Conference welcomes world
Metropolis conference co-chair Jack Jedwab on Vancouver’s role in integration debate
Canada’s Pacific gateway is host to the seventeenth edition of the National Metropolis Conference. As one of North America’s leading immigrant-receiving cities, Vancouver offers extraordinary opportunities to expand knowledge about the process of immigrant integration. Immigration plays a vital role in Canada’s demographic future and its economic wellbeing. This year’s Conference theme “Broadening the Conversation: Policy and Practice in Immigration, Settlement and Diversity,” underscores the need for ongoing cooperation between policy makers, the business community, researchers and those organizations that deliver services to newcomers. Effective cooperation across these sectors is essential if Canada is to continue to be a global leader in welcoming newcomers. As the country’s largest annual gathering of the network that constitutes the immigration sector, Metropolis has offered a unique forum for generating ideas as cutting edge research is presented and new projects and partnerships arise. The supplement in The Vancouver Sun offers the broader public valuable insights into some of the key contemporary debates around immigration and integration. On behalf of the Association for Canadian Studies, we want to thank the team at The Sun for their hard work in putting this together. We also want to thank all the partners that have contributed to the success of this year’s Conference and particularly Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Immigration Research West, Multicultural Societies and Services Agencies of BC (AMSSA) and the Metropolis Project at Carleton University.