It was as difficult as you can imagine for Doriane Aurelle Etemgoua and her family to leave behind Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, for the promise of a nursing job among the 7,000-plus souls of La Sarre, Que.Officials in the region, near Quebec’s western border with Ontario, lured Etemgoua and several dozen other African nurses, with the offer of jobs — part of a grand plan to fill critical labour shortages that had forced the closure of La Sarre’s obstetrics ward among other health services, the type of shortages now being seen in many parts of this country.But first, Etemgoua, who has a master’s degree in public health and left a good job in the pediatric emergency ward of a hospital, would have to go back to school for 10 months to prepare for provincial nursing exams that would allow her to practise in Quebec.Her immigrant experience has been one of shock: the shock of leaving a city of nearly three million people for a town with just three main streets; the shocking temperatures of her first Canadian winter; and the sticker shock from things such as taxes and tips, which stand out when one is waiting to return to full-salary status and to profit from a new life.But the Germans say that love goes through the stomach, and it might be true of immigration settlement, too.One of the most difficult daily struggles of Etemgoua’s strange, new life in a strange, new land came at the dinner table. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was impossible to find traditional African foods and products at either of La Sarre’s two grocery stories.“We were having trouble eating,” she said.It grew so dire that the new members of La Sarre’s African diaspora confronted the owners of the grocery chains Maxi and IGA.“Given that they are here to sell, and that the African community is starting to grow, they found an African supplier in (nearby) Rouyn-Noranda, and they’ve brought in some of their products.”Seeing a business opportunity, one of the husbands also started stocking up on African food supplies from Montreal and has begun selling them to the growing community.This simple anecdote speaks volumes about the two-headed immigration struggle in this country: the struggle of immigrants to make a home in Canada; and Canada’s struggle to convince newcomers to remain in rural and rapidly depopulating parts of the country.In a country that just breached the 40-million population mark, the struggle is real and will be further challenged by a recent plan by the federal government to bring in up to half a million immigrants each year between 2023 and 2025.Immigrants, refugees, front-line workers and experts argue it will take tolerance, empathy and adaptability from the Canadians already established here, as well as tenacity from those new arrivals, to see through the plan without further straining the sometimes fraught and fragile social harmony in this country.If you build a prosperous, multicultural society, in other words, the immigrants will come. But fail to rethink that society in a way that sets up a vulnerable and stressed immigrant population to survive and thrive, and the immigrant dream of a better life risks turning into nightmare.‘Opening our eyes’In Quebec, where immigration is sometimes cast as a threat to the French language and Québécois culture, the town of Granby stands out.About an hour’s drive east of Montreal, it is one of 14 cities designated as landing spots for government-sponsored refugees in the province. Over the years, this has brought Colombians, Afghans, Algerians, Congolese, Syrians, Vietnamese and Mexicans, among other nationalities.Earlier this year, the municipality launched a plan it hopes will convince newcomers not only stay, but to flourish.In May, Granby announced a three-year review of city operations and services that will examine everything from housing to public transport to daycare services to recreational activities to political participation through the lens of the needs of immigrants. The hope is to identify and remove barriers that stand in the way of the municipalities’ newest residents.It could be as simple as making it easier for someone who doesn’t speak French to register their child for swimming lessons, or featuring visible minorities in city newsletters and ad campaigns, or rethinking programming aimed at the city’s elderly immigrants.“It’s just a question of opening our eyes, accepting and being open to people’s paths, because often those people have exemplary resilience,” said Granby Mayor Julie Bourdon. “We just need to give them the time and the tools for them to get ahead.”One of the signs of Granby’s welcoming and nurturing newcomers, Bourdon said, was a 25-year-old social worker from Rwanda who spent the first half of his life moving between six different refugee camps. Faustin Mugisha arrived in Canada in 2014 at the age of 14, with the equivalent of a fifth-grade education and a distrust of strangers forged by the only life he had ever known.“When we arrived here, I was suspicious (of people) because, as a refugee, I was exposed to lots of bad things, like fears for security or food,” he said.“I was scared of people, but I remember there was a teacher who explained to me that in Quebec we like people who smile, people who get involved. I decided to start by simply smiling.”The fearful teenager had stumbled upon a winning formula.Before he had even mastered the French language, his fellow students elected him class president. And despite entering high school with that fifth-grade education from the refugee camps, Mugisha earned top marks.In 2019, he won an academic scholarship to help pay for his studies in social work. In 2021, he ran for a seat on Granby’s municipal council. He lost by a large margin, but still considers it an important step on the way to achieving his greater goals.