The Cochrane District will be welcoming francophone immigrants to the region.
The region is one of 10 being added to the Welcoming Francophone Communities (WFC) initiative, a project dedicated to helping French-speaking newcomers settle in designated areas.
Timmins Mayor Michelle Boileau said the initiative helps strengthen the collaboration between partners in Timmins and across the Cochrane District in terms of being able to support French-speaking immigrants.
“Why we want to make sure that we're properly supporting and welcoming French-speaking immigrants is because, for one, we absolutely need to continue to focus on immigration as one of the different strategies to attract and retain a skilled workforce needed here,” she said.
“We know that there's a labour shortage and there will continue to be over the coming years, so immigration will be one of the strategies to being able to meet the demands of the labour market across the Cochrane District.”
The WFC initiative was launched in 2018 by Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) in 14 francophone and Acadian communities outside of Quebec.
The pilot phase of the initiative started in 2020 and ended this March. Because of the success of the pilot, in January the IRCC announced the renewal and expansion of the program.
Supporting French-speaking immigrants is important in order to be able to maintain the level of French services being offered across the district, Boileau said.
“In the City of Timmins, we've been seeing a decline in terms of the francophone population,” she said.
“If we want to ensure that we continue to be able to receive French services and our stores and among healthcare providers, financial institutions, we do have to make sure that we're putting a focus on welcoming francophones to the community and that we're offering a welcoming community for them.”
The French-speaking world in Canada is crucial, Boileau said.
“French is among the top five spoken languages in the world, and it is a growing language as well, and so it's important that we be able to do business in French on an international level," she said.
Boileau said the City of Timmins is grateful to its partners who were part of putting together the application for the program.
“We're proud to be among the welcoming communities that were designated. It's something that we had seen our neighbours in Sudbury be able to attain a few years back, and something that we knew Timmins and the other municipalities among the Cochrane District and all of our partners working within that we could do as well,” she said.
“We’ve been working on becoming more welcoming communities and a more welcoming region for francophone immigrants over the past few years. And so it's nice to see that the collaboration, the partnerships, the work that we have been doing, is being recognized by the federal government. I look forward to seeing where we're able to take things with this new funding.”
