National Settlement Conference
(Kingston - June 18-20, 2001)
SOCIAL INCLUSION: A NEW VISION OF IMMIGRANT SETTLEMENT
IN CANADA
(Edited text of a keynote address delivered at the National Settlement
Conference, Kingston, Ontario on Monday, June 18, 2001)
By Ratna Omidvar
Thank you very much for inviting me to speak. It is indeed appropriate
that an immigrant addresses the first-ever national conference on settlement.
Nonetheless, it is an honour for this particular immigrant to do so, and
a responsibility that I hope I will deliver on.
Settlement is a uniquely personal and individual journey. Mine started
at Pearson Airport over 20 years ago. I sometimes wonder when and if my
journey will ever end. For all purposes, it would not be wrong for people
to assume that it has indeed reached a successful conclusion. My two daughters
are wonderful independent women, destined to take their share of shaping
this new world. My husband, after five years of being shut out from his
profession, has been practising it successfully for 15. We own our home
- or at least the bank allows us to pretend that we do; I have sponsored
my brother and his family; my parents came over 13 years ago. I choose
not to return to the profession of teaching and have carved out a new
career for myself. On a more daily, trivial but far more tangible level,
I am a member of the local women's book club, I plant daffodil bulbs in
our neighbourhood park with the local residents association, I demonstrate
against the cutbacks to education in Ontario. I have even finally understood
the finer points of unmanageable (and for me fairly strange) processes,
such as choosing, wearing and maintaining nylons or eating maple syrup
with bacon. There are certain things that I have unfortunately not been
able to master. It has been impossible for me to learn even the basics
of French, and I regret this enormously. As I review the mental balance
sheet that I have running, there is no doubt in my mind that as immigrants,
we have both enriched and been enriched by Canada.
But there are times, when I feel distinctly odd, alone, different - as,
for example, when I mix and mingle at Toronto gatherings of elites and
find that I am the only visible minority in a room of 400 odd people -
in addition to the serving-staff, that is. These are the moments when
I feel excluded simply by virtue being different, of not being from this
country and not having a greater, more personal, lived share of its history,
language and culture. And yet, even in my aloneness, I know that they
are the old establishment and are part of Canada's past, while I am of
the future.
These are also times when I realise that there is really no end to this
journey, because there is no destination and no single definition of what
it is to be Canadian. Unlike our neighbours to the south, where American
identity is defined, pre-packaged and sold as a brand all over the world,
being Canadian is not a rigid concept. Pico Iyer, the world famous travel
writer thinks of Canada as a global soul, "because it is free from expectation,
because it is willing to experiment, because it has a rare sense of imaginative
space and therefore is the best guide to the creation of a new kind of
stained-glass society" (Iyer, 2000). By being free and uninhibited, we
are best able to demonstrate to the rest of the world how creative possibility
arises out of this mix between old and new, "between global beings and
the global society around them".
However, there is one collective experience that resonates with us all
- the experience of displacement. Most of us come from somewhere else,
and have been displaced through persecution, war, or political or economic
ideologies. As displaced people, we are suspicious of official ideology,
because we are refugees in a sense from officialdom; from governments,
armies, strict traditions and ideologies. As Mark Starowicz creator and
executive producer of Canada: A People's History points out, we " are
especially vigilant of our rights - no one claims more rights than Canada.
Canada is consistently cranky, litigious, in perpetual living negotiation
of its constituent parts. To the frustrated question: When are we finally
going to settle all this? the answer of course is: Never. And that's not
a problem. In fact, that is exactly the point" (Starowicz, 2001).
So back to this journey to Never Never Land. If it is indeed a journey
without an end, how should the traveller prepare for it? What should the
traveller pack to take on this journey? What signs and milestones should
the traveller watch out for to know that the journey is taking the right
direction? Who is the best travel guide? Who draws the map for the journey?
And ultimately, who is this traveller?
The conference organisers have asked me to work with you today to rethink
and re-imagine this journey. I am to challenge you by thinking outside
the box and imagining settlement in a New World. What if we were to start
again? What freedom is implicit in this question! Yet, before I roam freely
with you on this subject, I do want to say a few things about my perspective.
