Timmins is one of 11 communities across the country chosen for the new Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot.
The federal initiative announced today will give participating communities access to supports to try a new community-driven model to help fill labour gaps.
“We were looking for rural communities that needed immigrants to fill unfilled jobs and also bring in much needed skills that are lacking, and the second criteria was that a community must also have at least a little bit of an infrastructure for welcoming immigrants, (such as) access to language training, access to housing, access to some sort of support initially, so the stronger the presence of those two criteria, the more likely we were able to select that community," said Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Ahmed Hussen in an interview with SooToday.
Sault Ste. Marie is one of the other northern communities on the list for the program, along with Sudbury, North Bay, and Thunder Bay. The initiative will start in 2020 and last for three years, with the possibility of extending it to five.
“We don’t have the details of what the process looks like yet, we’re going to be working with IRCC to determine what the eligibility criteria and the process will look like. For now we just know that we’re going to be awarded a certain number of positions and newcomers will be able to apply to Timmins for permanent residency,” said Maggie Matear of the Timmins Economic Development Corporation.
Instead of conventional processes to attract newcomers, Matear said there will be a special process for Timmins.
“The kinds of jobs that will be filled by this project will be determined by each community on its own. If a particular community has, for example, five different employers with five different types of jobs that need to be filled, those employers will go out and select potential employees,” Hussen told SooToday.
In Timmins, Matear said there's a need for welders, truck drivers, personal support workers, and frontline retail workers.
"We need people who are skilled in mining, engineering, finance, project management — so there’s a wide range of skill sets that are not necessarily available in Timmins or not available in the quantities that employers need them to be,” she said.
One of the TEDC's missions, she said, is to support local employers to grow their business.
"One of the things that they’ve been telling us for years now is that they’re having a really hard time finding skilled labour. We also know that the population in Timmins is declining as people move out of the community. The thing is, newcomers when they come to places like Timmins, find all sorts of things that are appealing in the community that we tend to take for granted, so we see this as an excellent opportunity to start rebuilding some of our lost population and to bring some diversity and some innovation and different ideas into our economy,” she said.
To attract people to the north, one of the priorities she noted is having a robust welcoming system.
She explained it would require working with community stakeholders, so when someone indicates they want to move to the community there is a system in place to help with housing, pick them up from the airport, access information on school and recreational services, temporary housing, and more.
“We think that that’s going to be a competitive advantage for us and it will make people more interested in maybe coming here because we’re going to provide them with all the support that they need to get their feet on the ground,” she said.
The program is based on the Atlantic Immigration Pilot, launched in March 2017 as part of the Atlantic Growth Strategy. The four Atlantic provinces were able to nominate up to 2,500 workers in 2018 under that pilot to meet labour market needs in the region.
Immigration pilot programs usually have a ceiling of 2,750 immigrants hired nationwide each year, but Hussen said this program will include workers families as well.
- With files from SooToday