“I decided to make my life into an example for others,” Mugisha said. “Because I didn’t have any examples at the time, I had to become my own example. I had to take inspiration from myself.”Mugisha also volunteers with Citoyenneté Jeunesse, a government-funded organization trying to raise awareness of and promote cultural diversity in Quebec’s predominately white, francophone rural regions.The group’s website tries to explain terms like “unconscious bias,” “privilege,” and “tokenism” — the realities of which Mugisha knows all too well.He recalled a university professor in Gatineau, Que., near Ottawa, highlighting the fact that he was the only Black person in his class — something he was already keenly aware of. More recently, while working in Baie-Comeau, an industrial town 400 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, he said it was months before he encountered another person of colour.It is common experience outside of large population centres for visible minorities to feel noticed, like a curiosity, which can be both alienating and intimidating for an immigrant far away from home and far outside their comfort zone.But Mugisha said that in his view there are also advantages that come with being an immigrant in the regions, surrounded by native-born people.“It’s the best place to be yourself,” Mugisha said. “The first experience with immigration they’ll have is with you. If you are yourself and present the best side of yourself, that’s the impression people will get.” (But there is also a risk: “If there’s a bad experience with you, they’ll cling to that negative experience and apply it to others.”)Representation is also an important factor in countering the types of systemic racism and institutional biases that prevent Canada from adapting to the needs of a growing immigrant population, said Samuel Juru, executive director of the Africa Centre, an Edmonton community group. Only 11 per cent of federal members of Parliament sitting in the House of Commons in 2023 are immigrants — a number that falls well below the number of Canadians who call themselves immigrants. But Juru pointed to the prominence of the Parliamentary Black Caucus; figures such as Minister of Housing, Diversity and Inclusion Ahmed Hussen, a Somali-born lawyer; and Amarjeet Sohi, the India-born mayor of Edmonton, in noting that “what we are seeing is the policymakers begin to start mirroring the population groups.”It is a longer and more difficult process before attitudes at the top of the power structures trickle down into concrete and necessary policy changes that could make Canada a country that is more adapted to the people it is targeting through immigration.One pressing area is the construction of housing, said Juru, himself an immigrant from Zimbabwe. One wrinkle, beyond a simple shortage of supply: “African families are complex. In my language, we don’t have a word for cousin. ‘Cousin’ is ‘brother.’ So when my cousin comes over, I say, ‘Come on, you can live with me for the next six months while you get sorted,’” he said.With African families, and families from the Global South, Juru said there is a need for a broader range of housing stock than the standard condos or two-bedroom apartments that are being budgeted for and planned by officials.“(Bureaucrats are) thinking about this from a numbers perspective, but there’s no one saying, ‘Hold up! We can’t keep doing this two-bedroom apartment thing for our migrants … How can we jazz it up so that it works for everyone?”Some parts of the country have stubbornly resisted policy coherence on matters of immigration, whether driven by the desire for electoral success or by genuine fear or ignorance.The province of Quebec, for example, is as dependent upon immigrants as the rest of the country, and favours French-speakers from African countries, including Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco — countries which have Muslim majorities.But the Quebec government also passed a divisive law in 2019 that bans public servants, including nurses and teachers, from wearing headscarves and other visible religious symbols — a move that would seem more likely to scare off potential immigrants than have them flocking to this side of the Atlantic Ocean.One of the low points of the last provincial election featured then-immigration minister Jean Boulet claiming that most immigrants to Quebec settle in Montreal, don’t speak French and don’t adhere to the province’s secular values.Frey Alberto Guevara, director general of an immigration-settlement service (known by its French acronym, SERY) in the Quebec region of Yamaska, said those who fear immigration or immigrants are driven by ignorance.