First of all, I believe that Canada is a wonderful country for immigrants
and for those refugees who are able to successfully make a claim on our
sense of social justice and compassion. My comments therefore do not arise
out of a belief that immigration and settlement are bad; rather, I proceed
from the conviction that they could be much better.
Secondly, I want to acknowledge that my roots are in the settlement service
sector, where I was fortunate enough to find a home for many years. However,
in the last three years, I have come to know the community of funders
and policy makers as well. I have come to understand that all of us -
settlement workers, funders, policy makers, private foundations - are
basically trying to do the same things, but with different tools. So I
speak with a great deal of admiration and affection for settlement workers,
and a growing respect for funders and policy makers.
***
The timing could not be better to discuss the issue of immigrant settlement.
The world around us is moving at a dizzying pace. The flow of knowledge,
information, goods and people - this force that we call globalisation
- has changed the context and environment in many areas, including that
of immigration. Our immigration levels will need to increase sharply to
maintain labour force growth. As a nation of taxpayers, we need to be
thankful that we are also a nation of immigrants and we need to make sure
that we remain so. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration has set
out an ambitious goal of increasing annual immigration to 1% of Canada's
population. So let's start with the premise that we need immigrants.
At the same time, Canada faces competition and has had a sketchy history
of meeting these targets. This may be attributed to a number of factors,
including a growing middle class and increased opportunities for skilled
individuals in traditional source countries of immigration. Other countries,
such as Germany, have recently joined the competition for skilled immigrants.
Strangely, we don't seem to doing so well with the immigrants we get.
The image of a lawyer, engineer or doctor driving a taxi is almost burnt
into our national consciousness. We know that immigrant wages are not
reaching the highs that they used to; in fact the indisputable correlation
between race and poverty should be a grave concern for all Canadians.
Clearly, something is not right. The speed and pace of change has put
extraordinary pressure on the settlement sector to change and speed things
up. There was a time when we all subscribed to this unwritten contract
between Canada and its immigrants, where the expectation was that our
children would be ones who would fulfil our immigrant dreams of full social
and economic inclusion and participation. The immigrant dream thus stretched
out over at least two generations. But that paradigm no longer exists;
immigrants are no longer prepared to defer their gratification to the
next generation. If they don't get it here and now, well then, they have
increasing opportunities to reach their ambitions elsewhere. "Instant
Settlement" is the order of the day. The challenge for the next ten years
will not simply be getting immigrants, but keeping them.
So, to our original premise - that we need immigrants - we need to add
a second premise: we need to do better by immigrants. Therefore we need
to do settlement better, differently.
What is this settlement that we are concerned about? Is it an end unto
itself? Should it have the kind of institutional framework that results
in the creation of a settlement industry that stands alone? It certainly
seems that this is exactly what we have created - a separate, stand-alone
institution that is set apart and away from the rest of Canada. Consequently,
settlement is something that only we immigrants think about and care about,
and mostly deliver, and mostly alone. As a result, when things go wrong
it is easy for the public to blame immigrants - if immigrants are not
working out, well then it is the immigrants themselves who are fault,
who are not integrating. When immigrants find that their much vaunted
qualifications are not translating into the appropriate high-level jobs,
then it is because their credentials are not on par with ours.
Consider who is attending this conference on immigrant settlement: we
are almost all settlement workers, policy wonks, funders! Where are the
others who should and do have a keen and vested interest in us? Where
are the corporate leaders who need our talents, the condominium developers
who need our business, the political parties who need our votes, the unions
who need our membership, the small businesses who need our investment,
the real estate agents who need our downpayments, the cultural industries
who need our talent?
If we are to truly rethink settlement, then we need start at the beginning
by recognizing its rightful and important place as a means to full and
equal participation in our democratic society. After all, immigration
is about nation building. And in this nation thankfully, nation-building
is about democracy and participation.
Settlement therefore cannot end at speaking English to a certain level,
it should mean speaking enough English so that we can vote or sit around
a board room. Settlement should not end at a referral to housing. Yes,
it should start there, but it should also include one of the most meaningful
and sadly forgotten indicators of settlement: home ownership. Settlement
should not end at showing people how to find jobs; it should start there
and go with them into the workplace. Settlement should not end at mere
information and referral, it should begin there and end with full participation.
