By Alan Broadbent

The great challenge for governments in these hard economic times is reducing spending without doing harm. National, provincial and municipal governments are all considering how to economize, and are looking at cuts to programs and services.

Those who think it will be easy point to reports of auditors general as popularized in the commercial press, and believe that there are great inefficiencies to correct. They imagine pots of money being spilled daily, and scads of unworthy recipients of government supports and services who can otherwise cope without public assistance.

Promises of fiscal rectitude just around the corner have been made from time to time in recent decades, and have almost never proven out. It turns out that our governments are not cesspools of lavish spending and profligacy. Much of the federal expenditure goes to programs like the Child Tax Benefit, supports for seniors and the disabled, and others who cannot participate successfully in the labour market. Provincial expenditures go for health care and education in large part, two of the fundamental pillars of economic competitiveness and well being. Municipal expenditures go to clean water, sewage and waste management, roads and transit, and other necessary hard services.

However, there is a frontier of smart public expenditure that can produce bang for the buck. It would be tempting to call it a New Frontier, but it is in fact an old idea to which government has been oddly resistant.

It is the idea of spending on prevention rather than the cure. Preventing something from happening rather than paying to remediate its negative effects is almost always a lot cheaper. Like the old Fram oil filter ad used to say, “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later,” with “later” being the more expensive alternative of major engine work.

The late Fraser Mustard told us decades ago that paying systemic attention to a child’s development in the early years would pay immense dividends later in their ability to grow into productive and well adjusted people. “Participaction,” the federal government fitness campaign from the 1970’s, promoted fitness and healthy living. Supportive housing advocates have for years told us that giving disabled people stable housing increases their functionality enormously, reducing their dependence on the medical system, welfare, and other supports. Public transit is known to boost civic engagement, labour market attachment, and pollution reduction. And numerous other early interventions have shown they can prevent people from expensive engagements with the health, criminal justice, and welfare systems.

Yet we remain publicly addicted to old ways, and have governments wanting to spend on prisons rather than housing, roads rather than rail, hospitals rather than parks and recreation. And we pull back funding for kids’ breakfast programs at schools, or leave them sparsely funded. There are some points of light, like the Ontario government’s commitment to early childhood education.

What if governments really wanted to reduce public expenditures, and decided to focus on preventing expensive late stage interventions? What could they do right now?

• The Caledon Institute has recently raised the idea of a Jobseeker Loan, a new temporary income measure to fill the gap between Employment Insurance and welfare, which would prevent unemployed Canadians from having their assets stripped and from falling into poverty.
• In New Zealand, work funded by The Tindall Foundation is developing a social housing bond to support low income housing in the rebuilding of earthquake devastated Christchurch. The bond would combine a government guarantee of principal with private capital, underwritten by the real estate value, to fill the low end of the housing market which the market does not serve. Stable housing helps prevent people from slipping below the poverty line.
• The Toronto District School Board conducts Faith Walks and Community Walks for teachers to explore the dimensions of their school’s community. Teachers go on organized walks to discover the community, and go into the faith institutions to learn about different faiths, all of which can increase their awareness of and sensitivity to their students. This helps prevent isolation with all its attendant later costs.
• Governments can follow the recommendations of The Workers’ Action Centre to hire a relative handful of workplace inspectors to end employer abuse of contingent workers, making sure the workers are paid what is due to them and not terminated unreasonably. Lost wages from abuse result in many people falling into poverty and relying on welfare and other assistance programs. Complaints filed amount to over $40 million per year, but the real abuse is very much more because most victims don’t file complaints.

These are examples of experiments or ideas governments could adopt to avoid downstream problems of poverty, isolation, and misunderstanding, which usually lead to more costly interventions.

Creating an orientation to prevention requires new architecture of government, never an easy task. But rather than opting for a general squeeze everywhere to reduce expenditure, which can harm good things and marginally restrain bad things, redesigning government to focus on avoiding expensive downstream or late-stage interventions would be a smart approach.

And there are no times like hard times to wring out a mandate for change.

We recently returned from a trip to Germany where we visited four German cities to share some of Toronto’s best ideas in immigrant integration, and to bring back some new ideas from Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin and Cologne.

While Canada and Germany are very different countries, cities in both countries exercise a powerful attraction for immigrants who are moving across borders, time zones, and regions to large urban centers. In Toronto, close to half of our population are immigrants, in German cities such as Stuttgart that number stands at 40%. In Toronto, we are fond of saying: if immigrants succeed, then so does Toronto. We’ve seen that is true for German cities too.

When integration is done well, it fuels economic growth, spurs innovation and prosperity and leads to socially cohesive societies. When it is done poorly or ignored, it results in exclusion, poverty and segregation with lasting effects.

We are fortunate. The City of Toronto is seen around the world as a model for immigrant integration.

And we’ve got plenty of practical examples of how this is true:

• In our public libraries you borrow books in other languages and learn English;
• In our schools, you can drop off your kids and then get settlement advice;
• In our local colleges and universities, it is very apparent who is going to be the next generation of engineers, doctors, scientists and teachers; and
• We see more and more inter-ethnic marriages – up by 33% since 2001. With diversity, it seems, romance is in the air. The parents may or may not approve, but the young kids don’t seem to care.

You know this already, but it bears a reminder: Toronto’s defining feature is its diversity. It is why people come here; it is why other countries want us to tell them about our experiences. We must remember that to the over 50% of Torontonians who weren’t born here, Toronto offers a relationship built on two words: hopes and dreams.

But it’s not all romance. Dark clouds have formed over us. Inequality is growing in Canada. In Toronto, those at the bottom are more likely to be minorities, many of them recent immigrants. While the recent recession took a toll on all of us, it had a particular deep impact on recent immigrants, with their unemployment rates being twice that of others. The narrative of doctors driving cabs and engineers delivering pizzas is not just local mythology, it is quite real. We have too many in the immigrant community working in precarious jobs in the service sector, part-time, or seasonal. They often hold down more than one job.

Add to this the lack of affordable housing and you have a city which succeeds only in driving people out to the suburbs, where there is little or no public transportation. Their disconnect with our city becomes more and more real. Their settlement, hindered further.

You get a hint of a perfect storm in the form and shape of high ethnic concentrations in certain parts of our city. We’ve always had our “Little Italy” and “Greek Town.” But something feels different today; and, not only in the scale and size of newer immigrant-dominated settlements. They’re isolated in our cities. There’s a hold the “old country”, including older, even antiquated, values have on people’s hearts and minds. It enables them to live and work in Toronto but exist emotionally in another place altogether. This isn’t the nation-building we have in mind.

In this context, we must give new legs to the hopes and dreams of those who come to Toronto. We need to look for new instruments for new times. We must create the city that better welcomes our newcomers. We must build the relationships in our city that allow us all to achieve our hopes and dreams.

Thankfully, we don’t have to look far for inspiration.

One of the most powerful instruments for integration and cohesion is also one of the most overlooked: sports. When kids play together, when their parents stand side by side with other parents and cheer them on the side lines, you create social glue. When I first came to Canada, my daughter was a member of a gymnastics club and parents spent our weekends driving the girls to smallish towns like Lindsay and Paris. As my daughter became more adept with ribbons and jumps, I learned some of the written and unwritten rules of engagement through other parents. That was the most practical settlement experience I had – and no one paid for it. The relationships I made were real, and had a true impact on my integration. I think we have a greater chance of building a nation in hockey rinks and on cricket fields instead of in lonely ESL classrooms.

It’s time for Toronto institutions to actively move from passively paying lip service to diversity, to real inclusion. What if every Toronto institution, voluntary agency, civil society organization set out to ensure that its board of governors was as diverse as its customer base? Not merely from a sense of social justice, or equity, but from a place of responsiveness to a new public and a new customer base. Think of our hospitals, our museums, libraries, the shelters, and the food banks. Think of the people who sit around these board rooms making decisions for the public good. Most often, they will replace themselves with others they know, others who think like them, who read the same books and went to the same kind of schools.

Think about this as an investment strategy. Your smarter money managers always advise you to do this. In this case, diversify not to protect you from the shocks of the stock market, but to protect you against irrelevance, outdatedness and a lack of competitiveness.

In case you need help, just ask us. We have a list of 1,500 candidates, ready, willing, able and trained.

Toronto has been incredibly successful in Canada’s multicultural experiment. We can’t forget what makes us beautiful – hopes and dreams. We have to foster the conditions that keep us open, responsive, growing, and connected (not closed, divided, disconnected, and fractured). We need to find deliberate strategies to connect us so we don’t end up with permanent solitudes. Yes, we should and must get the instruments and attention from senior levels of government. But the glue that I am talking about, the glue between people that really makes a difference, is in our own hands, on the sports fields, and in the boardrooms.

So my hope for 2012 is for all of us to get a tad sticky and to put our fingers in the glue.

For more information on Maytree’s visit to four cities in Germany, visit Good Ideas from Toronto: An Exchange of Immigrant Integration Practices.

By Alan Broadbent

The Occupy Wall Street movement has puzzled many people. The lack of organization, elaborated message, or visible leaders has left some people asking for more, and the presence of young people with no clear political or social agenda in the tent parks has left others wondering if it is just a dropped-out caravan.

The simple message of the 99% facing off against the 1%, the vast majority against the very rich who have corralled the bulk of the wealth created in the last quarter century, seems pretty clear, but is portrayed as not enough of an analysis.

But the data doesn’t lie. The gap between the richest and the poorest has been growing, as has the gap between the richest and the rest. And in the developed world the middle class has been disappearing.

Maytree’s belief has always been that inequality breeds instability. Along with mass migration and environmental degradation, inequality within and between nations creates the breeding ground for insurrection and crime on one hand, and poor health, low productivity, and social torpor on the other.

Canada has the good fortune of having active think tanks who have been working on these issues. The Caledon Institute of Social Policy over its twenty-year history has created innovative policy like the Child Tax Benefit to close the income gap, and its proposed new architecture is a practical approach to adult income supports (Towards a New Architecture for Canada’s Adult Benefits, Ken Battle, Michael Mendelson and Sherri Torjman, June 2006).

