Executive Director's Message

Toronto / August 2025

I sit to write this a few hours after returning home from Toronto’s symbolic ride on the freedom train- a remembering of the underground railroad- the network of ancestors and allies that brought many out of enslavement in the US to Ontario and other Canadian sites. It is symbolic of Nanny and the other grandmothers and grandfathers who led the maroons and their refusal of and resistance to enslavement.

Toronto / July 2025

I spent a recent afternoon in conversation with a few friends and acquaintances about Canada’s changing attitude towards im/migrants and refugees-decreasing support and open xenophobia; the decreasing support for Pride and other queer initiatives nationally and locally especially from corporate Canada; and the increasingly vocal debates happening in feminist spaces on transgender rights.

Toronto / June 2025

It seems like we can’t catch a breath, before another unexpected announcement of a legislative, by-law or policy change is announced by one or another level of government. All negative. All curbing individual and group rights. All must and will be challenged- in calls to elected politicians, in the streets and in the courts.

Toronto / May 2025

Toronto / April 2025 - There is much discussion at various tables across the broad national Immigration and settlement sector on ‘Canada’s immigration program’, ‘the future of settlement services’, ‘visioning a new immigration program’ and ‘a new vision for Canada’… you get my drift. All important. All timely. However, the urgency I felt for these conversations just a month or so ago, has receded.

Toronto / March 2025

“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed, but when we are silent we are still afraid, so it is better to speak.” (Audre Lorde)

Toronto / February 2025

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

Before leaving on my usual mid-winter vacation to warmer climes last month, our country and the world were nervously chuckling at the newly elected USA President’s musings about Canada being a 51st State of the USA and disrespectfully calling our Prime Minister, “Governor” as an insult - a belittling, an emasculation if you will.

There were sixty-three thousand individuals who arrived and claimed refugee status in Ontario in 2023. By mid-December 2024 approximately eighty-four thousand claims had been filed by persons residing in the province. We can make a guesstimate that we’ll end up just over the eighty-five thousand number for 2024, as November had seen a slight dip in numbers from the previous month.

Toronto / December 2024

I am having one of those moments where competing emotions are screwing with my heart and head and soul. I am sharing space at this very moment that I’m writing this, with a diversity of organizations and groups in a light-filled room in the aesthetically beautiful Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre gathering place in Winnipeg.