Laval meets with cities on how to manage immigration

Elected representatives from 10 of the province’s largest municipalities were at Laval’s Maison des Arts on Nov. 16 to continue working on the development of a common policy for the management of immigration, which is a mandate Quebec has begun handing down to the towns and cities.

More responsibility
“Cities have over the years acquired more and more responsibility in the area of immigration,” said Chomedey city councillor Basile Angelopoulos, vice-president of the Laval executive committee, who addressed the municipal officials at the start of the all-day meeting.
In a brief interview, Angelopoulos said the twice-yearly meetings are “an opportunity for the larger cities that welcome immigrants to exchange and to discuss the various options they have and to compare notes regarding immigration.
“It’s interesting to note that you have cities that are as far away as Saguenay that are also concerned about immigration,” he continued. “So immigration is not just something that is local to Montreal, Laval or Longueuil or other cities traditionally considered big. It’s become a lot more spread out to the entire province. This is an opportunity for the various cities to exchange and find out how they can better organize their supply and services.”

Is it downloading?
Over the last few years, Quebec has signed some protocols of understanding and agreements with Laval and other Quebec cities, by which the municipalities have essentially acknowledged their increasing role in the management of immigration, which previously had been a provincial and federal jurisdiction.
In some quarters, this kind of informal transfer might be regarded as a preliminary stage to an outright downloading of responsibility. “I don’t know if it’s a direct downloading,” said Angelopoulos when the question was put to him by the Laval News. “But it’s certainly part of the phenomenon where cities are taking on more and more responsibility.

The role of cities
“As they evolve, they acquire more responsibilities and in order to deal with them appropriately these types of forums and exchanges are crucial. Now immigration is a federal jurisdiction to begin with. Quebec has a significant role to play in that.
“But then at the end of the day, immigrants who end up arriving in our country end up living in cities, and that creates certain challenges and those challenges need to be addressed.” Asked whether Laval has incurred any costs from its immigration responsibility, which admittedly is still quite limited, Angelopoulos said simply, “It will be interesting to see the outcome.”