The Mowat Centre at the University of Toronto’s School of Social Policy and Governance has just produced a study of Employment Insurance. The working group was co-chaired by Maytree president Ratna Omidvar and former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow, and the project was led by Mowat Centre director, Matthew Mendelsohn. The report illustrates the inequality of treatment Canadians receive across the country in their access to EI benefits, and makes a series of strong recommendations to increase fairness and make the program truly workable.

The C.D. Howe Institute has also done work recently on EI reform, advocating too for the abolition of regional eligibility criteria.

Despite this good policy research and increased public awareness, Canadian governments seem less concerned in recent years about growing income inequality. Both business and government mantras focus on driving down costs and seeking austerity, with much of the brunt being born by employees who find wages and salaries stagnating or retreating.

Government policy, and the focus of many social agents, has been focused on income redistribution, conceptually moving money from big pockets to small ones, which in reality has moved money from medium sized pockets to small ones. Less attention has been paid to the initial distribution of incomes, to making sure that people are paid living wages at the lower end of the scale, and not paid egregiously at the upper end.

The debate has taken place with a sense that little other than fairness or merit is at stake, depending on your point of view.

But the stakes might be higher than we think, and the Occupy movement may be the harbinger of more serious discontent. Some have linked Occupy with the Arab Spring and the violent overthrow of kleptocratic tyrants, and they have been branded as dramatics or hysterics.

We remain persuaded that inequality breeds instability. And instability can have unpredictable outcomes. Paying closer attention to some of the equality remedies arising from Caledon, Mowat and others seems like a good risk remediation strategy.

By Alan Broadbent

Much of the work in Canada is done in a broad sector variously called The Community Sector, The Third Sector, The NGO (Non Government Organization) Sector, or The Charitable Sector. These descriptions define it as non government and non business. The Sector itself is broad, ranging from small volunteer organizations, through entities with one or two staff, to large institutes with many staff and very large budgets.

What they all seem to share, with few exceptions, is scarce funding and stretched management. While society seems to tolerate very high salaries in the corporate world, based on the presumption that businesses are creating wealth and value, it begrudges high salaries in the community sector because it falsely does not perceive either wealth or value creation. And whenever economic hard times are upon us, the budget cutting knives slice first at community organizations and their employees.

The enduring result is that community organizations are funded as austerely as possible, and their management teams are thin and stretched. Each senior manager is called upon to wear many hats: chief executive, manager of human resources, chief financial officer, head fundraiser, technology guru, program manager and dishwasher all in one person, all in one day, every day. Everyone who has held a senior management job in the community sector has experienced this, and few of them complain about it.

What it means, then, is that they have to be awfully good to be able to do so many things at a high level. But where does a mid-career person facing promotion go to learn so many things in a time-effective way?

This is the question Maytree sought to answer eight years ago with the Five Good Ideas lunch-and-learn program. What we sought to do was distil essential good practice across a broad range of management topics so that managers could pick out the highest leverage ideas to improve their own performance. We invited experts on key topics like finance, human resources, strategy, technology, government relations, and governance to deliver five good ideas that would enhance performance. We were delighted that so many excellent people responded to our invitation, and even more delighted that there was such a strong response and attendance from people in the community sector.

Maytree is launching Five Good Ideas, the book, published by Coach House Press. It is a collection of the lunch-and-learn presentations, and is a quick and easy reference for managers. Whether you are trying to figure out how to manage your board, structure your communications, deal with a union contract, or raise funds, Five Good Ideas can help you begin thinking about it more effectively. It can be as close as the top right hand drawer of your desk.

It is our hope that Five Good Ideas will be a real help to community sector managers, and in fact to all managers whether they be in government or business, because the elements of good management are common to all. Our observation and experience is that managers in the community sector bring a high level of talent, commitment, and endurance to their work, and we believe Five Good Ideas will make them even better, and will provide a helpful companion whenever needed.

Right in the top right hand desk drawer. Five Good Ideas.

>> Learn more about the Five Good Ideas book.

By Alan Broadbent

In all the recent chatter about “foreign workers” and unfair advantages to immigrants, the policy history and rationale for targeted approaches for targeted groups has gone largely unnoticed.

It’s not as if this is new medicine. In the early 1900s, under the leadership of Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier and his Immigration Minister, Clifford Sifton, Canada sought out immigrants to settle the Prairies with a mix of incentives including land grants.

In this vein, almost all federal and provincial governments have at some point used special approaches with special incentives to support special outcomes for various groups, such as young people, women, farmers, laid off workers or aboriginals. The same is true when government targets specific industries such as forestry, energy or the automotive sector. This is after all a fundamental way for governments to deliver public policy.

What is also forgotten in the chatter is one simple fact: if immigrants prosper, so does Ontario. We benefit from education that we have not paid for, we benefit from talent that is truly global in a rapidly globalizing economy. We benefit from connections to new markets, and we are in better position to produce new products for new customers. It is no accident that Toronto has been selected by the Aga Khan to host his world famous permanent museum for Islamic Art. It is no accident that foreign students flock to Ontario, and it is no accident that we are gaining in tourism from Brazil, China and India.

The proposed tax credit is but one expression of reasonable efforts to employ immigrants at the level that they can contribute best to the economy. What is unfortunate in the ensuing debate and discussion is that a good policy idea has been distorted by politics in an election campaign.

Ontario has a choice. We can treat immigration as a cost or a benefit. If we treat it like a cost, it becomes a problem to be managed, and we look to put constraints around it and limit its effect. But if we view immigration and immigrants as assets, we will think and behave like investors, wondering how best to leverage them for maximum benefit.

Many recent immigrants who arrive as permanent residents have difficulty finding their first job in Canada. Despite being highly skilled and educated, employers often ask them for Canadian work experience either because they are unfamiliar with non-Canadian education and professional credentials, or because of unconscious prejudices they may hold. The tax credit is one way to help employers mitigate a risk they may otherwise not take.

What’s more, it’s a proven idea. Financial incentives are offered – in their case a wage subsidy – to employers in Quebec who hire immigrants or visible minorities for their first job in Canada. In 2008-09, more than 1,008 people were hired, and, of these, 80% were still employed three months after the subsidy has ended. And in case you are wondering whether the policy was used by large companies that could afford to take a risk on a staff person without the incentive, 64% of participating businesses had only 1-49 employees.

A tax credit does not, as it has been characterized by the Globe and Mail, pit unemployed people against one another. Rather it recognizes, as good public policy does, that different instruments are required for different demographics.

The tax credit is a good idea, which should be embraced by the other parties, and implemented by the next government of Ontario.

By Alan Broadbent

Canada’s protection doesn’t come cheap, even for those who have been deemed to be worthy of our protection.

Refugees applying for permanent residence from within Canada must pay a processing fee of $550 per adult and $150 per child within 180 days of receiving a decision from the Immigration and Refugee Board. Individuals who cannot afford the fee cannot be removed from the country, yet they cannot become permanent residents either, delaying their access to Canadian citizenship.

Last month, the government proposed a regulatory amendment that would remove the 180-day limit. This would certainly be a welcome reprieve for refugees who need more time to save for the fee.

But it doesn’t deal with the real issue, that the fee is simply unaffordable. A family of four must find the resources to pay $1,400 which is more than a month’s salary at minimum wage.

The lack of access to permanent residence keeps refugees from integrating fully into our communities, resulting in personal costs to them, and costs to the general public in the form of increased reliance on Canadian social services. For example, the fees:

• Delay integration into the workforce. Protected persons who cannot afford the fee can renew their work permits and their temporary SIN cards. However, it is often difficult to find employment due to their perceived insecure status in Canada. Even when refugees are able to find work, employers who see that a person has a SIN card valid for one year (beginning with the number 9) and a temporary work permit are dissuaded from investing in such an employee.
• Delay access to post-secondary education. Young protected persons are sometimes erroneously treated by universities as if they were international students because both have temporary SINs. They may be sent statements intended for international students, requesting fees that are considerably higher than domestic rates. We at Maytree, through our Refugee Scholarship Program, have seen first hand how information sent in error can be confusing to applicants. The fear is those without guidance and access to the right information could become dissuaded from pursuing post-secondary education.
• Delay family reunification. Special provisions allow refugees to bring their families with them to Canada. To take advantage of these provisions, the protected person must be able to pay the fees for the entire family at once. The family separation that may result from the inability to pay the fees translates into stress-induced health problems, delayed settlement, and increased chances of estrangement once families are reunited.
• Delay nation-building. Becoming a permanent resident is an important step on the journey to becoming a Canadian citizen. Delaying access to permanent residence is contrary to the objectives of building Canada’s society.

Eliminating the processing fee would not be complicated or very expensive. It would entail a straightforward regulatory amendment and would reduce federal revenues by about five million dollars. (More information.) While these lost revenues would be modest for a department as large as Citizenship and Immigration Canada, removing the fees would make a huge difference in the lives of many would-be Canadians.

Let’s not stop at half-measures. Let’s eliminate the fees altogether for those who can least afford them: Canada’s inland refugees.

By Alan Broadbent

What should Canada’s population be? Are we the right size at 34.5 million? Or should we be larger or smaller? And if so, how much larger or smaller?

Population can rise or fall. The basic determinant is how many children are born, the so-called birth rate or fertility rate. For a society like Canada to stay at a steady state, women need to give birth to 2.1 babies on average. If that average is higher, the population grows; if it is smaller, it shrinks. Canada’s is just over 1.5, so our population is decreasing, based on fertility.

But other numbers influence population too: the number of immigrants who arrive, and the number of people who emigrate from Canada to someplace else; and the number of people who die. It matters what the age profile of the population is, whether there are more young people than old, whether there are sufficient numbers of people of working age to keep the economy going. Knowing the age profile of the population helps governments plan how many schools or hospitals are needed, businesses to plan what kinds of products will be in demand, and the community sector to plan what kinds of services will be needed. More daycare or elder care, more sportscars or family sedans, more kindergartens or geriatric facilities.

