It took four years of preparatory work before the North Bay & District Multicultural Centre officially opened its doors.
Ten years later, it is celebrating the work it does to provide immigrant settlement services for newcomers from Parry Sound in the south to Temiskaming Shores in the north.
Board chair and founder, Don Curry says it has been “very satisfying” watching and helping the centre grow.
“The vision was just a small operation. We started with 2.5 staff members over on Fraser Street, and it was just to settle the immigrants who were coming to Canada, and to this area,” said Curry.
“But the city had a vision at that time, which was to attract more newcomers to northern Ontario. So, we worked hand-in-hand with them and we were visiting shows in Toronto, trying to entice people to move to North Bay. So as the numbers grew, we grew as well, and we had to have more staff to help the increased numbers that were coming.”
Moving forward, the next project is to become a designated RAP (Resettlement Assistance Program), centre.
A proposal will be submitted sometime next year. The board will be reaching out for moral support from the city and other community partners to help make it happen.
“North Bay would be designated to receive government-assisted refugees. This is not like the Syrian refugees that we had previously. They were privately sponsored,” explained Curry.
“These would be government-assisted refugees, where the government pays their expenses for their first year in Canada. So it would help them get settled, help them get jobs, get their kids in school, get housing, all that sort to thing.”
The centre has two settlement workers who meet with newcomers and help them with things like getting bank accounts, getting their children in school, helping them meet new people and develop a circle of friends and getting them involved in social activities
Executive director, Deborah Robertson, pointed out that the centre assists an average of 300 newcomers a year.
And while they come from a variety of countries, Robertson says the top three are India, China and possibly the United States, closely followed by Europe.
Robertson says they aren’t seeing big numbers from any one specific country.
”We help people look for assistance with job search or language skills, those basic things that people would look for in terms of meaningful employment and a safe place to live. Other needs could be social interactions, so introductions to the various clubs and services in town,” said Robertson.
“Some people are wanting to apply for their citizenship, so we offer citizenship support and other people are looking to maybe bring family members here.“
Simon Blakeley is one of many newcomer success stories over the past decade. His background is in land use strategic planning.
He met his wife, who is originally from North Bay, while she was working in England. Her own immigration circumstance on that side of the pond required her to return to Canada. He followed.
For the past four and a half years he has been rebuilding his life in North Bay.
“I started washing boats at Giesler Marine, worked my way up into the office and started doing some social media, business development type work and progressively I picked up contracts along the way. I built my experience, built my network, and now I consider myself acclimatized here in North Bay. I know a lot of people in the city. I see a lot of potential and I want to help, so I give a lot of my personal time to the board. I want to put back into the community, how they helped me,” said Blakeley.
This summer he used the skills he brought from the UK to work in his field as a land use planner in the Muskoka region.
Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli said one of the conversations that came up during the business roundtable held in North Bay this week, was that many of the employers could not find employees.
What Fedeli found interesting was the high rate of unemployment, yet there are jobs that can’t be filled. That was proven to him during a tour of a large North Bay business.
“I thought their biggest issue was going to be taxes, and it wasn’t. They can’t find people. They need 20 employees today. And just last week, I visited with Tembec. It’s now called Rayonier. I met with the president and he told me right now, today, they need 35 employees in Temiscaming, and they can’t find any. And most of the jobs are just general labourers, there are some millwrights and specialized, but just labourers. He told me at their plants in Kapuskasing, Hearst, and Cochrane, they need 50 people and cannot find one,” said Fedeli.
“So, part of this will be solved by immigration, by employee immigration, people who are trained and ready to come to work. But it can only happen because we have a place like the multi-cultural centre that has been here for 10 years now. You couldn’t even dream of bringing immigrants in to look for these jobs if you didn’t have the support services already in place without this. Primarily the whole idea is, if these jobs are going unfilled, then we need immigration to help fill these jobs.”
He recalls as mayor, hearing from two of the largest mining companies in North Bay, that their biggest concern even then, was having enough people to fill jobs.
“They told me they have hundreds of employees that are going to be retiring in the next 10 years. They said a lot of them are engineers and there just isn’t that talent pool in North Bay today, and if we don’t train up for that, we’re going to have to bring immigration in, that’s going to be the only way to do it,” said Fedeli.
“I remember back then, families calling me and telling me their son didn’t have a job, and yet you want to bring immigration here. I remember that 10 years ago when we opened this place. The answer was, if we don’t fill these jobs, those companies will leave and then nobody will have these jobs. It is really important. The number of immigrants that we’re allowing into Ontario is limited, and it may need to grow.”
