National Settlement Conference
(Kingston - June 18-20, 2001)
NOTES FOR A SPEECH BY
JOAN ATKINSON, ON BEHALF OF
THE HONOURABLE ELINOR CAPLAN,
MINISTER OF CITIZENSHIP
AND IMMIGRATION
ON THE OCCASION OF
THE NATIONAL SETTLEMENT CONFERENCE
KINGSTON, ONTARIO
JUNE 18, 2001
Thank you. I am pleased to be with you today. The Honourable Elinor Caplan,
Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, is unable to attend today and
has asked me to pass along her best wishes to you for a successful conference.
With her regular meetings across the country, Minister Caplan is acutely
aware of the important settlement and integration work you and your colleagues
carry out. May I start by thanking all those who have worked so hard to
make this conference a reality.
I trust you have had the chance to introduce yourself to - and even get
to know - some of your colleagues gathered here today. And what more collegial
venue could there be than, well - a college dormitory along with its,
shall we say, intimate common facilities - to bring you close together
and let you get to know one another!
I want to take a moment here to thank Kingston and District Immigrant
Services, who are our local hosts. I also wish to thank the City of Kingston
and Queen's University. I hope that this venue will be true to its purpose.
Many believe that the reason a university exists is to provide a forum
in which to challenge, question and debate accepted ways of thinking and
doing things. You will do this in spades during this conference. So, take
advantage of the time you have together in common areas like the dormitories
to talk about the problems, to turn them around, to look at them from
different angles. And, above all, share your ideas for solving them.
Why do I say this, you may ask? Because you have a very special set of
circumstances coming together to help you solve them. They can be summed
up in one word. Synergy. What is the definition of "synergy"? According
to one source, it is "the joint action of agents so that their combined
effect is greater than the algebraic sum of their individual effects."
Does this sound familiar? The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Well that's what we've got in this room.
Let's stop for a moment and consider it - 400 invited delegates from
the Yukon to Newfoundland and Labrador. You represent the settlement community,
sponsorship agreement holders, provincial and federal governments and
other community stakeholders, who are directly involved with immigrants
and refugees in Canada. You represent Canada from coast to coast to coast.
You have been chosen for your dedication, your passion and your expertise.
Your cumulative and collective years of experience must add up to thousands.
I see before me a gathering which is greater than the sum of its parts.
You have synergy. Let's harness it this week.
What do we want as the outcome of this conference? To see that those
who choose to make Canada their new home get the best settlement experience
possible. Let's talk about settlement.
In Canada, we have a long and unique history of caring and compassion
for those who are settling in and adapting to life in a new country.
Imagine the challenges a hundred years ago. There was no formalized settlement
sector to welcome people and help them adjust to their new life. For the
most part, their meeters and greeters were the steamship companies or
trading companies.
Even in those early days, there was also a seedling community of unofficial
settlement workers. People from various ethnic communities coming together
to help their own. People from the churches. They focused their efforts
on welcoming new people with the spirit, the energy and the dream to make
a home for their families in Canada.
The settlement sector has a long and proud history in this country -
and you're part of that legacy too - of helping, as you do, people who
may be wary or frightened, but who also share the dreams of early immigrants
to Canada.
What are some of the forces behind this conference on settlement? Much
of the funding is to come from the Voluntary Sector Initiative, which
the Government of Canada announced in June 2000. The VSI is investing
more than $94 million over the next five years. It has several objectives,
but perhaps the most important one for us today is the following:
to agree on shared vision and principles for relations
between the Government of Canada and the settlement voluntary sector.
The Government of Canada sees not-for-profits as a key part of the social
safety net. Volunteers are an underutilized resource who offer help to
people, whether they are homebound due to illness or they are new to this
country. And they're an army of 7.5-million-strong here in Canada alone.
Plus, the voluntary sector makes good economic sense: 175,000 charities
and not-for-profits employ more than 1.3 million people nation-wide.
The Government of Canada hopes that, at meetings like this one, we can
start building a framework for cooperation. It's been almost ten years
since the Government of Canada developed a federal strategy to help integrate
immigrants. You may know that settlement renewal resulted in two very
important realignment agreements, one with British Columbia and one with
Manitoba. Quebec settlement services were already covered by the Canada-Quebec
Accord.
Just two years ago, though, Citizenship and Immigration began to rebuild
our settlement capacity in hopes of giving the Government of Canada a
greater role in ensuring that everyone in this country receives comparable
services and common information. Part of the challenge we have faced was
determining how best to invest new funding in the most effective ways.
So that tells you how we got here today. But where are we going, looking
forward from this point? Well, this conference recognizes that, if we
are to meet the government's goal of increasing the immigration levels,
we need to have the structure and the people in place now to ensure that
those immigrants are well served when they arrive.
Your work will form the basis of four working groups that will meet over
the next eighteen months to develop recommendations. They will look at
ways to maximize the work currently being done in settlement by dealing
with several areas:
- how to maximize our settlement programs so they meet the needs of
today's newcomers;
- what can be done to encourage immigrants and refugees to settle in
places other than the major metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montréal
and Vancouver;
- the accord initiative and its relevance to the settlement sector;
and
- (possibly) a working group that will deal with other significant issues
emerging from this conference.
It's clear we have a number of challenges. Let's meet these and other
challenges head on.
Every one of you has experience to share. And you are here today, together
for the first time ever in Canada, to talk about settlement and what we
can do collectively to make a good system even better.
Each of you will leave this conference with more knowledge to take back
to your communities to share. As they say in the world's oldest and largest
literacy organization, Laubach Literacy, "each one teach one".
This is the first national conference, though it builds on the work of
hundreds of federal, provincial, territorial and community meetings across
this land - meetings that have been going on for years and years.
And we're building on the strengths of the community and provincial networks,
in hopes of putting in place the cornerstones of a new national network
- to communicate, to improve service delivery and to share best practices.
In short, to strengthen our ability to put in place meaningful and workable
policies.
This is an exciting time and one filled with potential. I urge you to
recognize and to harness the energy, the potential that resides in so
many of you being gathered together in one place. You'll be able to look
at the sector one day and say, "I had a hand in those improvements," -
the improvements that will grow from your work in the next few days.
This conference is a chance to enrich our lives and the lives of future
generations. To make a difference. That is why we are here.
Thank you.
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