In fact, settlement should not start and end with immigrants and refugees
at all - it should include and involve all Canadians, all our institutions,
and our public. If the real test of settlement is not language levels
but active participation in our democratic institutions, then we have
to examine the capacity and ability of democratic Canada to successfully
facilitate this participation. And we cannot do this if all the effort
is concentrated on the immigrant, without concentrating with equal force
on the ability of Canada to make this happen. Otherwise it is like the
unheard sound of one hand clapping.
Uzma Shakir of the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians has observed
that there is a "lot of settlement going on, with nobody actually getting
settled." I believe that the reason for this is that we keep settlement
in a cage.
Why is this so? The answer we are usually given is 'jurisdiction.' We
are brought into this country by one level of government, we are left
at the mercy of a second. Most of us live our lives in cities and have
our first experiences of Canadian citizenship in cities and municipalities.
Yet this level of government has no place, no role in policy making on
issues of immigration. The problem of jurisdiction is not just vertical
between governments, it is also horizontal between departments and ministries.
Immigration remains isolated from human capital development, which remains
separate from health, and so on. Because of jurisdiction we have the unfortunate
situation of recruiting 'designer immigrants' for labour market shortages,
without actually being able to follow up with the jobs that we implicitly
or explicitly promise them.
The lofty goal of nation building is difficult to accomplish within this
maze of jurisdiction, with its inexplicable limits on who can do what
to whom, who gets credit for what, and who gets blamed. The voice of the
immigrant recedes further and further into the background as governments
engage in louder and louder squabbling.
Of course, jurisdiction is not a problem unique to immigration; it is
part of our national landscape, covering many issues of national concern.
Yet, at least in health and education we have some reason to hope that
jurisdictional boundaries will be transcended, largely because they occupy
so much of our national consciousness as issues of primary concern to
Canadians.
But what about immigration? We know that the health care system, the
long term care system, the pension system, the care for our seniors is
to a significant extent dependent on the future wealth from population
increase, taxes and consumption that results from immigration. Yet, immigration
is of national concern only in its negative manifestations. I have a hard
time remembering the last time I saw a positive story about immigration
or refugees on the front pages of our national newspaper. If ever we are
featured, it is a story about refugees or immigrants on welfare, or about
sponsorship breakdowns or about illegal refugees. With coverage like this,
it is no wonder that, according to a national poll of Canadian attitudes
by Maclean's magazine, Canadian attitudes towards immigrants are hardening.
Apparently, over 70% of Canadians insist that immigrants should adjust
when they come to Canada (Sheppard, 2000). But what do they think we do
most of the time when we get here? Everyday of our lives we adjust a little
bit more. We manage not to freeze in the winters, we manage to accept
working in factories when we should be working in hospitals, and we manage
to accept substandard wages. I think we do possibly a little too well
on the adjustment scale, and a little too little on the protest scale.
It is therefore unsurprising that jurisdictional barriers are harder
to transcend when it comes to immigration than in areas of national commitment
like education and health. Yet, I am left with the suspicion that, if
it were not jurisdiction, then there would be some other reason to keep
our interests on the margins.
I believe that to a large extent we ourselves are at fault. As long as
we see ourselves and allow others to see us as outsiders, supplicants
and victims, we will remain exactly that. We cannot rely on our political
leaders to give immigration and settlement their due. Our new immigration
bill appears to be more concerned about the machinery of keeping people
out than getting people in and keeping them here.
How do we change this? By remembering that political leaders are elected
by people! As people of this country we must take it on ourselves to translate
the issues closest to our hearts into issues of national concern, much
as those who are most directly interested in health and education have.
This means that we as immigrants must start unpacking our minds as well
as our baggage. We immigrants must begin to translate our individual successes
into collective political power. We need to stop being solely engaged
by our pasts and take ownership of this new land that we have chosen as
our own. We must stop drawing on our identities solely as Iranians, Chileans,
Pakistanis, Chinese, and so on, and start seeing ourselves as Canadians.
Most importantly, we have to start influencing public policies.
