the CanadaVisa Team - 23 July, 2015
Small communities across Canada are striving to attract more newcomers, and are working to provide settlement facilities to encourage immigrants to choose smaller communities as opposed to larger metropolitan areas.
The town of North Bay, Ontario is leading example of a smaller Canadian city making efforts to attract more immigrants to permanently settle in the rural Ontario communities.
Within three years of making a commitment to prioritize attracting immigrants to the community, North Bay has already set up an immigrant settlement agency and received settlement funding from the government. The town expects that this will encourage immigrants to settle and remain in North Bay, which will in turn contribute to the population growth and economic development of the area.
North Bay is one of three small cities in Ontario that are facing the challenges of low or declining population growth, and are part of an Ontario government pilot project to set up best practices for attracting and retaining immigrants in rural Ontario communities.
“When we did our business and retention program we realized that there were huge gaps in our labour pool and we knew that immigration was one way to bring people here,” said North Bay Mayor Vic Fedeli.
When immigration was deemed a priority by the city council, Marla Tremblay of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development formed the North Bay Newcomer Network, along with a few volunteers.
“We quickly realised that before we developed an immigration attraction and retention strategy, we should ask the newcomers who are here what they think,” Tremblay said.
North Bay held an immigration symposium in April of 2006, and asked the newcomers in the community to contribute to the discussion. The symposium identified an immigrant settlement agency as North Bay’s greatest need for attraction and retention of immigrants, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada representatives visited the community to explain how settlement agencies are funded.
The North Bay Newcomer Network chose the Young People’s Press to apply for settlement funding, because of its history of local and Canada-wide anti-racism projects, and in February 2008, the North Bay and District Multicultural Centre officially opened its doors.
The Centre offers many services to immigrants who settle in the area, from an Immigrant Settlement and Adaptation Program, which includes information on education and health services in the area as well as job preparation skills, to language programs and translation services.
“We’re absolutely thrilled with the progress to date,” said Fedeli.
The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) set up the Community Immigration Retention in Rural Ontario (CIRRO) pilot project last summer to study smaller communities trying to attract and retain more newcomers to Canada. The other Ontario cities involved in the project are Chatham-Kent and Brockville.
The results of this project will play a large part in shaping government policy aimed at encouraging immigrants to settle outside of the cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