“They don’t realize that it’s an investment for our society,” said Guevara, who came to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee from Colombia in 2003. “They are people who will buy groceries, who will pay rent, pay taxes, purchase gas. What is that? It’s an economic investment, but people don’t see it like that … They don’t realize we also need immigration for the economy to continue working.”Even Hérouxville, Que., has seen the light.The town of 1,300 people attracted international condemnation and lots of ridicule in 2007 for adopting and anti-immigrant (read: Muslim) code of conduct stating that stoning, burning or dousing women with acid were not permitted in western (read: Christian) Quebec.But even this municipal dot on the map 50 kilometres north of Trois-Rivières requires new workers to replace its aging, retiring and dying labour force, and that led last December to Hérouxville Mayor Bernard Thompson telling the New York Times: “We’ve had a break from our past … We now want as many immigrants as possible.”Ironically, though, the parts of the country that have shown some of the greatest willingness to welcome and help settle immigrants are the very places that have trouble hanging on to them.A 2018 study found that Newfoundland scored lowest in the country for retaining refugees, keeping just 36 per cent of those who arrived in the province five years after their admission to the country.Respondents to the Memorial University study had positive impressions of their hosts; their main problems were the weather, the lack of job prospects and — again — the food.“Respondents struggled to find certain foods, especially bread, and complained about the high cost of fruit and vegetables,” the report’s authors wrote. “There seemed to be a high demand for certain Arabic foods, as it was described to sell out quickly.”Though even a number of born-and-bred Newfoundlanders leave the province to find work, the refugee study identified problems that are not at all unique to the province: trouble learning the language; difficulty getting their professional and educational credentials recognized in Canada; and the need to take on lower-paying work to support family members.“Even folks with employment opportunities sometimes will choose to move on,” said Megan Morris, executive director of the St. John’s-based Association of New Canadians NL.“It’s really varied, but I think it’s important getting people connected as quickly as you can to services — making sure there is an opportunity, whether you want to go to school or get employment, that there’s a lot of support to help.”On the flip side, immigrants settling in Alberta seem willing to overlook what Juru said was a “racism problem” in Western Canada, referring to attacks on Muslim women and other incidents, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.“You want a job, you want food, you want to clothe yourself and pay your bills,” Juru said.“For migrants like me who are coming from poorer places in the world, like Africa, it makes Edmonton quite an attractive place to realize your economic and financial aspirations.”Etemgoua hasn’t yet realized the promise of a better life. A year after her arrival in La Sarre, she is still struggling to get by with the monthly stipend allotted to her, still making hard choices about spending, still waiting for the day she can return to the hospital ward and collect a full salary.There are difficult times. Times when she and her husband question their decision to move to Canada. Times when they must look at their seven-year-old son and four-year-old daughter to be reminded of why they voluntarily left their lives behind.But there are also other times when La Sarre, with its new-found supplies of African food; with its small-but-growing community of families from Sierra Leone, Algeria, Tunisia and Ivory Coast; with the open arms of a small Quebec town in great need, starts to feel something like home.One of those times occurred as Etemgoua travelled to Ottawa to renew her passport and had a sudden longing for La Sarre.“I realized (Ottawa) wasn’t a city where I could live. It was too noisy, too much traffic. I realized that it wasn’t for me,” she said. “I’m better off in my little village.”Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He covers global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan
It was as difficult as you can imagine for Doriane Aurelle Etemgoua and her family to leave behind Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, for the promise of a nursing job among the 7,000-plus souls of La Sarre, Que.Officials in the region, near Quebec’s western border with Ontario, lured Etemgoua and several dozen other African nurses, with the offer of jobs — part of a grand plan to fill critical labour shortages that had forced the closure of La Sarre’s obstetrics ward among other health services, the type of shortages now being seen in many parts of this country.But first, Etemgoua, who has a master’s degree in public health and left a good job in the pediatric emergency ward of a hospital, would have to go back to school for 10 months to prepare for provincial nursing exams that would allow her to practise in Quebec.Her immigrant experience has been one of shock: the shock of leaving a city of nearly three million people for a town with just three main streets; the shocking temperatures of her first Canadian winter; and the sticker shock from things such as taxes and tips, which stand out when one is waiting to return to full-salary status and to profit from a new life.But the Germans say that love goes through the stomach, and it might be true of immigration settlement, too.One of the most difficult daily struggles of Etemgoua’s strange, new life in a strange, new land came at the dinner table. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was impossible to find traditional African foods and products at either of La Sarre’s two grocery stories.“We were having trouble eating,” she said.It grew so dire that the new members of La Sarre’s African diaspora confronted the owners of the grocery chains Maxi and IGA.