The first Francophone Immigration Observatory in Canada will be inaugurated Wednesday afternoon. In a context of “politicization” of immigration, the organization will seek to inform and “have an impact on the government, community, and academic environment.”
Canadian Immigration Minister Marc Miller will participate in the inauguration ceremony, which will take place at 5 p.m. at the Center francophone de Toronto.
The members of the observatory are still in the process of “confirming” its objectives, but the organization intends in particular to organize educational workshops, as well as produce and “highlight” data, explains the professor from the University of French Ontario (UOF), Linda Cardinal, who led the project.
The observatory also hopes to participate in discussions on the implementation of the “new French-speaking immigration policy” that Ottawa must establish since the reform of the Official Languages Act.
The assistant vice-rector for research of the establishment, which was inaugurated in 2021, affirms that the UOF, since its creation, wanted to make the question of immigration “one of its niches of excellence”.
To carry out the project, Mme Cardinal consulted researchers, in order to “know their priorities”. “The idea was to host this initiative at the UOF, but with a pan-Canadian scope,” she adds. The University of Ottawa, Simon Fraser University, the Université de Moncton, and the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration (CERC), at Toronto Metropolitan University, are thus partners of the observatory.
“In research, we must always work collaboratively to have an impact, and to generate support, and also to ensure that in the Canadian Francophonie, in particular, we create a succession,” she comments. “We are making our universities responsible for the importance of the theme of immigration. Since the 2000s, immigration has been part of the very redefinition of what the Francophonie is in a minority context. »
Despite this central place, several research initiatives born in the last 20 years which were interested in French-speaking immigration have run out of steam due to lack of funding or institutionalization, explains M.me Cardinal, hoping that the observatory will receive enough funding to continue.
More details will follow
This report is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.