Honourable Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to share the perspective of the Regional Municipality of Durham on how to promote the economic prosperity of immigrants through settlement services. To provide some context, I offer the following information.

Durham region is located just east of the city of Toronto, has a population of approximately 608,000, and is comprised of one upper-tier municipality and eight lower-tier municipalities. Major employers include health, education, and energy sectors. The majority of residents work in small to medium enterprises. Many residents commute to the city of Toronto to work. Durham region is a designated infill centre in Ontario's places to grow, and anticipates a population of one million by 2031. Much of that growth is expected to come from immigration. Roughly 21% of the population are immigrants and just over 7% of the population are recent immigrants.

The Regional Municipality of Durham holds the LIP, local immigration partnership contract and has since 2009. I manage a small team that has worked exclusively on the LIP for the last six years. This team works to engage the broader community, business, educators, not-for-profits, local governments, and civil society to achieve the objectives of the LIP. The primary objectives of the LIP, as I'm sure most of you know, are to act as facilitators that create cultures of inclusion, to promote the economic and social settlement and integration of newcomers in a coordinated, efficient fashion, and to ensure that local intelligence informs local planning.

The Durham LIP works in partnership with local or lower-tier municipalities to align efforts for the best outcomes for newcomers across jurisdictional lines. Tracey Vaughan-Barrett from the Town of Ajax, one of the eight municipalities within Durham region, is on this panel as well. Hearing from both of us, we had hoped would give the committee a broad understanding of the Durham perspective.

I offer the following suggestions and observations based on my experience managing the LIP, as a former member of the Conference Board of Canada's round table on immigration, and as a member of a number of cross-sectoral committees working in and around the greater Toronto area.

I've been invited to speak to the committee about improving economic prosperity through settlement services.

The first step is defining what a settlement service is. In my opinion, we are all in the business of settlement. Traditional settlement services are government-funded. Non-traditional settlement services are provided by everyone, or at least could be. Libraries have been doing settlement work for years, not because they're funded to do so, but because their mandate is to meet the needs of all residents.

It is my experience that the economic integration and subsequent success of immigrants is most likely to happen when traditional CIC-funded settlement services and non-CIC-funded services, in other words, the broader community, work in tandem to create an environment that lends itself to immigrant success. LIPs are contractually prohibited from providing direct service, settlement or otherwise. Those in the broader community referenced in my opening statement, through which the bulk of the work of the LIP is done, are not considered traditional settlement providers. The distinction is important and worth repeating. In Durham region, the model of LIP we adopted purposely engaged the broader community to examine its structures, policies, programs and procedures to determine if they were inclusive of all populations. This type of reflective work takes years to position, accomplish, and embed. It is a work in progress.

Traditional settlement services prepare newcomers for communities. LIPs prepare communities, institutions and organizations for newcomers. When they work together, real systemic change has an opportunity to occur. LIPs, particularly LIPs positioned within another order of government, can act as agents of change. Education and information are accelerants of change. LIPs are positioned, if resourced and empowered to do so, to act as conduits to business, economic development departments, boards of trade, chambers of commerce, human resource councils, and organizations to inform and educate these bodies about the economic imperative of immigration.

If we can anticipate an increase in job-ready newcomers via express entry, the role of traditional settlements services shifts to meet a different set of needs, as does the role of the employer and the community that newcomers settle in. While the net effects of express entry are yet to be seen, it is fair to anticipate that this system will affect both traditional and non-traditional settlement services. If all parties understand the imperative of retention and not simply attraction, then the rules each play by can be more easily defined.

Looking ahead, I see traditional settlement services changing to meet the needs of a new demographic of newcomers and tailoring programs and services for the job ready, for dependent family members, and for refugees. LIPs will work with the broader community through education and knowledge brokering to inform practices around barrier-free workplaces, barrier-free institutions, and inclusive management practices. Communities like Ajax, which you will hear from in a moment, are adapting policies, expanding recreation programs, and reviewing board recruitment policies to ensure that they are barrier-free, meet the needs of all residents and create pathways to becoming part of the Canadian family.

This is happening in Durham already. As an example, the Ajax-Pickering Board of Trade, with the help of the Durham LIP, recently struck a diversity committee whose purpose is to develop a diversity engagement plan. While in its early stages, this committee is a first step towards business representatives acknowledging that it is in their best interest to understand the effects of immigration, express entry, changing demographics, and the impact on business practices, employers, employees, and customers. They are actively seeking out education and information, and the Durham LIP is making sure they have it.

The best hope for the rapid economic success of newcomers is to engage the full community in creating welcoming communities. The key players are engaged. We all have a role to play.

In summary, I would urge the committee to consider the following:

Fund traditional settlement services to do what they do best. Prepare newcomers for communities.

Empower and resource LIPs to continue the work that they have begun. Prepare communities for newcomers and lay the groundwork for institutional change.

Acknowledge and support the role of non-traditional settlement service providers, the organizations that operationalize the welcoming communities that attract and retain newcomers.

Thank you.

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