“Given that they are here to sell, and that the African community is starting to grow, they found an African supplier in (nearby) Rouyn-Noranda, and they’ve brought in some of their products.”Seeing a business opportunity, one of the husbands also started stocking up on African food supplies from Montreal and has begun selling them to the growing community.This simple anecdote speaks volumes about the two-headed immigration struggle in this country: the struggle of immigrants to make a home in Canada; and Canada’s struggle to convince newcomers to remain in rural and rapidly depopulating parts of the country.In a country that just breached the 40-million population mark, the struggle is real and will be further challenged by a recent plan by the federal government to bring in up to half a million immigrants each year between 2023 and 2025.Immigrants, refugees, front-line workers and experts argue it will take tolerance, empathy and adaptability from the Canadians already established here, as well as tenacity from those new arrivals, to see through the plan without further straining the sometimes fraught and fragile social harmony in this country.If you build a prosperous, multicultural society, in other words, the immigrants will come. But fail to rethink that society in a way that sets up a vulnerable and stressed immigrant population to survive and thrive, and the immigrant dream of a better life risks turning into nightmare.‘Opening our eyes’In Quebec, where immigration is sometimes cast as a threat to the French language and Québécois culture, the town of Granby stands out.About an hour’s drive east of Montreal, it is one of 14 cities designated as landing spots for government-sponsored refugees in the province. Over the years, this has brought Colombians, Afghans, Algerians, Congolese, Syrians, Vietnamese and Mexicans, among other nationalities.Earlier this year, the municipality launched a plan it hopes will convince newcomers not only stay, but to flourish.In May, Granby announced a three-year review of city operations and services that will examine everything from housing to public transport to daycare services to recreational activities to political participation through the lens of the needs of immigrants. The hope is to identify and remove barriers that stand in the way of the municipalities’ newest residents.It could be as simple as making it easier for someone who doesn’t speak French to register their child for swimming lessons, or featuring visible minorities in city newsletters and ad campaigns, or rethinking programming aimed at the city’s elderly immigrants.“It’s just a question of opening our eyes, accepting and being open to people’s paths, because often those people have exemplary resilience,” said Granby Mayor Julie Bourdon. “We just need to give them the time and the tools for them to get ahead.”One of the signs of Granby’s welcoming and nurturing newcomers, Bourdon said, was a 25-year-old social worker from Rwanda who spent the first half of his life moving between six different refugee camps. Faustin Mugisha arrived in Canada in 2014 at the age of 14, with the equivalent of a fifth-grade education and a distrust of strangers forged by the only life he had ever known.“When we arrived here, I was suspicious (of people) because, as a refugee, I was exposed to lots of bad things, like fears for security or food,” he said.“I was scared of people, but I remember there was a teacher who explained to me that in Quebec we like people who smile, people who get involved. I decided to start by simply smiling.”The fearful teenager had stumbled upon a winning formula.Before he had even mastered the French language, his fellow students elected him class president. And despite entering high school with that fifth-grade education from the refugee camps, Mugisha earned top marks.In 2019, he won an academic scholarship to help pay for his studies in social work. In 2021, he ran for a seat on Granby’s municipal council. He lost by a large margin, but still considers it an important step on the way to achieving his greater goals.“I decided to make my life into an example for others,” Mugisha said. “Because I didn’t have any examples at the time, I had to become my own example. I had to take inspiration from myself.”Mugisha also volunteers with Citoyenneté Jeunesse, a government-funded organization trying to raise awareness of and promote cultural diversity in Quebec’s predominately white, francophone rural regions.The group’s website tries to explain terms like “unconscious bias,” “privilege,” and “tokenism” — the realities of which Mugisha knows all too well.He recalled a university professor in Gatineau, Que., near Ottawa, highlighting the fact that he was the only Black person in his class — something he was already keenly aware of. More recently, while working in Baie-Comeau, an industrial town 400 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, he said it was months before he encountered another person of colour.It is common experience outside of large population centres for visible minorities to feel noticed, like a curiosity, which can be both alienating and intimidating for an immigrant far away from home and far outside their comfort zone.But Mugisha said that in his view there are also advantages that come with being an immigrant in the regions, surrounded by native-born people.