But Canada has no public population target that has come from a well considered process. We set immigration targets each year, the most generous per capita in the world, but to what end? Some people in the environment movement suggest that our population is too big because of the enormity of our carbon footprint. Some people in the commercial sector say we should be bigger to create bigger domestic markets for goods and services. But in the absence of a process of determining what size we want our population to be, we are just twiddling the dials, augmenting natural birth rate with a little more or less immigration.

Once, a century ago, we had a population policy. Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier looked at the vast unoccupied prairie and feared that the Americans would settle and claim it. So he decided that the west must be populated and set in motion a plan to do it. He assigned Clifford Sifton in his cabinet to establish permanent settlement. He did so by attracting cold weather farmers, firstly from the United States. They were preferred because they could bring with them cattle and equipment. Then they targeted northern Europe, and it was said you couldn’t go down any country road without seeing a Canada recruiting poster on a fence post or barn door.

The result was that in about seven years prior to World War One they increased Canada’s population by over 50%! Deliberately, smartly, and in a way that fulfilled a national interest (safeguarding the prairies for Canada) and contributed to the economy (by creating the economic powerhouse that prairie grain farms became). To achieve the latter, they did everything they could to help the immigrants succeed: there were land grants and cheap land, loans for equipment and livestock, rail lines built to get crops to market, new grain storage facilities, and communities built with schools, hospitals and commerce. It was a fundamental building block of 20th century Canada.

If we had a visionary government today, the equivalent would be to take Canada’s population to 50 million by 2020, and to 75 million by 2030. It would have to be done by increasing immigration dramatically, by bringing in the best and the brightest from around the world, and helping them succeed. Increasing fertility rates is an unlikely strategy in a prosperous country, which typically have low birth rates.

An increased population would have benefits for Canada. A larger domestic market would make us less reliant on volatile export markets, where politics can stop our softwood lumber or potatoes at the border. It would give our manufacturers longer product runs, and let them produce a broader range of products. It would let Canadian entrepreneurs grow larger companies, avoiding the current ceiling where they have grown to Canadian scale and they sell to a foreign buyer rather than expand internationally. It would allow more Canadian cities to grow to scale, creating advantages in finance, infrastructure, and social development. At the same time, it would allow Toronto, and perhaps one or two other cities, to continue to climb the ranks of important global cities. Much of the wellbeing of nations now depends on the ability of their great city regions to compete for talent and innovation with other city regions, and Canada needs to up its game.

If dramatic growth became Canada’s population policy, much would have to change. As a country we would have to emulate Laurier and Sifton, and do everything we could to make immigrants succeed as quickly as possible. Nobody wins if we don’t. Employers would have to become good at hiring from unaccustomed sources, particularly given that they would benefit so much from growing markets. Governments would have to increase and improve hard infrastructure like transit systems, roads, bridges and sewers, and soft infrastructure like schools and hospitals. They would have to change their mindset to think of millions of new transit users like a business would, new customers and new revenue. Universities, colleges and hospitals would have to develop more and better bridging programs to help newcomers succeed, not leave them to figure out their way through the system. Cities would have to plan how to attract and absorb more residents, not in distant isolated suburbs but in accessible communities with all the amenities of Canadian life. In many cases we have excellent platforms to build on for more people, and in many others we need to do more and do better.

We would have to pay attention to environmental issues by dramatically reducing the average carbon footprint of Canadians. We would have to continue to rely on our courts and justice system to protect and renew our societal values, to keep testing community standards many times each day across the country.

There is a population clock on the Statistics Canada website that will tell you what our current population projection is. It keeps getting bigger as you watch it. But there is no suggestion of where it should be going, how long it should take to get there, and why that is a good idea. That would require Canada to have a population policy.

Toronto has recently been reaping the benefits of its diversity. The Bollywood awards bring not only sizzle to our city, but also sold-out hotels and venues. TNT, the Chinese supermarket, now belongs to food giant Loblaws as part of its deliberate strategy to expand into a new customer base. The choice of Toronto as the home for the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre is also no accident but a strategic choice to locate a world class institution in a truly global city.

In other areas however, change is coming at a snail’s pace. There remains a curious diversity disconnect at the leadership levels in the GTA. Consider that only 4.2% of corporate senior leaders are visible minorities in the city region in spite of the well documented case for the financial returns on diversity.

Yet, it cannot be about the money alone.

While we live in one of the most diverse city regions in the world, visible minorities in Toronto are three times more likely to live in poverty than other groups, and between 1980 and 2000 the poverty rate among visible minority families rose by 361%.

There are many complex reasons and many complex solutions to this problem. One of them is diversity in leadership. Leaders are a powerful symbol for who belongs and who does not, particularly for young people. When they see someone who looks like them occupying a position of influence, they are more likely to aspire to it and to imagine themselves in that role.

Diverse perspectives in leadership can bring relevance to our city’s voluntary agencies. Take the example of a York region food bank that was having difficulty reaching out to their growing South Asian population. The addition of board members from this community helped the food bank realize that they didn’t have a marketing problem, but rather they needed to provide more culturally appropriate food.

At The Redwood, a safe haven for women and children fleeing domestic violence, diversity has become a deeply imbedded principle. Board members now have built the trust to face the challenges of diversity and equity with real openness and collaboration. Today, The Redwood’s board members are not just representative of their client communities, they are agents of change.

In the last twenty years, the city region’s demographics have changed rapidly. In 1991, 26% of the Toronto CMA’s population were visible minorities. Twenty years later this figure stands at 49.5%. It would be natural to expect a change in leadership at a faster rate. But this is not the case.

To some, this may seem natural. Just wait we’re told, this tide will shift. Progress will come. It’s “natural” that it will take time.

Maytree is impatient. We want to collapse these “natural” timelines and turn the diversity deficit into a diversity dividend.

We also know that we simply cannot aspire to change without taking action. Diversity in leadership won’t happen by accident. We need to be deliberate and systematic. We need to develop and deploy strategies for making change. Who you know matters. Deliberately sharing networks expands opportunities in a key way. Training and mentoring programs make core leadership skills accessible to the best and the brightest.

But perhaps it is also time to turn the old adage, “it’s not what you know but who,” on its head. Perhaps it is time to develop new approaches to recognizing, seeing and believing in the knowledge, talent, and innovation of individuals when it is in front of your eyes.

Because it’s not just important to fuel the region’s prosperity, it’s also the right thing to do.

One of the first lessons we learn in life is to play by the rules. At home, at school, on the playground, or in the neighbourhood, it is the rules that make the world go round, we are told. If it weren’t for the rules, we’d descend into chaos and confusion.

But what about stupid rules? What do we do when we’re faced with rules that not only don’t seem to make sense, but seem to run counter to our best interests? And what do we do when our best interests aren’t just personal to us, but to those who depend on us to deliver services or goods that make their lives better?

This is a dilemma that is increasingly facing people working in the community sector, as the cold hands of auditors general, regulators, and public sector funders tighten their grip on the activities in the sector. Those cold hands are abetted by hysterical and sloppy coverage in the commercial press.

The result is the imposition of rules and reporting processes comprehensively out of step with the actual risk of waste in the sector.

Starting in recent decades with dubious federal government grants for golf courses and fountains, then the Sponsorship Scandal, federal rules were tightened on the grantees, the vast majority of which were nowhere near the tainted transactions. In Ontario, as a response to the press-fuelled “scandal” at e-Health, tight “accountability” protocols were brought in which put precise limits on what could be spent for meals ($11.25 for lunch, all in), and what constituted a sufficient distance from the office for a chargeable meal (24 km.). And for those who thought they might save some money by buying groceries and preparing meals or snacks, they now had to get “prior approval” and a “written rationale” for the grocery bill to qualify. The rules were comprehensive and prescriptive.

It only got worse with the hunt for the “gravy train” in the Toronto mayoralty election. The hunt is still on. Then when the press piled on an oddly emotional commentary and report by an auditor of Toronto Community Housing, using words and phrases like “lavish” and “out of control”, everyone in the sector began to flinch.

I heard a story recently of an organization which had identified a training course for a valued employee which would help elevate them to the next level, certainly one of the best human resource tools, but the course was offered in Las Vegas. How would that look on page one of the newspaper? The agency sought advice and was told to find a similar course closer to home. They did, but it cost almost three times as much. The advice was to take it, because the optics were better.

Feedback is the key driver of intelligent systems. The problem with stupid rules is that they ignore feedback. Rules that are constructed to eliminate the need for intelligence, judgment, or human management lead to those “Las Vegas” type situations. They invite people to suspend their better instincts and “follow the rules”, even when they know the rules are making them do stupid things.

And such rule regimes tend to last well beyond any salutary remedial effect they were intended to have in the first place.

Probably the worst thing they do is cause people to flinch. And to doubt their own good judgement.

The community sector is notoriously underfunded and therefore thinly managed. Most organizations’ management teams are under-staffed, overworked, and underpaid. They make up a lot of ground through effort, judgement, and experience. Now they are losing some of that ground through flinching and filling out forms.

Governments need to recognize the unreasonable burdens they put on the sector. There is no question that the community sector can do its job better, and that it makes some decisions it wishes it could make again. In that regard they are like the business and government sectors, and maybe even like the press. But the way to make them better is not by imposing rules and reporting requirements which provide bureaucratic cover for government officials but don’t help the hard-stressed community sector serve its clients better or accomplish its work more effectively.

Government can help by making sure there aren’t stupid rules in place.

(March 24, 2011 – Forum on Financial Literacy for Newcomers to Canada, presented by SEDI and the Canadian Centre for Financial Literacy)

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Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you today on a subject I think about a great deal. Mastering dollars and cents is a competency that we all need to possess.

I remember my own steep learning curve on learning the essentials on dollars and cents when I first came to Canada in the early 80s. Almost from the day we arrived, we were confronted with the issue of willingly taking on debt by subscribing to a credit card. I have a fairly puritanical streak in me which was affronted by this notion of “buy now, pay a bit more later.” Yet everywhere I went I was asked for my credit card. I stood firm against this for a full year; but then finally I had to give in as I realized that a credit card in Canada is much more than about credit. It serves as an accepted and legitimate proxy for identity, solvency and, possibly, respectability in Canada.

