Thank you, Madam Chair.
We've done two things. One, we have done consultations with communities and provinces and territories as we get ready to set up a municipal nominee program. The second is we've gathered good lessons learned from the existing federal regional pilots. I'll come back to that.
One is that smaller rural centres want a role in immigration selection. How do they complement domestic labour market needs? They have dual objectives here, and this is certainly what we've learned under the Atlantic immigration pilot, between economic establishment and retention.
If you will just permit me, I would point out that one problem we tried to solve was the question of retention in smaller communities. When we established the Atlantic immigration pilot in 2017 the goal was to retain more newcomers in the region, as in the provincial nominee program, which I think we would all say has been a success. What wasn't a success in certain regions was retention. In parts of Atlantic Canada I think it got as low as 30% for those being retained, and that's what we wanted to look at.
What do you do as a community with wraparound supports to ensure that newcomers are staying in the community and contributing to the vibrancy of the community? That's what we've heard back from communities themselves on how we do that while looking at some of the other lessons that are there, working with other partners, working with those economic development agencies, the chambers of commerce in the city. It's a whole-of-society effort to make that happen. That's one thing that's come back to us.