Debbie Douglas: Articles In Solidarity...

I invite you to check in this corner every month for information, for what's happening in our sector and for good conversations about us and how we're moving forward as an effective and necessary part of Ontario's social safety net.

Debbie Douglas is the Executive Director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI).

 Follow Debbie on Twitter @ocasi_policy

Message from the Executive Director - February 2015

Type: 
Executive Director's Message
“It should be without contest that a priority list in the 21st century Canada should be based on a candidacy framed by talent and merit, rather than fluency in English or French.” This is a quote from a letter sent to Federal ministers Kenney and Alexander by the National Congress of Italian Canadians in response to growing concerns by many immigrant (particularly non- English or French speaking ) communities that our new immigration policies and priorities are discriminatory.

Message from the Executive Director - January 2015

Type: 
Executive Director's Message
Lives Matter. The end of 2014 was a contradictory mishmash of feelings: anger, frustration, optimism and hope. All feelings shared by many around me whom I know and even more folks whom I do not know. From Lagos to New York; from Toronto to Johannesburg we heard the shouts of ‘Black Lives Matter' as Africans in the diaspora bore the brunt of violence against their (primarily) male bodies and bore witness to the callous disregard shown to Black lives by the responses of the systems – legal, political, economic and social.

Resetting The Municipal Agenda

Type: 
Executive Director's Message
Increasingly those of us working in the immigrant and refugee serving sector have recognized the importance of municipalities in immigration, immigrant and refugee settlement, and inclusion.  It took the provinces and the federal government a bit more time to acknowledge this but it came together for us in Ontario in 2005 with the signing of the Canada-Ontario Immigration Agreement (COIA, which expired in 2010) which for the first time formally recognized the important role municipalities have to play in our political project of immigration integration. Having formal agreements among the three levels of government created the framework for the NGO sector to engage municipalities on settlement and inclusion policies and programs.

Telling Tales

Type: 
Executive Director's Message

It is a cliché that the only constant is change. But all clichés have their truths. We are living in a season of change. We have witnessed exponential changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection program. We are engaged in discussion (and debates) on changing how public services are delivered and funded. We are questioning and looking to change the way relationships of influence are established and utilized, and whose interests become paramount or are sidelined and ignored.

Taking the Pulse of the Immigrant and Refugee-Serving Sector

Type: 
Executive Director's Message
Since the millennium, Ontario's immigrant and refugee-serving sector has been witness to significant shifts in the kinds of programs and services required to meet the needs of immigrants and refugees. There has been a shift in demographics in terms of countries of origin beginning about a quarter century ago, but as important has been the later change in the education levels, employment experience and official languages facility of new arrivals.

Message from the Executive Director - July 2014

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Executive Director's Message
This past two weeks exemplified what makes Ontario one of the best places to live, work, worship and play. The province and particularly the City of Toronto put out its welcome mat to the world for the International Human Rights Conference and World Pride 2014. At the risk of sounding like the cheerleader in chief, there has been no better example than that of the proactive, intentional planning that went into ensuring an inclusion agenda, which paid off in spades if we can go by the energy generated by our visitors and those of us who live here, as we met each other and celebrated our victories of minority communities around the world and cried and commiserated about how far we still have to go to ensure legal, political and social equality for too many.

Message from the Executive Director - June 2014

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Executive Director's Message
Finding a topic of interest on which to comment proved particularly difficult this month. Not because of a lack of subject matter but of competing interests- between the angst that the new bill amending the Citizenship Act is causing many of us concerned with issues of immigration and citizenship; and the fiercely  fought Ontario provincial election that's just days away, there's much food for thought and commentary here. So I'll indulge myself and write of both.  The Citizenship Bill first.

Message from the Executive Director

Type: 
Executive Director's Message
Over the past year OCASI and some of its members have been intimately engaged with the debate on the Canada Jobs Grant program and the implications for Ontario's newly arrived immigrant populations and other groups with little or no labour market attachment (which makes them EI ineligible); supported  the campaign to increase the minimum wage to $14/hour; took every opportunity to speak about the need to increase social assistance rates including ODSP (Disability support program) and the need for a boost to the Ontario Child Benefits program. Needless to say there was great anticipation about the 2014 provincial budget. Imagine then the response to the not unexpected decision of the opposition parties to withhold support for the budget, setting the stage for a provincial campaign and an election in mid-June.

Talking Gender

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In the Field

About three weeks ago, thirty ethno-racially and linguistically diverse women- concerned with issues of women’s equality, immigrant and racialized women’s inclusion, and with general issues of immigrant and refugee integration-gathered to talk about what they saw as the political, policy and program priorities in Ontario. The meeting, hosted by the Minister Responsible for Women’s Issues and the Ontario Women’s Directorate with support from OCASI, was a first of its kind.

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