Pathways to Prosperity: Canada

Policy and Practice Rationale

There is a growing appreciation by governments at all levels – both domestically and internationally – of the importance of locating the capacity to plan and integrate settlement services as close as possible to the individuals and communities that the services are intended to benefit. This tendency is driven by an understanding that services need to be integrated from the bottom up rather than top down; by a realization that integration requires a capacity not only to target individuals but also neighbourhoods; and by an appreciation that effective programming and delivery require tacit knowledge as well as sound analysis. Fiscal pressures have also increased interest in promoting efficiency, through better local coordination, as well as in leveraging resources, especially from organizations that offer only universal services.

Community partnerships such as the CIC-funded LIPs initiative, the Regional Gateways in Saskatchewan, and place-based partnerships in other locations are key to supporting the regionalization of immigration, an important objective of both federal and provincial governments and, increasingly, municipalities. This research will investigate how best to structure these partnerships to promote their effectiveness, and what strategies to use to assess their impact.

Conceptual/Theoretical Framework

The research would contribute to the growing literature on place-based policies and multilevel governance. For example, it would contribute to a deeper understanding of how to structure and support place-based policies to optimize their effectiveness, and how multilevel governance can best operate in relation to immigration policy and practice. It would also contribute to theorizing on regionalization and on welcoming communities.

Research Questions

Specifically, the following questions will be addressed in this research:

• What features of community-based partnerships contribute to their success in promoting immigrant settlement and integration?
• What are best practices for establishing and operating community-based partnerships, and how might these practices be effectively transferred?
• Are there practices that are likely to be particularly effective for Francophone and Northern communities where specialized immigrant services may be in short supply? The study would extend to francophone networks in various provincial and territorial jurisdictions.
• How do we measure the effectiveness of these partnerships from an organizational perspective as well as in terms of the community outcomes they promote?
• How do we group or categorize communities for purposes of comparison, for evaluating outcomes, and for sharing promising practices? What community features are most important for this purpose (e.g., community size, immigrant composition, economic situation, strategic goals)?

Description of the Project and Possible Approaches

The research proposal has a number of thematic components that would be investigated by P2P teams and integrated into a cohesive project:

1. A pan-Canadian comparison of place-based community programs aimed at promoting settlement and integration. The comparisons would take place along dimensions that include: program objectives; key program structures and processes; institutional arrangements (staffing, committees, and support); main activities mandated under the program; analytic support for planning and action; program financing; and existing evaluations and analyses.
2. Studies of critical points in the operation of place-based programs. These would include initial project creation and management of relations with pre-existing community undertakings; formation of key councils and committees; and development of strategic and operational plans.
3. Studies of select best practices, defined with respect to better coordination, increased leverage, broader community involvement, and better (better quality and more resources) integration programs. The best practice studies would focus on program features rather than  offering pronouncements on the overall effectiveness of community programs. The best practice studies would be modelled along the lines of the Open Method of Coordination – an expert, team-study methodology employed by the European Union to assess and improve social policy initiatives. The analyses would target different types of communities, including those that differ in size and immigrant composition, Northern communities, and Francophone communities.
4. A study designed to provide baseline measures and to help measure outcomes produced by place-based initiatives. This study would build on work that the Welcoming Communities Initiative (WCI) has conducted for CIC NHQ and Ontario Region. In 2010, the WCI produced a report for CIC NHQ outlining 18 characteristics of a welcoming community and potential strategies for assessing these characteristics. In 2012, the WCI completed a related project for CIC Ontario in which it identified objective indicators for many of these characteristics and produced baseline indicator tables for a sample of Ontario LIPs, based on data from the 2006 census, Canadian Community Health Survey, EQAO educational outcome data, and other sources. The proposed study would conduct similar analyses for place-based initiatives across Canada, using more recent datasets. Depending on availability, the 2011 census would be used, as well as other datasets available from Statistics Canada and other sources. The importance of this project is that it would permit objective assessments of where communities stand (by creating welcomeability measures) and what areas require further attention. The research could also be used to assess the effectiveness of select actions in particular areas. The aim of the study would be to develop a grid – a reference frame of comparable communities – against which place-based community partnerships could evaluate the success of their respective strategic plans and interventions. The grid would also facilitate the sharing of best practices (by ensuring that practices were exchanged among similar communities). To construct the comparison grid, the research would examine alternative approaches for classifying the ‘circumstances’ of any given community so that communities with similar circumstances would be classified together in a peer group (e.g., based on community size, growing or declining demand for labour, presence of recent immigrants in the community). This would allow researchers, evaluators, and practitioners to assess how a community is performing compared to other communities operating in similar circumstances, and to share best practices tailored to these circumstances.

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