Next, I was confronted with the entirely new experience of filing a tax return, this yearly ritual that Canadians, many with great excitement as I found out later, participated in. Coming from a country where everything to do with bureaucracy, especially financial bureaucracy, is a nightmare, it was indeed a great example of the efficiency of public service. But more importantly, it was an incredibly hands-on way of learning some of the Canadian values embedded in the tax code.

We arrived in Canada during particularly difficult times. Maybe there are some people in the room who still remember when interest rates were a whopping 14% and that mortgages were being sold at 18%. In addition, we were asked everywhere for a magical dust that we could not buy for love or money – Canadian work experience. We were not alone of course in this experience and joined the many hundreds of immigrants – doctors, lawyers, engineers – who were in the same boat. Many of our friends started to work in factories, others by default started small businesses as an alternative to employment. And so we became aware of a whole new set of competencies as small business owners – sales tax, rental leases, employment contracts, insurance etc. Needless to say, many of these businesses failed, including the one we started, because there were so many essentials we did not know, and possibly because our hearts were not in it.

Every day, we make a complex array of financial decisions – from choosing a bank, to finding a mortgage to managing consumer debt to taking out student loans, signing the rental lease for the first apartment, negotiating a service contract, buying life insurance, sending remittances back home. Compared to people who are born in Canada or whose families are Canadian, many newcomers have a natural diffidence and lack of confidence in making financial decisions about products, services, vendors and advisors. As a result, they are more vulnerable than others to fall prey to bad and sometimes downright unethical products and services. There is a lot to learn and sadly few opportunities to do so.

I think this audience will agree with me that if we want newcomers to succeed, to be good players, then we need to share with them the written and unwritten rules of engagement.

But first I want to share with you a few well known and maybe a few lesser known facts with you.

Firstly, there is good news

• Canadians generally have positive attitudes towards immigrants and immigration, in fact among the most positive in the world.
• None of the major political parties expose anti-immigrant views. All support high levels of immigration. Ethnic votes are courted. No politician that hopes to survive will explicitly put out anti-immigrant views.
• Multiculturalism ranks just behind hockey and the RCMP as a valued Canadian symbol.
• Over the longer term, the key indicators that immigrants are doing well are positive – home ownership, intermarriage, citizenship, success of immigrant children in school, success off the charts.
• We have a solid legislative framework that sets the stage for this positive climate – Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, multiculturalism policy, citizenship act, articulated array of settlement programs.
• And there are some marvelous innovations primarily from the local scene – Toronto Public Library has reinvented itself to meet the needs of immigrants, CBC Radio has redefined itself as the voice of Toronto.

But there is bad news as well. The natural patterns of yesterday are being replaced with some disturbing trends.

• Before the 1980, immigrants would quickly (within 10 years) have incomes that exceeded the Canadian-born. Their children’s education and earnings would also exceed other Canadians.
• More recent immigrants have a different trajectory. Fully 61% of working age newcomers have completed university – but they have lower employment rates, they are more likely to work part time than full time, they are more likely to work in hospitality and food services industries. Immigrant women seem to be particularly vulnerable, their unemployment is double that of women in Ontario overall.
• Four in ten recent immigrants earn less than $ 10,000.
• Only four in ten skilled immigrants are able to find work in the field of training and education, others face declining choices in how to fend for themselves.
• Yet immigrants don’t come to Canada without resources either. 50% of skilled immigrants have savings that exceed $15,000 and 50% in the business economic category have savings that exceed $100,000.
• There is no single way of describing immigrants – they are as diverse as the languages they speak.
• This diversity is seen first hand in our cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Immigration has fuelled population growth, and it has also increased the demand for housing, resulting in an incredible growth in the 905 and urban sprawl.
• Toronto is one the most diverse cities in the world, yet places of power and privilege seem to be reserved for the old elite – look at our leaders in the city, whether they are on Bay Street, Queen’s Park, City Councils or even the leaders of our charities and foundations, most are the face of Old Canada.
• But the really bad news seems to be hidden from the public. Few people know that we have embarked on a massively flawed experiment in immigration, bringing in temporary foreign workers at an enormous scale, the numbers equaling that of total landed immigrants last year. Temporary foreign workers have limited rights and protections, variable rights and access to permanency and are only able to work for designated employers. Sadly we seem to be going down the world class failure of the Gastarbeiter experiment in parts of Europe.

So if there is a single narrative in immigration that has endured, it is this: Welcome to Canada. Work hard but beware, it maybe your children who will succeed.

How do we change this narrative, how do we compress and collapse natural and unnatural time frames so that we can achieve success faster, quicker better – that is our mantra at Maytree.

Certainly, financial literacy is a tool that is not yet mainstream in the lexicon of integration and settlement. You don’t see it reflected in the service mix of service providers, and yet financial decisions are made by immigrants very quickly. For instance, within two days of arriving, they will decide where to bank, and like other Canadians, once they have made their choice, they are unlikely to change. Immigrants are also more vulnerable to consumer fraud for many reasons. In the first year of arrival, they will make very important financial decisions at a time in their lives when they need to turn over every penny carefully. Because of the lack of formal employment opportunities, many will default to entrepreneurship, sink family and community capital into ventures that may be ill advised, or ill financed or ill conceived.

Canada certainly seems to have come late to this idea that financial literacy is one more tool in the toolkit of integration. But we can take lessons from other places in the world that are enjoying success.

Let me travel the world with you a little to bring you the most interesting ideas on how different cities across the world are somewhat ahead of us and how easy it is to borrow, replicate and adapt from success. (You can find these and other example on Maytree’s Cities of Migration website.)

From Durham, North Carolina comes this simple smart idea.

North Carolina has fastest growing Latino immigrant population in the United States. More than half of this community speaks English poorly and over three-quarters of them do not have bank accounts. In part this is the result of a lack of documentation, an inherent distrust of banks and language issues. The result is that as a community, they are regularly overcharged for services such as loans, cashing a check or obtaining a money order. A lack of banking infrastructure also makes long-term financial planning essentially impossible.

The Latino Community Credit Union (LCCU) was founded to address the financial needs and knowledge shortfalls of this growing immigrant community.

It provides services to immigrants who have not previously held bank accounts or had been otherwise excluded from the US financial system. All the employees are bicultural and bilingual in English and Spanish. Most are immigrants themselves and are trained to help first time banking customers navigate the system and its requirements. All forms and policies are available in English and Spanish. The credit union works with trusted community organizations such as churches and community centres to market their offerings.

It also provides financial education on essential topics such as how to manage accounts, taxes, how to save money, develop a budget, and how to build credit. Approximately 2,000 people per year now attend these classes at work sites, churches and local community organizations.

My next story comes again from the US, this time from Chicago with an idea that enables religious Muslims to be part of the great North American dream of home ownership. Home ownership, we know, is a significant benchmark in integration. It has long been linked to helping immigrant groups feel more invested in their community. Until recently, Muslims who wanted to buy a home had to save hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase it outright, get loans from family and friends or put aside their religious beliefs which don’t allow for interest payments and so prevent them from taking out a conventional mortgage.

Prior to 1997, no bank or bank branch in the United States offered formal Islamic financing that was both publicly approved by a U.S. regulatory agency and sanctioned by a board of Islamic scholars. Instead, American Muslims looking for an alternative to a conventional mortgage could try and turn to self-help groups that pooled money from investors and placed it in a revolving fund that bought homes and leased them to Muslim families.

So Chicago’s Federal Reserve Bank stepped in to provide a systemic solution to this problem. It created several Islam-friendly lending programs, and started to offer creative loans that comply with the laws against receiving interest by creating joint-owner partnerships or charging lease fees in place of interest.

In London England, a social enterprise organization called Fair Finance offers a range of services to low income people, many who do not have a bank account. Fair Finance provides emergency credit at a fair rate to individuals who work in migrant heavy industries such as catering and taxis and is actively helping prevent the financially vulnerable from being further exploited.

Here is Canada, Maytree has played a small role in addressing one of the most significant issues – access to credit for those who do not have a credit history, who may not have a work reference, or money in the bank. We set out to convince major financial institutions that the human capital inherent within immigrants and their drive and search for a better life were in fact a proxy for money in the bank. We assumed the risk of building the case, providing microloans to close to 160 individuals with loans ranging from $2,000 – $5,000 for the purposes of upgrading licensing and training for employment. 75 % of these were gainfully employed, 73 have already paid off their loans, and we are fully convinced that the default rate, if any, will be very minimal. We are delighted to have “inherited” this project to the RBC with a pilot in Toronto.

From our backyard in Toronto comes a brilliant idea that Maytree is proud to support. But first some background.

We all know that education, in particular post secondary education is a huge predictor for success. We also know that post-secondary education is becoming more and more expensive. So it is no wonder that children from low-income families are less likely than their more affluent counterparts to attend post-secondary education, even when their parents put a high value on education and even when their grades are equally high.

One solution is of course education savings. The federal government has developed a number of tools as part of the Canada Education Savings Program to encourage saving for education. These include:

• The Registered Education Savings Plan;
• The Canada Education Savings Grant; and
• The Canada Learning Bond – a contribution by the federal government into the RESP of a low-income child. An initial grant of $500 is followed by an additional $100 per year, to a maximum of $2,000. Technically this is free money.

The problem is that many low-income families don’t know these programs and instruments exist. They have limited access to accurate information about them. There are few resources available in languages other than English and French, and the information that is available is often difficult to understand. Unfortunately, banks do not actively promote their RESP products, so many low-income families are attracted to the more aggressively marketed group plans offered by scholarship trusts. Group plans, typically, require regular contributions and charge significant enrolment fees. Contributions can be lost if families are unable to meet ongoing plan requirements.

Enter SmartSAVER (www.smartsaver.org), a new project conceived of by the Omega Foundation. SmartSAVER helps low-income families save for their children’s post-secondary education by promoting greater use of Registered Education Savings Plans and the Canada Learning Bond.