“It’s the best place to be yourself,” Mugisha said. “The first experience with immigration they’ll have is with you. If you are yourself and present the best side of yourself, that’s the impression people will get.” (But there is also a risk: “If there’s a bad experience with you, they’ll cling to that negative experience and apply it to others.”)Representation is also an important factor in countering the types of systemic racism and institutional biases that prevent Canada from adapting to the needs of a growing immigrant population, said Samuel Juru, executive director of the Africa Centre, an Edmonton community group. Only 11 per cent of federal members of Parliament sitting in the House of Commons in 2023 are immigrants — a number that falls well below the number of Canadians who call themselves immigrants. But Juru pointed to the prominence of the Parliamentary Black Caucus; figures such as Minister of Housing, Diversity and Inclusion Ahmed Hussen, a Somali-born lawyer; and Amarjeet Sohi, the India-born mayor of Edmonton, in noting that “what we are seeing is the policymakers begin to start mirroring the population groups.”It is a longer and more difficult process before attitudes at the top of the power structures trickle down into concrete and necessary policy changes that could make Canada a country that is more adapted to the people it is targeting through immigration.One pressing area is the construction of housing, said Juru, himself an immigrant from Zimbabwe. One wrinkle, beyond a simple shortage of supply: “African families are complex. In my language, we don’t have a word for cousin. ‘Cousin’ is ‘brother.’ So when my cousin comes over, I say, ‘Come on, you can live with me for the next six months while you get sorted,’” he said.With African families, and families from the Global South, Juru said there is a need for a broader range of housing stock than the standard condos or two-bedroom apartments that are being budgeted for and planned by officials.“(Bureaucrats are) thinking about this from a numbers perspective, but there’s no one saying, ‘Hold up! We can’t keep doing this two-bedroom apartment thing for our migrants … How can we jazz it up so that it works for everyone?”Some parts of the country have stubbornly resisted policy coherence on matters of immigration, whether driven by the desire for electoral success or by genuine fear or ignorance.The province of Quebec, for example, is as dependent upon immigrants as the rest of the country, and favours French-speakers from African countries, including Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco — countries which have Muslim majorities.But the Quebec government also passed a divisive law in 2019 that bans public servants, including nurses and teachers, from wearing headscarves and other visible religious symbols — a move that would seem more likely to scare off potential immigrants than have them flocking to this side of the Atlantic Ocean.One of the low points of the last provincial election featured then-immigration minister Jean Boulet claiming that most immigrants to Quebec settle in Montreal, don’t speak French and don’t adhere to the province’s secular values.Frey Alberto Guevara, director general of an immigration-settlement service (known by its French acronym, SERY) in the Quebec region of Yamaska, said those who fear immigration or immigrants are driven by ignorance.“They don’t realize that it’s an investment for our society,” said Guevara, who came to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee from Colombia in 2003. “They are people who will buy groceries, who will pay rent, pay taxes, purchase gas. What is that? It’s an economic investment, but people don’t see it like that … They don’t realize we also need immigration for the economy to continue working.”Even Hérouxville, Que., has seen the light.The town of 1,300 people attracted international condemnation and lots of ridicule in 2007 for adopting and anti-immigrant (read: Muslim) code of conduct stating that stoning, burning or dousing women with acid were not permitted in western (read: Christian) Quebec.But even this municipal dot on the map 50 kilometres north of Trois-Rivières requires new workers to replace its aging, retiring and dying labour force, and that led last December to Hérouxville Mayor Bernard Thompson telling the New York Times: “We’ve had a break from our past … We now want as many immigrants as possible.”Ironically, though, the parts of the country that have shown some of the greatest willingness to welcome and help settle immigrants are the very places that have trouble hanging on to them.A 2018 study found that Newfoundland scored lowest in the country for retaining refugees, keeping just 36 per cent of those who arrived in the province five years after their admission to the country.Respondents to the Memorial University study had positive impressions of their hosts; their main problems were the weather, the lack of job prospects and — again — the food.“Respondents struggled to find certain foods, especially bread, and complained about the high cost of fruit and vegetables,” the report’s authors wrote. “There seemed to be a high demand for certain Arabic foods, as it was described to sell out quickly.”Though even a number of born-and-bred Newfoundlanders leave the province to find work, the refugee study identified problems that are not at all unique to the province: trouble learning the language; difficulty getting their professional and educational credentials recognized in Canada; and the need to take on lower-paying work to support family members.“Even folks with employment opportunities sometimes will choose to move on,” said Megan Morris, executive director of the St. John’s-based Association of New Canadians NL.