I think it is natural to pay attention and be concerned about what is
happening back home. But that does not mean that our civic activities
here need to be contained to our own cultural and ethnic associations
and faith institutions. Haroon Siddiqui of The Toronto Star tells an interesting
story: When that newspaper failed to report that an Indian had won the
Miss World title three years in a row, Toronto's South Asian community
was outraged! The Star got more calls than it could handle. But when the
Star reported on the problems that immigrant and ethnic professors were
experiencing in receiving tenure at the University of Toronto, there was
hardly a squeak out of them. Certainly the millions of South Asians who
live in all parts of the world outside India and Pakistan have a history
of paying a heavy personal price for staying out of the public policy
and political arena - look at Fiji and East Africa. Let's look at a more
positive lesson from our neighbours to the south and at the attention
that the Latino vote got in the last US election. Certainly, that particular
politicised community has been incredibly effective in flexing its muscles,
particularly in California.
Before anybody misunderstands me, I am not calling for immigrants to
set aside their identities and adopt a solely Canadian identity. I am
not against multiculturalism as it is supposed to be. I am against existing
solely in our own exclusive worlds, cultures and institutions. True multiculturalism
must surely mean living side by side with all our similarities and differences
in a civic society as engaged citizens.
A first step in redefining the place of immigration and settlement policies
in the national consciousness must therefore start with immigrants. We
are so often called a special interest group, perhaps it is time for us
to start acting like one. We can do this in four steps:
First, we need to form a national coalition of immigrants and interested
individuals, whose purpose it would be to inform the public and the government
on immigration and settlement policy. Members would not represent organizations
or any specific groups of immigrants - they would simply represent themselves
and be free from the constraints of organisations or governments because
they would be acting in their own personal capacity as watchdogs, commentators,
informed citizens. They would include a mix of prominent and ordinary
people. The National Forum on Immigration in the US is a model that I
admire - when its CEO puts in a call to the Vice President of the US,
he is assured his call will be returned, because both political parties
in the US understand the power of the immigrant vote. Closer to home we
have the Canadian Council of Refugees, an excellent model (and a sympathetic
one, too) that we can build on.
Second, we need to bring policy down to a level such that it engages
people in their daily lives. Policy in the abstract has no meaning. It
only begins to engage people when they see how it affects their lives,
their communities, and their children. People live their daily lives in
communities and cities. Most immigrants gravitate to cities and most of
the impacts of integration occur (or not) at the that level. Cities, therefore,
should be at the centre of policy discussion on all issues of settlement.
It is at the level of neighbourhood, community, and city life that the
immigrant is best able to start getting involved in matters of policy.
So we need to actively encourage immigrants to participate in local affairs.
Third, but tied to the second point, we need to ally ourselves to some
of the emerging and potentially powerful movements in the country that
are about the redistribution of political power to Canada's cities. I
refer to the movement that is gathering force in our nation's biggest
cities to create a new base of respect for themselves through redefining
their relationship with senior levels of government. If we accept the
premise that greater coherence between federal settlement policies and
local integration practices would accelerate settlement, then it would
make sense to start exercising our potential power by participating, and
in fact playing a very important and leading role, in this new movement.
Finally, settlement workers need to formalise their professional bonds
with each other across the country and form their own professional association
dedicated to furthering their capacity and garnering respect for them.
National or even provincial settlement worker associations would not only
serve the profession through development of standards and codes of conduct,
but hopefully also enter formally into the field as a player in policy.
It is time for front-line settlement workers to emerge from behind the
skirts of their Executive Directors. It is time for you to gain the respect
of this nation. Who can imagine any debate on public education in Canada
not being informed by the very powerful Teachers Federations or any debate
on health service delivery without the input of doctors and nurses.
So this, then, is my vision: a coherent national body of concerned citizens
informing and shaping national policies of settlement and immigration,
shored up by a grass roots movement of immigrants taking part in a strengthened
local democracy, backed by the professionals in the field. We would finally
be in a position to craft settlement policies, not in backrooms or even
at conferences, but in full, open discussion with the public.
Perhaps now we can begin to imagine a Canada where the discourse on settlement
has been popularised, where our national coalition of immigrants is an
influential body that has the ear of the public, the media and the government.
