the CanadaVisa Team - 20 July, 2015
Nearly a fifth of Canada's total population was born elsewhere in the world. Many of these individuals immigrated to Canada because of the promise of living freely in a democratic, peaceful and multicultural society. Studies have shown however, that immigrants to Canada have low levels of political participation. A new program being run by The Maytree Foundation aims to change that by encouraging civic engagement among immigrants.
The new initiative is called School4Civics, and will explore a variety of different methods, such as mentoring and skills workshops to encourage active involvement by immigrants in Canadian political life. The hope is both to encourage greater diversity in Canada's political leadership, and to have the program's participants help increase voter turnout in their communities. The Maytree Foundation, which is sponsoring and running the program, is a non-profit, non-partisan charitable organization with reducing poverty and inequality in Canada as its goals.
The program is being launched this summer in the Greater Toronto Area, which is home to the highest concentration of immigrants in Canada, and is one of the most diverse cities in the world. Fully 44 per cent of the area's residents were born outside of Canada. With the Province of Ontario headed to the polls for a provincial election in October 2007, the organization will have an opportunity to measure its success in increasing voter turnout.
With immigrants accounting for such a large part of Canada's population, especially in its larger cities, low levels of voter turnout among immigrants are very important to civic engagement in the country as a whole. Immigrants to Canada hold public office at every level in the country, including Canada's Governor-General (the official head of state) the Honourable Michaelle Jean, who came to Canada from Haiti when she was a child. While only citizens of Canada may vote in elections, the School4Civics program hopes that with more role models like Jean, immigrants who have already attained Canadian citizenship will participate more actively in Canadian politics.