“It’s really varied, but I think it’s important getting people connected as quickly as you can to services — making sure there is an opportunity, whether you want to go to school or get employment, that there’s a lot of support to help.”On the flip side, immigrants settling in Alberta seem willing to overlook what Juru said was a “racism problem” in Western Canada, referring to attacks on Muslim women and other incidents, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.“You want a job, you want food, you want to clothe yourself and pay your bills,” Juru said.“For migrants like me who are coming from poorer places in the world, like Africa, it makes Edmonton quite an attractive place to realize your economic and financial aspirations.”Etemgoua hasn’t yet realized the promise of a better life. A year after her arrival in La Sarre, she is still struggling to get by with the monthly stipend allotted to her, still making hard choices about spending, still waiting for the day she can return to the hospital ward and collect a full salary.There are difficult times. Times when she and her husband question their decision to move to Canada. Times when they must look at their seven-year-old son and four-year-old daughter to be reminded of why they voluntarily left their lives behind.But there are also other times when La Sarre, with its new-found supplies of African food; with its small-but-growing community of families from Sierra Leone, Algeria, Tunisia and Ivory Coast; with the open arms of a small Quebec town in great need, starts to feel something like home.One of those times occurred as Etemgoua travelled to Ottawa to renew her passport and had a sudden longing for La Sarre.“I realized (Ottawa) wasn’t a city where I could live. It was too noisy, too much traffic. I realized that it wasn’t for me,” she said. “I’m better off in my little village.”Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He covers global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan
It was as difficult as you can imagine for Doriane Aurelle Etemgoua and her family to leave behind Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, for the promise of a nursing job among the 7,000-plus souls of La Sarre, Que.
Officials in the region, near Quebec’s western border with Ontario, lured Etemgoua and several dozen other African nurses, with the offer of jobs — part of a grand plan to fill critical labour shortages that had forced the closure of La Sarre’s obstetrics ward among other health services, the type of shortages now being seen in many parts of this country.
But first, Etemgoua, who has a master’s degree in public health and left a good job in the pediatric emergency ward of a hospital, would have to go back to school for 10 months to prepare for provincial nursing exams that would allow her to practise in Quebec.
Her immigrant experience has been one of shock: the shock of leaving a city of nearly three million people for a town with just three main streets; the shocking temperatures of her first Canadian winter; and the sticker shock from things such as taxes and tips, which stand out when one is waiting to return to full-salary status and to profit from a new life.
But the Germans say that love goes through the stomach, and it might be true of immigration settlement, too.
One of the most difficult daily struggles of Etemgoua’s strange, new life in a strange, new land came at the dinner table. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was impossible to find traditional African foods and products at either of La Sarre’s two grocery stories.
“We were having trouble eating,” she said.
It grew so dire that the new members of La Sarre’s African diaspora confronted the owners of the grocery chains Maxi and IGA.
“Given that they are here to sell, and that the African community is starting to grow, they found an African supplier in (nearby) Rouyn-Noranda, and they’ve brought in some of their products.”
Seeing a business opportunity, one of the husbands also started stocking up on African food supplies from Montreal and has begun selling them to the growing community.
This simple anecdote speaks volumes about the two-headed immigration struggle in this country: the struggle of immigrants to make a home in Canada; and Canada’s struggle to convince newcomers to remain in rural and rapidly depopulating parts of the country.
In a country that just breached the 40-million population mark, the struggle is real and will be further challenged by a recent plan by the federal government to bring in up to half a million immigrants each year between 2023 and 2025.
Immigrants, refugees, front-line workers and experts argue it will take tolerance, empathy and adaptability from the Canadians already established here, as well as tenacity from those new arrivals, to see through the plan without further straining the sometimes fraught and fragile social harmony in this country.
If you build a prosperous, multicultural society, in other words, the immigrants will come. But fail to rethink that society in a way that sets up a vulnerable and stressed immigrant population to survive and thrive, and the immigrant dream of a better life risks turning into nightmare.
‘Opening our eyes’
In Quebec, where immigration is sometimes cast as a threat to the French language and Québécois culture, the town of Granby stands out.
About an hour’s drive east of Montreal, it is one of 14 cities designated as landing spots for government-sponsored refugees in the province. Over the years, this has brought Colombians, Afghans, Algerians, Congolese, Syrians, Vietnamese and Mexicans, among other nationalities.
Earlier this year, the municipality launched a plan it hopes will convince newcomers not only stay, but to flourish.
