Thank you, Ms. Normandin.
I will answer in English.
The services in rural communities are very much about education and about ESL or French as a second language classes. It's all about integration. It's all about the committees within the sponsorship agreement holders that are now across the country.
I think what we were lucky to find in a space like Antigonish were people who were willing to give their time, energy and efforts to help us restart our lives, because small towns need immigrants, and they want them to be retained. They want them to stay. They don't want to give them the first year or two and then see them leave for the big city.
Certainly, attracting immigrants to small towns is the goal for every Canadian town with aging populations, and there is not so much labour in small towns. Even for us, in starting a business in a small town like Antigonish, Peace By Chocolate now offers tens of jobs, and some of those jobs stay on the market for over two months with no one to apply, because so many people actually leave these small towns for the cities.
What we are trying to do right now is to spread our story much more, so that immigrants know first-hand that they can find their opportunity. The second thing is that our family, when they came here, did not speak English. I was the only English speaker. They were so attracted to a big city like Montreal that they could have left within a few months to find an Arabic-speaking community, but they took a chance, and that chance was not taken by themselves but by all of the community that has supported us since then.