Where immigration is concerned, the urban communities are always ahead of the rural ones, except for the region Mr. D'Amours is from. There have not been many initiatives. Even in the Miramichi area, I don't believe there is an immigrant reception committee. Bathurst and the Acadian Peninsula have begun, and Campbellton will be starting soon.
St. John is also a real success story. The Anglophone community has a school-community centre where a wonderful lady, Rama Kuresh, of Tunisian origin, is doing a fantastic job with immigrants. Sometimes Canada tends to focus a little too much on wealthy immigrants or immigrants coming to invest. When I was there three or four weeks ago, there was a Congolese carpenter and a Congolese electrician. These occupations are overlooked. We tend to want to attract people from the upper class, when in fact we need increasing numbers of plumbers, truck drivers, and so on, as I was saying earlier.
So, the SANB's work was put on hold for a year and a half. We waited and were told not to do a thing, because the money would be coming. So, we were a little frustrated, but now that it has gone through, we're happy. Ms. Blin was only hired two or three weeks ago. However, we do have enough people on the ground now to start coordinating work and developing tools together.
Another success story would be in the field of medicine. The University of Moncton, the CAIIMM and other immigration agencies developed a lexicon for foreign physicians, to help them communicate with Acadians. For example, Acadians call diarrhea cholera. Medically speaking, there is obviously a big difference between the two. A doctor can make a patient sicker if that patient tells him he has cholera. So, it's small scale initiatives such as this that simplify things and allow people to move forward. We want to see more initiatives like that. We're very happy to at last be able to get fully involved in the immigration file.