In May, Granby announced a three-year review of city operations and services that will examine everything from housing to public transport to daycare services to recreational activities to political participation through the lens of the needs of immigrants. The hope is to identify and remove barriers that stand in the way of the municipalities’ newest residents.
It could be as simple as making it easier for someone who doesn’t speak French to register their child for swimming lessons, or featuring visible minorities in city newsletters and ad campaigns, or rethinking programming aimed at the city’s elderly immigrants.
“It’s just a question of opening our eyes, accepting and being open to people’s paths, because often those people have exemplary resilience,” said Granby Mayor Julie Bourdon. “We just need to give them the time and the tools for them to get ahead.”
One of the signs of Granby’s welcoming and nurturing newcomers, Bourdon said, was a 25-year-old social worker from Rwanda who spent the first half of his life moving between six different refugee camps. Faustin Mugisha arrived in Canada in 2014 at the age of 14, with the equivalent of a fifth-grade education and a distrust of strangers forged by the only life he had ever known.
“When we arrived here, I was suspicious (of people) because, as a refugee, I was exposed to lots of bad things, like fears for security or food,” he said.
“I was scared of people, but I remember there was a teacher who explained to me that in Quebec we like people who smile, people who get involved. I decided to start by simply smiling.”
The fearful teenager had stumbled upon a winning formula.
Before he had even mastered the French language, his fellow students elected him class president. And despite entering high school with that fifth-grade education from the refugee camps, Mugisha earned top marks.
In 2019, he won an academic scholarship to help pay for his studies in social work. In 2021, he ran for a seat on Granby’s municipal council. He lost by a large margin, but still considers it an important step on the way to achieving his greater goals.
“I decided to make my life into an example for others,” Mugisha said. “Because I didn’t have any examples at the time, I had to become my own example. I had to take inspiration from myself.”
Mugisha also volunteers with Citoyenneté Jeunesse, a government-funded organization trying to raise awareness of and promote cultural diversity in Quebec’s predominately white, francophone rural regions.
The group’s website tries to explain terms like “unconscious bias,” “privilege,” and “tokenism” — the realities of which Mugisha knows all too well.
He recalled a university professor in Gatineau, Que., near Ottawa, highlighting the fact that he was the only Black person in his class — something he was already keenly aware of. More recently, while working in Baie-Comeau, an industrial town 400 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, he said it was months before he encountered another person of colour.
It is common experience outside of large population centres for visible minorities to feel noticed, like a curiosity, which can be both alienating and intimidating for an immigrant far away from home and far outside their comfort zone.
But Mugisha said that in his view there are also advantages that come with being an immigrant in the regions, surrounded by native-born people.
“It’s the best place to be yourself,” Mugisha said. “The first experience with immigration they’ll have is with you. If you are yourself and present the best side of yourself, that’s the impression people will get.” (But there is also a risk: “If there’s a bad experience with you, they’ll cling to that negative experience and apply it to others.”)
Representation is also an important factor in countering the types of systemic racism and institutional biases that prevent Canada from adapting to the needs of a growing immigrant population, said Samuel Juru, executive director of the Africa Centre, an Edmonton community group.
Only 11 per cent of federal members of Parliament sitting in the House of Commons in 2023 are immigrants — a number that falls well below the number of Canadians who call themselves immigrants.
But Juru pointed to the prominence of the Parliamentary Black Caucus; figures such as Minister of Housing, Diversity and Inclusion Ahmed Hussen, a Somali-born lawyer; and Amarjeet Sohi, the India-born mayor of Edmonton, in noting that “what we are seeing is the policymakers begin to start mirroring the population groups.”
It is a longer and more difficult process before attitudes at the top of the power structures trickle down into concrete and necessary policy changes that could make Canada a country that is more adapted to the people it is targeting through immigration.
One pressing area is the construction of housing, said Juru, himself an immigrant from Zimbabwe. One wrinkle, beyond a simple shortage of supply: “African families are complex. In my language, we don’t have a word for cousin. ‘Cousin’ is ‘brother.’ So when my cousin comes over, I say, ‘Come on, you can live with me for the next six months while you get sorted,’” he said.
With African families, and families from the Global South, Juru said there is a need for a broader range of housing stock than the standard condos or two-bedroom apartments that are being budgeted for and planned by officials.
