Yes, everybody has ideas. Of course, often what you find when you do round tables with organizations that are providing these services is that they will say, “Obviously, the solution is to give us more money and to make it multi-year.” You try to look past the obvious. Maybe there are certain success stories that you want to give multi-year funding to, and you want to provide that confidence to those organizations to continue doing their good work. I have to admit it's often difficult to find people who think beyond their local dynamic or their personal experience. We want those stories, and we want those experiences to be understood and to be told. But to find people who can think about a pan-Canadian policy that would have equal measure of value to someone in Sudbury, where roughly a third of the population is francophone or French-speaking and working in a job in the mining sector to have those economic opportunities, and to somebody who might be a brilliant young academic who is trying to be fully engaged in our sciences in Toronto...we need our immigration capacity to fully integrate people into job opportunities that are very different in different regions of the country.
How do you have a pan-Canadian policy that reflects these different things? Well, part of it is not trying to have a “one size fits all” Ottawa approach to immigration, but to set up pools of funding to support those organizations that take a flexible approach to integration and services on the ground that makes sense for Edmonton or Sudbury or Montreal or Vancouver or Nanaimo. That flexibility is something we try to recognize and to build in. You fund those things, and then you do round tables as I did—not just in Ottawa but in Sudbury and in Sault Ste. Marie and in North Bay and in Charlottetown. You go to those regions and you sit down face to face and you say, “Take me to your office. Tell me how it works. Tell me how it's going. Show me what you're doing. Let me see how it's going for you.” You get a pretty quick assessment of who the pretenders are and who the real deliverers of effective services are. You try to relay those back to the department and encourage those who have successful models to then tell their success stories to other parts of the country and to keep moving forward.
Governing is a constant exercise of trial and error and of taking the best examples and moving them forward, and that's what we try to do with official languages as well.
