Good morning, everyone.
Thank you, merci, for allowing us to speak with you today on an issue that is of great importance to Monctonians.
Our community has been very active and innovative on ways to integrate immigrants. Through our experience with the Atlantic immigration pilot, we will outline ideas to increase immigration, attraction, integration, and retention.
Our community is trying to attract a significant number of immigrants over the next decade—15,000—just to ensure we can maintain our current population. To grow the economy, we need closer to 25,000 over the next 10 years. Currently, we attract approximately a thousand newcomers a year, and this does not include the one thousand international students who are living in the city.
Moncton is a welcoming community and we are working hard to implement key initiatives and services for immigrants, but we also feel that changes in federal policy, along with financial support, would enable us to be even more efficient and effective in supporting immigrants and newcomers in the Moncton area. Moncton has hundreds of available positions in such key sectors as IT, finance, insurance, back office support, and tracking and logistics, just to name a few.