“(Bureaucrats are) thinking about this from a numbers perspective, but there’s no one saying, ‘Hold up! We can’t keep doing this two-bedroom apartment thing for our migrants … How can we jazz it up so that it works for everyone?”
Some parts of the country have stubbornly resisted policy coherence on matters of immigration, whether driven by the desire for electoral success or by genuine fear or ignorance.
The province of Quebec, for example, is as dependent upon immigrants as the rest of the country, and favours French-speakers from African countries, including Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco — countries which have Muslim majorities.
But the Quebec government also passed a divisive law in 2019 that bans public servants, including nurses and teachers, from wearing headscarves and other visible religious symbols — a move that would seem more likely to scare off potential immigrants than have them flocking to this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
One of the low points of the last provincial election featured then-immigration minister Jean Boulet claiming that most immigrants to Quebec settle in Montreal, don’t speak French and don’t adhere to the province’s secular values.
Frey Alberto Guevara, director general of an immigration-settlement service (known by its French acronym, SERY) in the Quebec region of Yamaska, said those who fear immigration or immigrants are driven by ignorance.
“They don’t realize that it’s an investment for our society,” said Guevara, who came to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee from Colombia in 2003.
“They are people who will buy groceries, who will pay rent, pay taxes, purchase gas. What is that? It’s an economic investment, but people don’t see it like that … They don’t realize we also need immigration for the economy to continue working.”
Even Hérouxville, Que., has seen the light.
The town of 1,300 people attracted international condemnation and lots of ridicule in 2007 for adopting and anti-immigrant (read: Muslim) code of conduct stating that stoning, burning or dousing women with acid were not permitted in western (read: Christian) Quebec.
But even this municipal dot on the map 50 kilometres north of Trois-Rivières requires new workers to replace its aging, retiring and dying labour force, and that led last December to Hérouxville Mayor Bernard Thompson telling the New York Times: “We’ve had a break from our past … We now want as many immigrants as possible.”
Ironically, though, the parts of the country that have shown some of the greatest willingness to welcome and help settle immigrants are the very places that have trouble hanging on to them.
A 2018 study found that Newfoundland scored lowest in the country for retaining refugees, keeping just 36 per cent of those who arrived in the province five years after their admission to the country.
Respondents to the Memorial University study had positive impressions of their hosts; their main problems were the weather, the lack of job prospects and — again — the food.
“Respondents struggled to find certain foods, especially bread, and complained about the high cost of fruit and vegetables,” the report’s authors wrote. “There seemed to be a high demand for certain Arabic foods, as it was described to sell out quickly.”
Though even a number of born-and-bred Newfoundlanders leave the province to find work, the refugee study identified problems that are not at all unique to the province: trouble learning the language; difficulty getting their professional and educational credentials recognized in Canada; and the need to take on lower-paying work to support family members.
“Even folks with employment opportunities sometimes will choose to move on,” said Megan Morris, executive director of the St. John’s-based Association of New Canadians NL.
“It’s really varied, but I think it’s important getting people connected as quickly as you can to services — making sure there is an opportunity, whether you want to go to school or get employment, that there’s a lot of support to help.”
On the flip side, immigrants settling in Alberta seem willing to overlook what Juru said was a “racism problem” in Western Canada, referring to attacks on Muslim women and other incidents, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You want a job, you want food, you want to clothe yourself and pay your bills,” Juru said.
“For migrants like me who are coming from poorer places in the world, like Africa, it makes Edmonton quite an attractive place to realize your economic and financial aspirations.”
Etemgoua hasn’t yet realized the promise of a better life. A year after her arrival in La Sarre, she is still struggling to get by with the monthly stipend allotted to her, still making hard choices about spending, still waiting for the day she can return to the hospital ward and collect a full salary.
There are difficult times. Times when she and her husband question their decision to move to Canada. Times when they must look at their seven-year-old son and four-year-old daughter to be reminded of why they voluntarily left their lives behind.
But there are also other times when La Sarre, with its new-found supplies of African food; with its small-but-growing community of families from Sierra Leone, Algeria, Tunisia and Ivory Coast; with the open arms of a small Quebec town in great need, starts to feel something like home.
One of those times occurred as Etemgoua travelled to Ottawa to renew her passport and had a sudden longing for La Sarre.
“I realized (Ottawa) wasn’t a city where I could live. It was too noisy, too much traffic. I realized that it wasn’t for me,” she said. “I’m better off in my little village.”
Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He covers global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan
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