There is excitement in the North Bay immigrant community.
Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot Coordinator Patricia Carr is reaching out to selective locally employed individuals from her North Bay & District Chamber of Commerce office. She’s creating a buzz.
“Have you heard from Patti yet?” is the question skilled immigrants in the city are asking each other, as some have heard and some have yet to hear. She is inviting them to complete the first application form for the RNIP program, which details their employment experience and education and language credentials. She follows up with their employers and the next step is an interview with the community selection team.
If the candidate is fortunate enough to receive a community recommendation the next step to becoming a permanent resident is to complete a full application package for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Hearing from Patti is everyone’s dream, because they are fully aware she has more than 3,500 interested people on her email list and there are only 100 spots available for the city in 2020.
I used the term “immigrant community” in the first paragraph, which implies it’s a monolithic entity. It is not. Those being contacted and hoping to be contacted came from around the world to be here—India, Mexico, Philippines, Japan, Brazil, China, Bangladesh, Nepal—and those are only the ones I know personally.
A common trait is they are Canadore College graduates. Most also have degrees from their home countries and I have met pharmacists, nurses, mining engineers, industrial engineers, architects, videographers, accountants, software engineers, and more.
Patricia sent a mass email October 21 to the 3,500-plus interested parties with a link to the project’s spanking new website, designed and produced by the smart folks at TWG Communications. It looks very good and has some sections yet to come, but the Chamber is okay with that as it wants to deal with people already in the city first.
You can check out the site here.
The North Bay RNIP program is getting a world-wide boost with the release this week of a video on RNIP, hosted by fellow Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant Kyle Broda and yours truly, with a 30-minute guest appearance from Patricia Carr to answer questions from the community perspective.
The video is on sale for RCICs and counts as four hours toward their obligatory annual professional development. If you want a 10-minute free sample of the four-hour video here’s a link.
It took a long time to get to this stage, where we are seeing people apply for permanent residence with a commitment to live and work and raise their families in North Bay. I anticipate, as does Patricia, that the local supply may fill the 100 spots for this year, but for 2021 we will be seeing people from outside Canada coming here to live.
The pilot’s original target was 250 principal applicants and their families each year but that was reduced to 100 in year one to evaluate results.
With more than 3,500 people and their families expressing interest, I suspect we would have little difficulty filling 250 spots, especially if the project boundary is expanded to include Temiskaming Shores, as was outlined in the original proposal to the federal government.
These are all positions employers were unable to fill locally so congratulations to Patricia and the Chamber and her partners, the City of North Bay, Yes Employment Services, North Bay & District Multicultural Centre, Labour Market Group, FedNor, and of course Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Editor’s Note: Don Curry is a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant living in North Bay.
