Concern grows as Waterloo Region draws fewer immigrants

WATERLOO REGION — This region is losing strength as an immigration magnet as more newcomers settle elsewhere, new census figures confirm.

“I hope it’s a bit of a wake-up call for the region in its ability to go out and promote itself. You have to be thinking global now,” said Peter Donahue, chair of the Immigration Partnership, a public agency that helps immigrants settle here.

“It is a flag that people should be paying attention and developing more proactive strategies to attract more newcomers,” said Tara Bedard, executive director of the Immigration Partnership.

Before 2001 this community attracted one in every 57 immigrants to Canada. It attracted one in every 86 immigrants between 2011 and 2016, according to census data released Wednesday.

This decline is not a blip. This community has steadily attracted an ever-smaller share of the 3.2 million immigrants who arrived in Canada since 2001.

Advocates say attracting and keeping immigrants is important because immigrants fill jobs, bring creativity and diversity, and foster an international outlook that helps the community sell itself and its goods to the world.

“We have an aging population. We have an economy we want to grow. We are looking for more diversity,” Donahue said. “We do some really good recruitment in certain sectors, like our tech sector and education sector. But we need to bring more people to the region.”

Census findings show that immigrants are increasingly choosing to settle in bigger cities such as Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Immigrants are also increasingly choosing western cities such as Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Regina.

Donahue suspects some immigrants are drawn to the booming Western economy while some are turned off by the faltering local economy.

Ontario’s manufacturing decline slammed the regional economy between 2005 and 2015. Stagnant household incomes grew slower than almost every other big city in Canada, other census findings show.

Immigrants typically settle where they think they can work. “You can’t give your family anything if you don’t have employment,” said Lucia Harrison, chief executive of the Kitchener Waterloo Multicultural Centre. “After that I would say people are looking at education. They’re looking at affordable housing.”

Advocates suspect new struggles in the Western economy will persuade some immigrants to resettle here. “The economy out west has been on fire for a long time. It’s slowing down now. I suspect you’ll see some shifts,” Bedard said.

The Immigration Partnership helps immigrants settle successfully, in part to persuade them to stay. The agency has not focused on attracting immigrants.

Harrison wonders if the community must now work harder to recruit immigrants, to compete with other cities that are doing more outreach. “Maybe we have sat on our laurels for a while,” she said.

This region added 14,045 immigrants between 2011 and 2016. It’s the fewest number to settle here in the last three censuses. Immigration to Canada soared by 30 per cent over the same period.

The top three countries supplying immigrants to this region since 2011 are India, China and Syria. This compares to the U.K., Portugal and Germany before 1981. Immigrants now account for 23 per cent of the regional population, little changed from 21 per cent in 2001.

Immigrants arriving from non-European countries are changing the face of the region. The number of visible minorities has more than doubled since 2001 to reach 100,025 residents.

Visible minorities represent 19 per cent of the regional population today, up from 10 per cent in 2001, census findings show. “I believe that we all benefit from diversity,” Harrison said.