Executive Director's Message

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.

Toronto / October 2024 - It was the beeping sound of text messages coming through my phone that woke me up this morning. I quickly shook off sleep and reached for my phone wondering why my youngest, away at school, would be blowing up my phone this early in the morning. It wasn’t her.

Toronto / September 2024 – It’s Labour day and my thoughts turn to the role of unions, in our work of building inclusive and welcoming communities so that all im/migrants and refugees find a sense of home regardless of where they land in this vast country of ours.

This moment in time feels like back to the future. Not in the sense of Sankofa – looking back to take the lessons that will help to shape the future - but in a sense of historical erasure which will ensure that we repeat practices that are exclusionary, that are discriminatory and divisive.

Toronto / June 2024 - As the car turned the corner of Davenport Road, turning into Church Street (non-Torontonians, indulge me for a moment), I sensed a change in the air at this intersection of the northern entry to Toronto’s Gay Village. A place that represents freedom, liberation and possibilities for many young queer persons across Canada, but probably more so around the globe.

Toronto / May 2024 - “We will have to be nuanced in our response.” I wrote to my Board of Directors, as a follow up to their discussion on the almost daily announcements of changes to the International Students Program from the federal Minister of Immigration. But after hitting send, I wondered how do you nuance the lives of individuals that are being impacted by these changes?