With the help of public, private and community partners, SmartSAVER reaches families in their own environments in their own languages. It is doing this by:

• Marketing RESPs for low-income families through ethnic media and social networking;
• Engaging community organizations to promote enrolment in the Canada Learning Bond;
• Working with government to connect families with the enrolment supports they need;
• Providing multi-media, multi-lingual web information resources to help families understand and access RESP benefits at www.smartsaver.org.

At the same time, SmartSAVER makes it easier for low-income families to find and start an RESP that suits their needs by:

• Creating easy-to-use RESP product information geared to low-income consumers;
• Working with financial institutions to overcome process barriers to RESP participation;
• Working with government to explore opportunities for automatic enrolment.

What do these good ideas have in common, even though they come from places as removed from each other as Durham, Chicago, London and Toronto.

• First, integration is a two way street – just as immigrants change, so do public institutions. Think of the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago.
• Second, all actors are integration actors – the loan officer, the employer, the business down the street. Integration is not a sole source industry – it is everyone’s business. Yours and mine. The credit union and the church, the employer and the government.
• Third, there is no one way of thinking of an immigrant. No one group is exactly like the other. Given a wide spectrum of background, culture, motivations, life experiences, newcomers cannot be characterized as a single-need group. And therefore solutions cannot simply come from any one organization. As the Task Force on Financial Literacy pointed out:

Financial education is a matter of shared responsibility. No single organization will be the solution. It will take all of us – governments, the private sector, nonprofits, schools, parents and individuals – working together to make an impact.

• Finally, I would suggest that the time has come to emancipate and update our notion of what is the settlement toolbox. Not just language and job search, not just housing and health, not just school and university, but also banking and loans, interest and credit.

So – successful money management, successful settlement, successful nation!

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Look west to the narrow curve of Lake Ontario where the people of Hamilton are showing us a future worth aspiring to.

It isn’t a land of milk and honey, a fantasy land of castles and limousines. Steeltown hasn’t gone soft.

It is better than that. The people of Hamilton have decided to pull together to lift the poorest out of poverty, to heal the whole community by mending its wounds.

A dramatic signpost that something new was happening in Hamilton occurred on October 29, 2005 when the Hamilton Spectator’s front page was blank, bearing just this small message:

The stories have been removed from this page to remind us that nearly 100,000 children, women and men live in poverty in Hamilton, people whose stories rarely make the front page. We’re going to change that.

As Spec publisher Dana Robbins said, “The Spectator did not lapse into advocacy, we leapt into it.”

But The Spec was not crusading alone. They were building on groundwork done by the Hamilton Community Foundation, under the leadership of Carolyn Milne, and by the City government itself. Attracted to those efforts were business leaders like Mark Chamberlain. The Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction was created. Poverty became a civic concern.

Like most cities, Hamilton does not have the big levers of change to improve the lives of poor people. Those lie with provincial governments and the federal government. But unlike most cities, Hamilton has decided that poverty is a major civic concern, and they are pressing forward to make poverty in their community visible, and to force everyone in Hamilton to confront and own it so that action can be taken.

At the front of the charge, with the megaphone, remains The Spec. They have a continuing series they call Code Red which highlights stories of people struggling in poverty. The series name was prompted by Carolyn Milne, a former nurse, who said that when you needed a patient to pay attention, you gave them information they could not walk away from. That is what The Spec is doing with Code Red, giving Hamiltonians information about poverty in their community that they cannot walk away from.

Every community in Canada has poverty. Most have a growing gap between rich and poor. Few of them have Hamilton’s ability to create a sustained civic effort to map and combat poverty. Even fewer of them have a newspaper with the maturity and conviction to tackle the tough issues rather than the glib headlines.

We’d do well to look to the west end of Lake Ontario.

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Canadians love numbers.

Data makes front page news. Record high temperatures! Record low unemployment! Business leaders tell us how the resource industry was the best ever, while manufacturing numbers indicate troubles ahead.

For those of us who work on immigration issues, it is no different. We wait patiently for the Citizenship and Immigration’s Facts and Figures document to tell us exactly how many permanent residents arrived the previous year, and how many temporary workers. And lo and behold, we find out that Canada exceeded its targets in almost every category. But wait, in the next breath, the government announces plans to reduce the overall numbers of family members and skilled workers. You’d better believe there will be a reaction.

But there are some numbers we don’t talk much about. And because we don’t talk about them, we don’t quite know how to handle them.

Consider this: Between 2000 and 2006 approximately 11% of immigrants to Canada moved from one province to another within Canada. While people aren’t all moving in one direction, once the dust settled, it was clear that Alberta is the clear winner, adding an additional 20,000 immigrants to their population. Most are skilled workers, originally destined for Ontario, who heeded the call for new opportunities in Alberta as these dried up in Ontario.

The Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs), which are intended to bring (and hopefully keep) people to regions are less successful at keeping immigrants in their intended province than other programs. About 16% were on the move between 2000 and 2006, and of these 31% ended up in Ontario, 31% in B.C., and 23% in Alberta. What this tells us, of course, is that while we can try to engineer the movement of people, for the most part we will fail. Family connections and job opportunities create a strong pull factor that is too hard to reengineer. Though other Canadians are less likely to relocate, those that do are moving in the same direction.

As the numbers of provincial nominees increase (between 2006 and 2010 the numbers have more than doubled), relocation will be increasingly important to measure. Cuts to settlement funds to Ontario have been justified in part because of decreasing numbers of immigrants to this province. But we need to get a better handle on the numbers of people who are relocating to the province right now. As Ontario’s economy recovers, it is likely that the province will become a stronger magnet for secondary migration for immigrants from across the country.

PNPs are selected to fill labour market niches in other provinces, but no doubt once they arrive in Ontario they will contribute to the province’s prosperity as do the hundred thousand who arrive from abroad every year. Still, they may need extra help. A recent evaluation of the Federal Skilled Worker Program found that PNPs have lower levels of education and training, and have lower incomes than skilled workers.

We must conclude that it is shortsighted to make significant decisions on public investments in settlement with only a partial view of the facts. Our governments need to figure out exactly who comes, who stays and who moves so that it can make the best decisions in the public interest.

We remember Bob Marley as a powerful influence in music and culture. He was a strong advocate for social justice, speaking out against oppression and poverty and FOR peace and human rights.

His music and message of hope resonated across cultures, across boundaries, across races – and still does today.

In that spirit, my message is about diversity – and hope.

I have been involved in this discussion for many years now, working to convince people and organizations about the importance and value of diversity. And I have seen positive changes. Intellectually, people seem to get it – at least most of the time. Unfortunately, too often their actions don’t reflect this as they fall back into old hiring practices or looking to the same networks.

What has changed, though, is that this is no longer a fight fought by a few. There are many diversity champions now – you just have to look the people receiving awards today. We’ve come a long way.

But, we’re not quite there yet.

I feel that I am on safe ground when I suggest, that our city, whilst being a tolerant society, a successful multicultural society, a model for others, is not yet an inclusive society. Although we are proud to open the door to people and welcome them into our home, we don’t quite go the length of inviting them to join us at the kitchen table.

Real power and influence continue to be centered in the hands of a few. The leaders who set the pace and the agenda, are almost all from an outdated institution called the Old Boys Club. There is a startling disconnect between the people who live in our large urban centre and the people who are at the top of the ladder. A serious consequence of this, of course, is that we fail to provide role models to a large and growing youth population with significant cost to their future aspirations and to social cohesion.

But things are changing. They have to – and I’m not alone in saying this, in working toward this.

Diversity strengthens society. It plays a key role in Canada’s economic outlook because when there is diversity around the decision-making table, organizational performance improves, innovation happens and new solutions are generated.

So, diversifying our leadership is not just the right thing to do. It is a fundamental driver toward realizing our social and economic prosperity.

Thank you again for this honour in the name of a great artist who continues to inspire this important work.

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“I have a dream.”

Dr. King’s words are forever etched in our sensibilities. But in truth, as the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he did much more than dream. Dr. King was a man of action — a social change agent, an activist, a crusader for the rights of the poor, a catalyst in the struggle against apartheid, and a leader in the fight to end the Vietnam war. He was a campaigner and a movement builder, who fought for radical change with radical methods.

As a clergyman, Dr. King used the power of the pulpit to mobilize a small army of campaigners and activists, based in churches, union halls, and community centers. Perhaps the most striking example is how he was able to reach 50,000 people (without the help of facebook and twitter), and convince them to boycott the Montgomery bus system by walking or car pooling to their jobs, schools and churches.

Were he alive today, he would be 81 years old. I suspect he would be gratified to see that in the US, the formal structures of segregation have been dismantled. No one can or will stop a Rosa Parks from sitting on any seat, in any bus, in any part of the United States. He would be delighted and proud that a black man is the President of the United States.

But he would also likely be dismayed to see the informal barriers to full equality that still exist today, in the US and around the world. The exclusion of people, including racial minorities, migrants, and poor people, continues to occur. This injustice is both subtle and not so subtle, systemic and institutional, and we must all be concerned because as Dr. King pointed out: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

There are numerous organizations engaged in the struggle for justice and equality, and I’m privileged to have the opportunity to lead one such group. Maytree is a small, private foundation dedicated to promoting diversity and fighting poverty, with a particular focus on migrant integration and inclusion. While it normally takes one or two generations to reap the benefits of migration, it is Maytree’s ambition to do it sooner, faster and better.

Every successive stream of migrants enriches our communities. The sooner migrants are both integrated and included in society, the sooner our cities and our country can benefit. I know this both as a refugee and a Canadian.

My story: one of many Canadian stories

I grew up in India, went to university in Germany, and eventually settled with my husband in Iran. Like the more than 14 million refugees who are forced to leave their homes every year, in 1982 I left political oppression and sought refuge in Canada.

When I arrived, I had a couple of real advantages. I spoke English fluently, and had family and friends in the country. But like many other migrants, our education and experience were devalued, and to many ordinary Canadians, I was just another brown face. I was even encouraged to change my name, advice that I’m glad I didn’t take!

It took my husband and me about eight years to find work commensurate with our skills and training, and to reinvent ourselves. This was a difficult time for us, but I know too many migrant families who struggle for much longer.

