Duane Hicks
Testimonials
sought from
immigrants
With a launch date set for March, work is continuing on the Northwestern Ontario Immigration Portal Project (NOIP), a provincially-funded Internet-based project that hopefully will help attract more residents to Rainy River District.
The NOIP will be a web portal having general information pertaining to immigration to the region, such as living, working, and doing business here, as well as links to information on how to get a Social Insurance Number or accreditation in a profession.
But in addition to that, the portal will feature web pages from 27 participating municipalities with information specific to their communities, including Fort Frances and Rainy River District.
Locally, the input from the community has been limited (for example, only four people showed up to a teleconference last Thursday). But Geoff Gillon and Jeannette Cawston of the Rainy River Future Development Corp. are working hard to gather and prepare content for web pages for Fort Frances and communities in the west end of the district.
This content consists of text and photos, as well as links to relevant content on other websites, which will inform those who visit the websites about:
•information about the community (i.e., demographics, location, features, points of interest, etc.);
•quality of life (access to Rainy Lake, clean, safe, etc.);
•employment opportunities and primary employers;
•investment and business opportunities, including any business currently for sale;
•housing availability and prices;
•education facilities;
•recreation and sporting facilities;
•community organizations; and
•ethnocultural organizations and associations.
They also are seeking testimonials of positive experiences from immigrants who have come to Fort Frances and Rainy River District, and would like to share their feelings on how they like it here, how their life has changed, etc.
These immigrants need not come from far away, but could have just moved here from elsewhere in Ontario or Canada.
Testimonials ideally will include text and photos. Two or three testimonials should be sufficient.
Those who would like to provide testimonials, or any kind of relevant input, are encouraged to contact Gillon or Cawston at 274-3276 or info@rrfdc.on.ca
The pair will present a preliminary version of the local website to the public in early to mid-November (to get an idea of what it may end up looking like, check out www.immigratetosmithsfalls.ca)
At that time, they will gather input as to what else local residents would like to see added to the web page that they might have not thought of or missed “before it’s set in stone,” said Gillon.
“The last thing you want to do is go through the whole process and then have somebody say, ‘You should have done this,’” he added.
After any new information is added, all of the content will be turned over to consultant Walter Bilyk, who is co-ordinating the project.
Bilyk said Thursday during the teleconference that all participating municipalities must have their finalized information into him before the end of the year so that it may be translated into several languages and readied for the regional immigration portal launch in March 2010.
Portal project
Bilyk has been consulting with participating communities in recent months, co-ordinating them to get ready for the launch next spring.
“Every community we’ve visited is in the process of collecting their content now,” said Bilyk, adding participants range from Fort Frances and Rainy River to Ear Falls and Red Lake to Sioux Lookout and Pickle Lake.
“A large part of this project is the consultation we’re conducting with all these communities,” Bilyk explained. “That’s why this portal is really unique. It’s different than all of the other immigration portal websites that are out there now in Ontario.
“Right now, there are 15 Ontario municipalities that have their own immigration websites, and they’ve all been funded by the provincial government as is this project that’s for Northwestern Ontario.
“That’s why I am so excited about this,” he enthused. “It’s for Northwestern Ontario. It’s not just for Thunder Bay, or for Fort Frances or a single community, it’s for the whole area of Northwestern Ontario.
“So in terms of the consultations, we’ve completed the initial visits to each community and during each visit we talked about the community profile that each community would want to have on their [web] pages and what priorities the communities would have, as well.
“For example, if they’re primarily interested in attracting entrepreneurs to set up businesses in their communities, which a lot of communities definitely are, or do they have a real need for skilled workers in a specific area?
“A couple of communities had a real shortage of service workers in the service sector,” he noted.
Bilyk reiterated that attracting new people to a community need not only mean immigrants from afar, but from elsewhere in Ontario or Canada.
“Some of the communities, for example, are interested in attracting newcomers from Newfoundland to come to Northwestern Ontario,” he said.
“A lot of Newfoundlanders are interested in Northwestern Ontario because the climate is similar, they like to live in small communities, they like to live in communities that may not be close to large centres, for example,” he noted.
“Different communities have a different perspective on what they want to focus on in this portal.”
Objectives of NOIP include:
•providing the community with a national and international profile to support the attraction of new residents;
•providing local information, access to community services and programs, and related links for potential immigrants or individuals considering relocation to the community;
•attracting newcomers with skills and experience that reflect the needs of local employers and industries;
•integrating and retaining newcomers already located in the community; and
•complementing the services provided to immigrants and newcomers by local and other service providers.
The Thunder Bay Multicultural Association will be translating the information put up on the websites to make it understandable by those who may not read English.
At this point, it’s confirmed the information will be translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, simplified Chinese, Tagalog (Filipino), Russian, Hindi, Arabic, and Japanese.
After the portal is launched in March, participating municipalities will be able to update their pages via the Thunder Bay Multicultural Association.
Bilyk noted the Thunder Bay Multicultural Association likely will contact the participating municipalities semi-annually to see if they want to do updates, which the group then will translate, adding that if a major change has to be done at shorter notice, it probably could be.
