Thank you for that important question, particularly with regard to immigrant and refugee integration.
The policy of the department is that if we don't provide child care, transportation, and interpretation services, we likely won't be able to get the clients, particularly the female clients, to the language classes, employment services, or the full suite of services we offer.
Child minding and child care is an inherent component of the settlement program. When refugee or immigrant mothers or women—any clients—want to come to a settlement agency in their community to access programming, a child care facility is provided there to care for the children while the client is in the class. There is transportation funding available to help get them to the class, and while they are there, there are interpretation and translation services, should they need them.
Now, I must admit that with 45,000 Syrians arriving in Canada—many of the Syrian families are very large, with six, eight, 10 children—this has put an immense pressure on our settlement agencies when the family arrives at the door. The settlement agency may have 25 child care spaces, but a mom arrives with eight children, and there may only be two vacancies in the day care. This has required the department to quickly react and add additional funding to increase the number of child care spaces.