Nevertheless, I am proud of my new country. Its history is now my own.

Migration is the defining feature of Canada’s identity. When asked to explain what it means to be Canadian, citizens often list multiculturalism along with hockey and the maple leaf as their defining symbols.

Canada has welcomed British and French settlers, Ukrainian cold weather farmers, British orphans, Chinese railway workers, Italians labourers, Vietnamese boat refugees, and, most recently, Afghans and Iraqis fleeing the war against terror. Today, an impressive 40% of Canada’s population over the age of 15 is a migrant or has a parent who was born outside the country.

Approximately 84% of eligible migrants are citizens. Their children attend university in high numbers, earn higher than average wages and participate actively in all aspects of civic life. They are just as comfortable watching Hollywood and Bollywood, eating hot dogs and sushi, and watching cricket and hockey. They date, hang out, and, in many cases, marry someone from another part of the world. They will work along Irish, Japanese, Koreans, Somalis and Tamils. And they will not be surprised to find that their boss is a woman.

Integration is not an accident

As a relatively new country, Canada is not hindered by a long history of ethnic conflict or strife. Canada does have a history of civic tension between French and English, and between both of them and our First Nations. However, over time we have learned to accommodate those tensions in increasingly peaceful ways and have reached a level of tolerance for difference which has helped us develop a number of constitutional and legal frameworks to encourage migrant integration. Canada asks migrants to become citizens after only three years in the country, and its Charter of Rights and Freedoms grants all residents, regardless of citizenship status, the right to equality and due process from government institutions. While more inspirational than substantive, Canada’s Multiculturalism Act enshrines the principles of tolerance and mutual understanding.

While these deliberate efforts have resulted in successful integration for many migrants to Canada, a few trends require a new and enhanced approach.

First, poverty in Canada is racialized. The hard truth is that brown and black faces are making up an increasing proportion of the country’s poor. Recent migrants to Canada are “two to three times more likely than those born in Canada to experience low income, regardless of sex, level of education, family type, or province of residence.” Migrants who are visible minorities are more likely to experience poverty than other migrants. This is true even among migrants who have been in Canada for more than 17 years.

Second, thanks to inexpensive travel, satellite television and cheap phone calls, it is possible to physically have a home in Toronto, but to emotionally exist in a different part of the world. Many migrants now find it easier to stay within their own community rather than integrate and interact with others.

Third, Canada is not immune to the clashes of values that have found an expression in countries around the world. In Quebec, a bill is before parliament that would limit access to public services for those wearing a niqab.

Being successful at migration does not mean that we will automatically like one another and that everyone will think and act the same. As Robert Putnam has stated in his research, more diverse societies tend to be societies, at least in the short term, with lower forms of social solidarity and social capital. These are societies that tend to be more insular, trust each other less, and eat and bowl alone. But even Putnam admits that “diversity is not only inevitable, but over the long run desirable” because it creates new forms and expressions of solidarity by constructing new, more modern and encompassing identities.

Finally, while Canada is proud to open its doors to people and welcome them into our metaphorical home, we have yet to ask them to stand near the fire place. Real power, influence and prestige in Canada continue to be centered in the hands of a few. In politics, media, and business, in corporate board rooms, public institutions or even foundation boards, the leaders, who set the pace and the agenda, are almost uniformly white and male. Even in offices and boardrooms within the region of Toronto, where 50% of the population were born outside the country, 86% of leaders are white. Migrants have found themselves trapped between the floor and the glass ceiling.

Consequently, the breadth and scope of new ideas and new diasporic networks of talent remain untapped. Most importantly, the portrait of power and influence fails to provide role models to our diverse youth population – with significant consequences for their future aspirations and for Canada’s social cohesion.

From integration to inclusion

Inclusion is therefore our next challenge and one that many other countries, including Germany, share. We must create a community where difference among people is viewed as the norm and not an aberration. Where it is valued as an asset, not a liability, where it is deliberately pursued as strength and not avoided in ways which exclude the most vulnerable.

Inclusion is not the same as integration, though the two concepts are inextricably linked. Integration sets out to ensure that the migrant fits in, speaks the language, obeys the law, works, pays taxes and votes. Inclusion goes a step further, where the migrant is an active partner in shaping and changing institutions and society. Integration is about getting started and getting settled; inclusion is about making your mark on society. Whilst integration asks a great deal of the migrant, inclusion asks the host society to change and shift.

As in many parts of the developed world, Canada’s inclusion challenge will be driven by demographics. By 2030, net migration will be the only source for population growth. In our largest urban centers, where opportunity and wealth are created, hyper-diversity is a defining feature of city life. We have to get integration and inclusion right for sound business and social reasons.

Maytree is doing its part by moving beyond describing the problem. Instead, we’re imagining and acting on solutions. For instance, the foundation supports a pan-Canadian movement of local networks to ensure that Canada’s migrants find work commensurate with their skills and experiences. Canada’s most powerful corporate leaders are leading these multi-stakeholder efforts because they are keen to find and develop the best talent to drive innovation and compete globally.

Through the DiverseCity project, Maytree also invests in ensuring that our city’s leadership landscape is as diverse as the people who live in it. Over the last three years, we have propelled more than 1,500 minority leaders in our city into positions of leadership and therefore closer to the center of power. In Toronto, we work with city governments and provincial bodies to help them seek qualified talent to sit on their boards, agencies and commissions. As a result, the leadership landscape in our city today looks significantly more diverse and inclusive than it did three years ago. The foundation also works with media to help them understand both the challenges migrants face, and the ways in which they can be fully integrated into our society.

In short, we focus on places where inclusion is most important – at work, in the board room, in the media, and in political and civic life.

Inclusion will guarantee equality of opportunity, belonging and contribution. It has the power to turn “me and you” into “us and we”.

Inclusion is not simply an aspirational idea. And like integration, it is not an accident. To be meaningful, it must be intentional, action- and results-based.

A global challenge: local solutions

The movement of people across national boundaries will continue – it is as inevitable as globalization. Just as many Europeans left their homes in the past century to make their fortunes in the former colonies, the reverse is happening today. Europe is now the preferred destination of choice for many migrants. And like Canada, European countries must figure out how to both integrate and include its newcomers.

There are currently 48 million people in the European Union who are regular international migrants, representing roughly 9% of the population. As life expectancy and aging continues to increase, there will be a corresponding decline in native-born labour forces. Without future migration, the working-age population in the EU (which is currently at 333 million) would drop by 91 million in 2050. Of course, nation states have other options at hand to address this issue, such as a higher retirement age and increased fertility levels. But these options, even if realized, are not sufficient in themselves. Migration remains a demographic necessity.

Canada, Germany, the US, Norway, Sweden, the UK and other countries are competing and will continue to compete for skilled migrants. As the middle class in India and China grows, this competition will only grow fiercer.

Of course, the context in Europe is very different from that in Canada. We are a young country, while Europe is steeped in tradition. We are separated from the rest of the world by a huge ocean and the world’s largest border to the south, and as a result we can select our migrants. Most European countries do not have this luxury. But neither do you have the luxury of doing nothing.

In Arrival City, Doug Saunders argues that migration to urban centers is one of the most important trends of the 21st century, next only to climate change. Migration will have profound implications for the success of local, national and international economies. Successful arrival cities will create a new and prosperous middle class. Failed arrival cities will create poverty and social isolation.

He illustrates this point with the stories of two US suburbs, Herndon in Virginia and Wheaton in Maryland, both located around the densely populated area of Washington, DC. Both suburbs experienced a dramatic growth in migrant populations in the early 2000s.

Herndon is an aviation industry town. Easy credit enabled many blue collar workers to buy large homes in the area and word spread to neighbouring Latino enclaves and to villages in Central America. The wave of migrant arrivals started – and with them came new shops, churches, and clubs. Herndon woke up at the beginning of the 21st century to discover it had become an arrival city. But public attitudes turned negative. A strong anti-migrant backlash resulted in evictions and zoning ordinances to discourage Latino businesses. Large numbers of migrants left the town. And in 2008, when the economy slumped, so did Herndon.

On the other side of Washington lies the suburb of Wheaton, which went from being 90% white in the 1970s to 40% migrant in 2000, just like Herndon. But the residents of Wheaton saw the newcomers not as a threat, but as an opportunity to revive their fading town. They embraced a branding campaign to make Wheaton known across the capital region for its multiethnic culture, cuisine and products. Zoning rules and business offices were used to encourage and help entrepreneurs set up small shops and retail outlets. The result is a town booming with migrant-owned businesses and a home ownership rate of 62%. When Wheaton was hit by the downturn in the economy, and faced with mortgage foreclosures, city officials launched a campaign to help migrants stay in their homes and their businesses. In their view, this was a necessary step to ensure the long-term health of Wheaton. Today, Wheaton is on the way to prosperity.

Learning from one another: city by city

Regardless of geographical, historical, cultural and philosophical differences, arrival cities have a lot to learn from each other – especially how investments in the short term will pay off in the long term.

Maytree has developed an international project, Cities of Migration, which showcases good practices on integration and inclusion from cities around the world. By describing their accomplishments, we show that cities can be successful with the right inputs and under the right conditions. We also demonstrate how good ideas can be replicated. And, perhaps most importantly, we show that the aspirations of inclusion can be grounded in reality.

Let me give you some examples of the good ideas that we have found:

• In Copenhagen, cycling is a way of life. More than 80% of Copenhageners bike to work and play. The local Red Cross teaches migrants, many of them women, to bike, understand the rules of the road and how to repair a bike. In this way, they normalize the stranger and make him or her part of the everyday landscape, even when he or she looks and dresses differently.
• In Cardiff, Wales, which has a large refugee population, the local police force provides language training to the community, thus enabling not simply language acquisition, but also trust with the police. This is somewhat counterintuitive but the results speak for themselves. The makeup of the Cardiff police force mirrors more closely the makeup of the community.
• Here in Germany, I visited Marxloh Mosque in Duisburg and saw women having a gemuetlichen kaffeeklatsch in one room and children having religious lessons in the Koran in the next. All in the same mosque.
• In Chicago, the Federal Reserve Bank has helped conservative Muslims buy homes and start business by creating new financial instruments which enable them to borrow without breaking their religious beliefs.
• In Toronto, migrants who aspire to political life can go to school to learn how to do so. Toronto also has an easily searchable database of qualified leaders from under-represented communities who are ready, willing and able to take their place as board members and directors of public institutions and civil society organizations.

