City accused of short-changing commitment to newcomer issues

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This article was published 21/02/2024 (650 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Organizations that help newcomers say the City of Winnipeg is shirking its responsibility to the growing immigrant community, who have been left out of its draft budget.

The 2024-27 draft budget, which was released this month, transfers management of the newcomer welcome and inclusion policy, first adopted in February 2020, to the chief administrative officer.

Advocates say operating funds must be earmarked to the policy.

“A policy without dollars, a policy without money for implementing, is a book on a shelf,” said Abdikheir Ahmed, executive director of the Aurora Family Therapy Centre, at a news conference Wednesday.

“We support the City of Winnipeg’s shifting of the skeleton staff working on the policy to the CAO’s office for citywide oversight, but without any funds, this amounts to just moving chairs, and nothing beyond that.”

The policy includes strategies to address racism and discrimination, build more equitable city services and improve workplace diversity. It includes changes that could be done without additional resources to others that would require additional funding.

In the draft budget, money is set aside for one new full-time employee who will be tasked with working on the newcomer policy, said Colin Fast, director of communications for Mayor Scott Gillingham.

“The city has already implemented several recommendations from the strategy using existing staff resources and council receives regular progress updates,” he wrote in an email.

Ahmed and other newcomer advocates say the measures fall short of their expectations.

They say the city needs two new staff positions, one to implement the policy and a second staffer to co-ordinate the development of the newcomer youth employment strategy promised in the policy. They say they need mandatory newcomer inclusion training for city staff to be developed.

“We realize there’s a lot of competition for city dollars, but we think this is high priority,” said Vicki Sinclair, executive director of the Manitoba Association of Newcomer Serving Organizations.

Sinclair said Winnipeg has fallen behind in efforts to recruit immigrants and it has resulted in a drop to Manitoba’s five-year retention rate for immigrants. While 75 per cent of newcomers admitted in 2012 were still here in 2017, just 64 per cent of those who came in 2016 remained in 2021.

“You only have to look at the newcomer pages on websites belonging to cities such as Edmonton, Calgary and Halifax, with their friendly photos and multilingual newcomer guides and messages from the mayor, let alone the City of Toronto with its fully staffed newcomer office and an annual official ‘newcomer welcome day,’ to see how unimpressive Winnipeg’s city vision is,” she said.

In 2023, there were 19,765 new immigrants to Manitoba, most of whom settled in Winnipeg. Immigrants make up more than one-quarter of the city’s population, but the city’s financial priorities don’t reflect those numbers, Sinclair said.

“It’s not enough to value diversity without intentionally investing time and money into integrating newcomers” she said.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca