Thank you very much.
I would like to thank the chair for the kind invitation to the Metropolis Project to appear before the standing committee. It is a pleasure for Julie Boyer and me to be here.
In our opening remarks, I will begin with a general description of the Metropolis Project. Julie will close with a description of our activities on official language minority communities in Canada.
Metropolis is a Canada-led international network of academic researchers, government officials, and NGOs who are all dedicated to the enhancement of policy on migration and diversity through the application of empirical scientific research. In Canada, Metropolis supports five university-based research centres headquartered in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver, which receive funding from 13 government departments to carry out a program of policy research in six areas of priority that were decided by the federal funders.
These six are: economic and labour market integration; housing and neighbourhoods; citizenship and social, cultural, and civic integration; policing, justice, and security; families, children, and youth; and welcoming communities, within which Metropolis researchers examine official language minority language communities in Canada.
Twenty Canadian universities are involved as formal partners in the centres. Researchers from most other Canadian universities are less formally involved.
Each research centre receives approximately $325,000 per year for infrastructure support and research and each leverages an additional roughly $1 million per year for research from other sources. The Metropolis secretariat is responsible for overall stewardship, promotion and network development, and knowledge transfer.
I would like to emphasize that the secretariat neither conducts research of its own nor develops policy. Through our knowledge transfer work, we inform policy-making within the federal partnership, but we do not have a policy responsibility and therefore do not speak for the government on its policies or its programs, despite the fact that we at the secretariat are all employees of Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
Funding for Metropolis has been provided since 1996 in five-year increments. Current funding expires on March 31, 2012.
The International Metropolis Project is an unfunded activity that now encompasses a policy research network from roughly 40 countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australasia, with a small number of countries in Africa and Latin America. The international project is managed by the Ottawa secretariat, with some assistance from a branch office at the University of Amsterdam.
The most public work of the secretariat is to publicize research through our website and our paper publications and to organize conferences and seminars in Canada and abroad. Our annual national and international conferences each attract about 1,000 people and are now considered to be the largest and most important regular immigration and diversity conferences in the world.
Through these events, we try to lead our network's research and policy thinking towards emerging trends and the societal changes that most need attending to by governments. The degree of attention that is now paid to immigration and diversity has risen as a result of Metropolis' lead. This includes work on official language minority communities, which were little researched until Metropolis began developing a network and organizing discussions on the topic, as Julie Boyer will describe to you momentarily.
Overall, it is our ambition to play a strong and positive role in supporting evidence-based decision-making by government agencies in Canada and abroad.
I'll now, if I may, turn the microphone over to my colleague, Julie Boyer.