Another presentation about Saint John’s immigration strategy.
The main goal of the strategy is to attract new people, enhance the newcomer experience, and retain immigrants.
On Tuesday, Mike Randall from Portfolio Solutions Group presented its revised strategy to Saint John’s growth committee.
The presentation outlined eight strategic pillars:
- Establish a no wrong door approach to immigration support services that enables customized support based on immigrant needs
- Better communication Saint John offers to newcomers
- Create a pilot program for segmented and targeted skilled immigration attraction, settlement & retention
- Expand and improve immigration-focused communications for Saint Johners
- Expand and improve core settlement services that address key gaps in journey
- Enhance focus and positioning of “Why Saint John” to provincial and federal partners
- Create a dedicated resource to implement the immigration strategy
- Regionalize the immigration strategy
Mayor Donna Reardon was pleased with the presentation and during the question/answer period mentioned when immigrants come to her office they bring up two themes.
“One is that transit is huge for them because they often come from a place where they’ve never owned a car and it wasn’t necessary to own a car, so it was a different dynamic, and the other thing they are very concerned with is a place of worship.”
Randall mentioned those were also themes they heard while developing the strategy.
“The other one we need to recognize is that newcomers aren’t always looking to buy a house, and right kind of accommodations, three-bedroom type apartments, and I know there’s not lots of those available.”
Councillor Brent Harris also pointed to housing and mentioned it the immigrant strategy needs to be a large part of the city’s budget moving forward.
“As chair of our strategic plan I look at this and I think there’s a lot of ways in which this feeds into that entire framework.”
“I look at some of the discussions that we had at our last council meeting around housing policy, and one of the ones I put forward in part of the motion was to have this inclusionary zoning policy looked at for three bedrooms specifically,” added Harris.
The Saint John Immigration Strategy will go to Common Council at a later date.