After finding and publishing more than 85 ideas from cities around the world, we can say a few things with confidence about the integration and inclusion of migrants.

First, place matters. While migration is a national or regional phenomenon, integration and inclusion are uniquely local experiences. The local welcome is a living example of whether a country’s migration system succeeds or fails.

Second, inclusion is a two-way street. Just as the migrant must change and adapt, so must society and its institutions. In Toronto today, we are building more cricket pitches than baseball diamonds.

Third, cities can chart their own path, even if it is contrary to national sentiment, national media and national policy. The sheer necessity of living and working side by side and getting on with the business of daily life is a natural driver for solutions, arrangements and compromises.

Finally, everyone is an inclusion actor – the postman, the business down the street, the teacher, the unionist, the politician, the migrant. Each has a role that can only be accomplished with the active participation of the other. And each benefits from the diversity and shared prosperity that migration brings to their cities.

I am going to be bold enough to conclude with a recipe for success. The ingredients are: access to citizenship; a chance to own property and to operate your business; the right to work; access to education (especially language education); a safe place to live; opportunities for political and civic participation. Some of these ingredients are best placed at national levels of government, such as citizenship and the protection of human rights. But many are best imagined and delivered locally. As Jane Jacobs has famously said: “The level of government closest to the people is best positioned to deliver services to it.”

The Next Dream

The notion of inclusion and integration is not far removed from Dr. King’s dream for justice and humanity. If he were alive today, he would see this call for inclusion as a natural sequel to his dream for racial equality. “We have all come in different ships, but now we are in the same boat.”

He would agree that the formal legal structures that ensure equality are a first step, but that there are other challenges to overcome in changing the hearts and minds of people and institutions.

He would remind us that racial equality is meaningless without financial opportunity, political voice and citizenship.

He would recognize that if racial equality is a first step, racial equity and inclusion logically follow.

He would tell us to join hands with civil society organizations and their leaders in building a movement, as he did when he organized the famous march in Washington and delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech.

And finally, he would encourage us with these words: “It is one thing to agree that integration is morally and legally right. It is another thing to commit oneself positively and actively to the ideal. This is no day to pay lip service to integration. We must pay life service to it”.

Thank you very much.

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In December, while most of us were thinking of the upcoming Holiday Season, many settlement workers in the city were getting pink slips. This was a result of cutbacks to immigrant services implemented by the federal government.

The government argued that the cuts are justified because fewer immigrants have been arriving to the region. This is true. Last year, the region welcomed close to 83,000 newcomers, approximately 30,000 fewer than in 2005.

But there are other numbers to consider. In Ontario, for example, newcomers were more than twice as likely as the Canadian-born to be unemployed. Unemployment numbers released in November 2009 indicated that nearly 20% of recent immigrants in Toronto were jobless. While the unemployment rate had dropped both nationally and locally for Canadian-born residents, the opposite was true for people who had been in the country for less than five years. Previous periods of recession have shown us that immigrants who arrive in recessionary periods can experience long-term economic difficulties, if they aren’t given the right supports early on.

More needs to be done now to make sure that these recent immigrants don’t fall through the cracks and fail to integrate. Saving money today simply defers the costs that we will have to pay tomorrow, costs that will only multiply with time.

In Toronto, we’ve long seen immigration as an asset and prided ourselves as a city which welcomes the world. However, a true welcome means that immigrants must find the right job, for which they have training and experience; settle smoothly into good neighbourhoods; and participate in the regular life of the community. Toronto’s indicators of successful settlement have been slipping in the last few years, with immigrants taking longer and longer to catch up.

This seems to be then a particularly bad time to cutback on an investment that will reap us benefits in the future. For one, we face increasing competition. Traditional source countries, including China and India, with their own growing middle class, will soon have increased opportunities for skilled individuals. Other countries, such as Germany, have joined the competition for skilled immigrants. For another, successful immigrants in Toronto (and elsewhere) have access to global networks, new markets and customers to help us grow our economy, if not today, then certainly tomorrow.

The speed and pace of change have put extraordinary pressure on the city, its settlement sector and other stakeholders to change, to find new services for different times, to speed things up. Cutting funding at this time is in our opinion remarkably short-sighted.

With this in mind there is another number that we should consider: 1,013,186. According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Facts and Figures this is the number of newcomers who arrived to the Toronto region over the last ten years. About 46% of the region’s population is foreign-born and many still need services.

It may be good news that immigrants are no longer just choosing Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto as their first destination in Canada. But it seems too early to cut funding to the traditional landing points without making sure that recent immigrants have access to services they still need. We know from past experience, that Toronto (along with Vancouver and Montreal) exercises a powerful pull on the imagination of immigrants, if not as the first destination, then as the second. And this is particularly true when the first job dries up.

We have to decide what welcome immigrants will find. If they don’t find a welcome, they may well choose to vote with their feet and move somewhere else. It will be our loss.

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As 2010 winds down, our thoughts at Maytree are turning to what we might hope to see in 2011. The holiday season offers us all some time to reflect on the past, and to begin to think of the things that will make our country and communities better. And thus we each begin to shape our agenda for a new year.

Here are some things we see arising from 2010 that we hope to see blossom and flower.

1. The Caledon Institute has developed A Basic Income Plan for Canadians with Severe Disabilities.

Despite billions of dollars spent on a complex assortment of social benefits, many working age Canadians with disabilities end up desperately poor and trapped on welfare, the dead-end default program of last resort. While there has been some progress for persons with disabilities since the landmark Obstacles report was released 30 years ago, one area in which there has been almost no improvement at all has been that of income security. This tragic state of affairs is neither tolerable nor necessary.

The foundation of this plan is a proposed new federal Basic Income program that would replace provincial/territorial social assistance for most working age persons with severe disabilities. The Basic Income program would be a close model of the long-established and well-regarded Guaranteed Income Supplement for low-income seniors. The second reform is to convert the existing non-refundable Disability Tax Credit into a refundable Disability Tax Credit that would extend compensation for the extra costs of disability to the lowest-income people with disabilities. The refundable credit would pay $2,000 through the income tax system to every person eligible for the Disability Tax Credit. These federal income security initiatives would free up funding for urgently needed disability supports and services, permitting the provinces and territories to set up a coherent, comprehensive system of supports and services for those with disabilities.

This federal and provincial/territorial policy partnership could bring Canada into a new age of enlightened programs for those with severe disabilities, with a modest but liveable assured minimum income and a system of supports for daily living that could be among the best in the world. All this is achievable within the boundaries of our current political and administrative institutions and at a cost which is realistic in light of other fiscal choices.

2. The flowering across Canada of proven mentoring and human resource management programs for successfully integrating immigrants into the labour market.

The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) created a model which works, fuelled by The Mentoring Partnership which links immigrants with Canadians in the same line of work to counsel on job culture and open up domestic networks; and hireimmigrants.ca, which works with corporate human resource professionals to become better at hiring immigrants, a definite advantage in attracting top talent.

Now, Assisting Local Leaders with Immigrant Employment Strategies (ALLIES) is helping cities across Canada find which programs will work best for them as they strive to attract and integrate newcomers to their communities. In recent years we have turned a corner in Canada with more and more cities realizing that immigration is key to their future prosperity and well-being. The flowers are beginning to bloom offshore too, as the OMEGA (Opportunities for Migrant Employment in Greater Auckland) program in New Zealand is being heralded as a success for the whole nation.

3. Ontario’s Social Assistance Review.

Premier Dalton McGuinty, a serious thinker and actor on matters of policy, announced the Review near the end of the year, to be co-chaired by Frances Lankin, previously head of United Way Toronto, and Munir Sheikh, the former Chief Statistician of Canada. The Commission has been given 18 months to do its work and will have the support of a well-staffed secretariat.

The last comprehensive review of social assistance in Ontario was undertaken more than 20 years ago by George Thompson, resulting in the Transitions report. When Transitions was written it was limited by the knowledge and technology available at the time.

Today we have over a decade of experience using the tax system to deliver non-stigmatizing tax credits as an alternative to the rule-ridden welfare system. Information technology has exploded exponentially opening new opportunities for innovation. Most importantly, we have come to a better understanding of the limitations and possibilities of social assistance, and have learned to look at the income security system as a whole instead of focussing narrowly on raising or lowering welfare rates. Restructuring the whole system was one of the key visions promoted by the report of the Social Assistance Review Advisory Council, which set the ground for the Social Assistance Review Commission.

Ontario’s Social Assistance Review could represent a watershed in the development of social policy in all of Canada for the next decades by presenting economically and politically feasible strategies for a transformation of our hide-bound and inadequate welfare program into a modern income security system.

4. Food has become a prominent and important issue.

Access to healthy food for people at all income levels, the environmental impact of growing and transporting it, the chemical and industrial infrastructure underpinning the industry, food quality, food security, the viability of farming, and related issues of obesity, diabetes, cancers, and even food as an instrument of social control have become matters of important research and commentary. The Metcalf and McConnell foundations, The Stop and other food security agencies, and many other universities, governments, corporations and NGO’s have identified moving to a healthier and more sustainable food regime as critical to community well being and the national interest. Much of the work being done is informative and inspiring, giving hope of a better future.

5. Public parks as essential “rooms in our house”.

Across the country, people are recognizing that public parks matter, as in Toronto where the new organization Toronto Park People (TPP) is dedicated to improving Toronto’s parks. Toronto’s parks are languishing and the biggest obstacle to improvement is a culture of “no” in the parks department that limits community engagement and crushes creativity. TPP advocates for better parks for all citizens and communities by facilitating citizen engagement in their parks and building a network of local community park groups. A key focus for the group in 2011 will be a citywide Parks Summit in April that will bring together park advocates from across the city for the first time ever. TPP will also partner with the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects to sponsor a forum in March entitled “Whose Park Is It?” The group will also unveil a new website that will provide resources for local community park groups and provide opportunities for groups to connect and learn from each other.

