure, and ecosystem to support them. I think we need to target specific countries and do a better job of trying to cluster our immigrant populations so that they can have a little bit of critical mass in terms of a population base, even in small communities. We certainly need to do a better job of retention by integrating them into the communities, looking more closely at churches and civic groups and the role they play, and also looking at the settlement services. As my colleague said, in smaller areas, settlement services tend to not be as developed as they are in the urban centres. We need to do a better job of that.
This starts fundamentally with an economic base. A lot of the immigrants who come to Atlantic Canada—the ones who leave—don't have a solid economic foundation. They get all the points. They get to come to the province or the region, but they don't actually have a job or an economic opportunity along with that. They don't necessarily attach properly to the labour market, which was the main reason, by the way, for the Atlantic immigration pilot. We had economists from Romania working in call centres because they passed all the tests and got all the points they needed to come to Canada, but they couldn't find a job in New Brunswick. If you want a call centre worker, go find somebody with the skills; don't go find an economist. That is an actual example.
Even in Cape Breton we need to do a better job of finding specific job opportunities for these immigrants even before they arrive. We can use the school system better, use the community college system and the university system as a conduit for new immigrants to integrate into the community. I think there is a lot more we can do.