Where conversations relating to settlement policy are crafted with the
active interest of a wide variety of stakeholders. Where the objectives
of settlement dovetail with the objectives of industry, education, labour,
health. Where the resources of these Ministries would be brought to bear
collaboratively on the achievement of certain national objectives. Then
and only then can settlement services be elevated from the basement to
the penthouse, where they deserve to be.
Settlement policy would no longer be confined to the outcomes to which
it is currently forced to limit itself, because settlement would no longer
be just about language proficiency, job search skills, or initial settlement
counselling. It would measure its progress differently, it would be delivered
differently, resourced differently and involve different stakeholders.
Settlement workers would have the responsibility of providing active
connectivity to the rest of the world. That would mean that settlement
workers would work in different places, including schools, libraries,
community colleges, union halls, employment centres, health centres, shopping
malls etc. Within these institutions they would have standing, prestige
and clout because they would be the initial, essential, and interpretative
link to potential consumers and customers - to a new power base.
And how would we measure progress in this brave new world? Accountability
is important. How trivial it would be to tie settlement to "language level"
1 or 2 or 3, or how many clients were seen by how many counsellors within
this emancipated vision; and how inappropriate.
What if we adopt the larger measure of equity, instead, as the high ground
we are striving towards? Equity is a simple concept, easy to grasp, easy
to measure, easy to dream about. When does society begin to look like
us? Who makes how much and how does it compare? Who is sitting around
our boardroom tables? Who is governing our country? Who is teaching our
children? How far away are we from a reflection of ourselves among Canada's
powerful institutions?
It is high time that the faces of teachers in our classrooms in Surrey
and Hamilton begin to resemble the faces of the students; that senior
citizens in Chinese or South Asian long-term care facilities are able
to get care from qualified nurses in their own language; that occupational
regulators understand that there is no conflict in promoting access and
protecting the safety of the public.
* * *
I was asked to unpack the box of settlement, and in doing so I have come
to dislike the contours of this box, with its hard edges and rigid walls,
with its current limitations of what is possible and what is not. Perhaps
we don't need a box at all. Perhaps we need a whole new way of looking
at settlement where equity is the objective. Perhaps we should simply
throw away the box and replace it with a circle - of inclusion and equity.
Perhaps it is even time for us to consider replacing the very word "settlement"
with the word "inclusion." Instead of settlement policies we would then
have inclusion policies; instead of settlement programs, inclusion programs.
Instead of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, there would
be a Department of Citizenship, Immigration and Inclusion. Our Co-Chair's
new title would be Director General, Inclusion Branch. I feel dizzy just
at the thought.
I hope, though, that we don't just flirt with these ideas today only
to drop them again tomorrow. The test of good ideas lies in their ability
to be translated into action. I challenge you today to determine whether
mine have any legs. You - settlement workers and settlement agencies -
are powerful players, with the ability to reach out to thousands of immigrants.
It is up to you to sow the seeds of a new national movement of immigrants
that focuses on creating, responding to and commenting on relevant policy
issues and, if the idea resonates, to put forward a new framework for
settlement based on inclusion. It is up to immigrants to carry forward
and translate their individual successes of immigration into political
clout.
I recognize that this will not be easy. The question of funding is always
at the heart of our capacities and our limitations. I ask you, however,
to imagine a world of settlement that has new allies, new stakeholders,
new relationships and therefore new champions.
Let me finish where I started. If settlement is indeed a journey, then
who is the traveller? I conclude then that the traveller is not the immigrant,
but Canada itself. It is Canada that travels this road, with its history,
its institutions, its culture, its people and, yes, accompanying it are
immigrants and refugees, settlement workers and agencies. But it is a
road that we travel together. We are joined together, and we should know
that if one turns, so does the other, if one succeeds, so does the other
and if one fails so does the other.
I will borrow some much-quoted lines from Rabbi Hillel in closing. He
says in these few words what I have been trying to say for the last twenty
minutes:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I
And if not now, when?
Thank you very much.
References
Iyer, P. (2000). The Global Soul. New York: Knopf, Borzoi Books.
Sheppard, R. (25, December 2000). "We are Canadian" In Maclean's, Toronto.
Starowicz, M. (11 June 2001). Convocation address at York University,
Toronto.
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