Mayor Wants Dieppe To Be Warm And Inclusive Place For Newcomers
DIEPPE – The City of Dieppe launched its first immigration strategy Thursday to support targets and efforts set out in a regional strategy that includes Moncton and Riverview.
The tri-community’s strategy, announced in 2019, aims to attract 2,700 immigrants a year by 2024, with 33 percent of that allocated for Francophone immigration. A bilingual city, Dieppe wants to support retention and attraction by focusing on things like intercultural dialogue and making services more accessible for newcomers.
“We are called to play a more and more important role in the attraction and retention of the immigrant population. It is important to adapt municipal services to newcomers so that they can fully take advantage of the excellent life that we find here in Dieppe,” said Mayor Yvon Lapierre in French, which was translated into English.
“Our role is also important around the promotion of intercultural community dialogue … we have an increasing role to play in the valorization of cultural diversity and the prevention of racism and discrimination.”
He hopes the strategy will help Dieppe achieve the goal of promoting the city as a “warm” and “inclusive” place.
RELATED: Greater Moncton Targets 2,700 Immigrants A Year By 2024
Dieppe’s 2020-2024 strategy aligns with the priorities of the City Council, Expansion Dieppe and the tri-community’s Local Immigration Partnership. The city wants to become a destination of choice for francophone immigration in Atlantic Canada, and its strategy aims to:
- Help fill labour shortages
- Ensure linguistic balance in the region
- Ensure the stability of companies in vulnerable sectors
- Adapt municipal services to cultural diversity
- Boost cultural diversity
- Promote and support community intercultural dialogue
- Implement policies or strategies for the management of cultural diversity, and
- Adopt measures to prevent racism and discrimination.
Currently, Dieppe’s population makes up 18 percent of the Dieppe-Moncton-Riverview census metropolitan area. About 15 percent of all immigrants with permanent status and 16 percent with non-permanent status who arrived in the area between 2011 and 2016 settled in Dieppe.
A bulk of them (70 percent) are economic immigrants, while about a quarter are family-sponsored. Asia, Europe and the Americas are large contributors to that inflow, followed by Africa.
The strategy points out several challenges with immigration in Dieppe, including those related to a lack of housing that’s adapted to the needs of newcomers, gaps in the public transit system, communication with the newcomer population, retention of post-graduate programs, the needs of a culturally diverse population, the economic integration of immigrants and connections between international students and the community, among others.
As part of promoting conversation about diversity, the city teamed up with non-profit Dialogue NB to hosting a discussion about unconscious bias and racism after the launch of its immigration strategy.
The discussion was live-streamed and included Universite de Moncton’s Leyla Sall, associate professor of sociology whose research focused on migration in Acadian culture, as well as racism, and Marie-Pier Rivest, assistant professor at the School of Social Work.
Salls says prejudice, conscious and unconscious, affects many areas of life. In the context of immigration, he said it could affect hiring. For instance, some employers may not hire a new immigrant who doesn’t have Canadian experience. But the immigrant had just arrived and haven’t had the chance to work yet.
“If we don’t give the opportunity of someone having a first chance, how will they get that experience? So they’re in a vicious circle,” he said.
He added that the consequences of prejudice are “great” within organizations. Either immigrants are passed over for jobs completely, or if they’re hired, they’re given a lower position, less valuable tasks, or have their promotions blocked.
“They’ve integrated into the labour market but when it comes time to have a promotion, they’re blocked,” he said. “So we say they have to show more effort, they have to be more involved in the team, they have to cooperate more with people, who quite often, don’t want to have them in their group.”
In some cases, racism has pushed professionals to leave their jobs. He gave the example of a black nurse who worked in a hospital in New Brunswick who quit their job due to such an experience.
In the case of Francophone immigration, Sall says immigrants need to feel so welcome that they’ll integrate with the local francophones otherwise there’s a risk of creating two tiers of Francophones – the locals and the newcomers.