With thanks for contributions to Michael Mendelson of The Caledon Institute and Dave Harvey of Toronto Park People.

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Congratulations to Rob Ford on becoming Toronto’s 64th mayor.

As he and the other candidates will know from ten long months of campaigning, Toronto is a complicated and vibrant city, with many actors and many dramas.

There are a number of highly engaged organizations and people working at making Toronto prosperous and equitable. Organizations like Maytree and The Metcalf Foundation, the United Way and the Toronto Community Foundation, and the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance each work to carry the city onwards and upwards. Corporations are deeply engaged in the community with financial support, like TD Bank’s support of the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance and environmental initiatives or RBC’s engagement in facilitating immigrants integrating into the labour market by its support of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council. Corporations also help provide a critical analytical lens on the region, through such things as the work of TD Research. In addition to the work of such organizations, there are active citizens in every part of the city working to make their neighbourhoods ever better places to live and raise families.

All of this activity is aided immensely by a friendly and supportive Mayor’s office and city council. Over its three decades, Maytree’s work has flourished when it has been aligned with the interests of a mayor or councillor. And we have always been happy to be helpful to our political leaders when their work and intentions have aligned with ours. Our view is that nobody wins when our political leaders fail, so we should offer support to them as they work to build prosperity and equity, the fundamental bases of city building.

Of course the city does not belong to its political leaders alone. It belongs to all of us, and we all can play a role in city building. While an alignment with city hall is an advantage, it is not a necessary condition. In a dynamic city, many actors will continue to play many roles on many stages. This is the fact of life in cities, which must always be in motion and always striving, lest they fall back.

Mayor-elect Ford will know that there are many hands extended to help him succeed in the vital job of city building.

“As I prepared for this year’s lecture, I thought about the thirty years since my arrival in Canada, and how much Canada and I have changed,” says Ratna. “How much we both are a work in progress.”

She spoke about her journey from exile to belonging, from refugee to one of leading social activist creating opportunities for a better Canada.

Ratna began by saying: “I’m going to tell you my story in Canada… My story is no different than that of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who choose to make Canada their home. We all have a starring role in the same reality show.”

View the video below (in 4 parts). Download the full text of Ratna’s lecture: Ratna Omidvar – A Canadian in the Making: Letters to Canada (PDF).

Part 1 – Exile

Part 2 – Exile to Endurance

Part 3 – Endurance to Awakening

Part 4 – Redemption

By Michael Adams, Writer and Founder of the Environics Institute, and Ratna Omidvar, President, Maytree

(Originally published in The Mark)

Last weekend, German Chancellor Angela Merkel summed up her country’s failure to integrate a large number of Turkish “guest workers” and their children with a stark statement: she announced that multiculturalism in Germany had “failed utterly.”

It would be understandable if this remark agitated Canadians. Canadian society, arguably more than any other, has adopted “multiculturalism” not just as a policy framework but as a cornerstone of our national identity. When Canadians are asked to state, in their own words, sources of their pride in Canada, multiculturalism comes in fourth – tied with health care and in line behind our democracy, our quality of life, and a caring/humanitarian outlook.

Does the fact that Germany’s Turkish guest workers (and even their German-born children) are isolated and frustrated hold lessons for Canada? It certainly does. The crux of Germany’s current challenge, however, is not multiculturalism. It’s citizenship.

Germany’s Turkish guest workers had no path to citizenship and were thus excluded from many important aspects of German life, from educational opportunities to entrepreneurship (not to mention political rights). They lived in ethnic ghettos, and their children, even those born in Germany, were also denied citizenship. (Germany has changed its citizenship policies in recent years, but Merkel’s speech addressed the social conditions that have resulted from the policies of the foregoing decades.)

In contrast, Canada has encouraged its newcomers to acquire citizenship after three years of permanent residence, and any child born in the country is automatically granted citizenship. Approximately 84 per cent of all eligible immigrants to Canada have attained citizenship.

These high rates of citizenship acquisition have enabled immigrants’ political participation. It is not a mere coincidence that Canada has proportionally more foreign-born legislators than any other society and that Calgary recently became the first large Canadian city to elect a foreign-born, visible-minority,mayor. Broad citizenship uptake has ensured that immigrants have equal access to public life and social services, and it has produced an atmosphere of formal equality that is far from universal among countries with substantial immigrant populations.

But Canada’s approach to citizenship, while broadly successful to date, remains a work in progress and is being threatened by current trends in immigration policy. In 2009, temporary workers living in Canada outnumbered permanent residents arriving in the country. Many of these temporary workers will have access to permanent residency, but a significant and growing proportion will not.

The assumption of the temporary foreign worker program is that the workers who arrive under its auspices will leave when Canadians no longer need their labour. The reality in Germany and other European countries tells us that these people do not simply go home. (The Swiss playwright Max Frisch sums up the complications of shifting labour across a map: “We called for workers, and human beings came.”) Many remain in their new country and become part of an unrecognized, undocumented, and vulnerable underclass.

Over time, Canada’s temporary foreign worker program – and especially a pilot program that focuses on drawing low-skilled temporary workers into the country – is creating an ever larger group of people who do not have access to permanent residence and who may end up living within our borders as undocumented workers. Even those who do have access to permanent residence will have to wait longer than previous cohorts to gain citizenship, since their years spent in Canada as temporary workers or students will not count toward residency requirements. The delay – and especially the denial – of citizenship acquisition are worrisome trends because seeking citizenship is both a sign of integration and an enabler of engagement, contribution, and participation.

At the very least, Canada needs to make sure that no one living in this country ends up in permanent citizenship limbo – especially not the kind of intergenerational limbo that the children of guest workers in Germany have experienced. To let this happen would be to replicate Germany’s failures at precisely the moment some German leaders are resolving to replicate Canada’s successes by adopting a real policy of integrative multiculturalism (by whatever name).

But we need to do more than merely avoid the obvious problems of guest-worker marginalization: we need to talk frankly about the nature of citizenship in a world increasingly defined by mobility and migration.

Some Canadians were dismayed when, in the summer of 2006, thousands of Lebanese Canadians who had been living in Lebanon or visiting for extended periods were evacuated at Canadian expense amid Israeli bombing in the region. If these people were Canadian, why were they living abroad? Were they “Canadians of convenience” as some commentators alleged, or can good Canadians spend time outside Canada – as thousands of “snowbirds” do each winter in Florida and Arizona? Is citizenship about taxes for services? Voting? Residence? Military service? Speaking French or English (or French and English)? Is citizenship a passport or is it a sensibility – a feeling of belonging and a willingness to contribute?

A robust national conversation about the nature of Canadian citizenship and how people can act as good citizens is overdue. This conversation has important implications for newcomers and the Canadian-born alike.

We believe Canadians should be talking seriously about what is working and not working when it comes to the integration of immigrants and their children. But we must work hard to avoid the trap of attacking or defending a nebulous notion of “multiculturalism.”

Canadian multiculturalism is not a single, static practice that we can declare to have succeeded or failed. It has been evolving since it was adopted from “celebrating differences” to successful integration and will continue to evolve. Part of helping it evolve toward greater success and effectiveness is to talk openly about how Canadians live, work, and govern themselves and how our policies and institutions can promote full participation in this society, which has already cast its lot with diversity and immigration. A thoughtful conversation about citizenship is a great place to start.

Michael Adams of Environics Research Group and Ratna Omidvar of the Maytree Foundation are co-partners along with the CBC and the Institute for Canadian Citizenship on a new research and dialogue project on the meaning of citizenship in the 21st Century.

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The last couple of decades in Canada have seen a lively and rich discourse on immigration policy, process, and practice. Who gets in, how they are selected, how they are settled in the short term and integrated in the long term have all been discussed, written about, researched, and litigated.

And the participants in the debate are a broad range of Canadians, including politicians, academics, advocacy groups from various perspectives, lawyers speaking for their clients, public servants charged with policy and program development and implementation, and citizens.

One of the great things about this discourse is the variety of voices engaged in it. People who have been in Canada for 100 years or 100 days, who have come from 100 miles down the road or half way round the world have felt free to speak up and let their voices be heard. And one of the great glories of Canada is that this can be so.

So it is surprising that a new organization, the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform, has hit the ground complaining about the lack of discourse, or at least what they suggest is a lack of honest discourse. They disparage those who have been participating as part of an “immigration lobby”, suggesting a greedy self-interest to defy the national interest. They promise to engage in an “honest” discussion, to put the real facts on the table, to set Canada on the right course of an immigration policy that will finally serve the country properly.

The people behind this organization are elderly gentlemen with old associations with old networks. One gets the impression that the members of this organization resent the breadth and vibrancy of the immigration discourse, feeling that such policy matters should be left to the professionals.

“Don’t try this at home” for fear of endangering the nation, they seem to be saying. They complain that anyone speaking against immigration policy is branded as anti-immigrant and racist, and speak dramatically about such issues being a “third rail” that only they will have the courage to touch. But, while they puff up their paper courage and try to reframe their anti-immigration musings, it is hard to see this as anything more than the last gasp of the old white elites, enraged at the encroachment on their turf by the democratic hordes.

They are too late. The horses left the barn a long time ago.

In the first place, international migration is like a mighty river that will not be stemmed or turned. Second, Canada has benefited too well for too long from migrants landing on our shores, even the very occasional boat load that arrives to great uproar. Third, too many good people have been earnestly engaged in the discourse for too long to be told to shut up and sit down. And fourth, Canadians are tired of leaving complex questions to “the experts”, who always seem to want to exclude voices who don’t agree with them.

We are a country that knows how to talk about things, to put difficult issues on the table, and to keep talking about them as long as there is a voice to be heard. We’re also a country that has been able to distil good sense from that discourse, and then to implement it in a body of law which gets tested through our justice system every day all across the country.

We are long past the date when any one group could lay claim to knowing what is “honest” and what is right.