The Saint John Human Development Council and

the Saint John Multicultural & Newcomers Resource Centre Inc.

present

Non-profit Immigrant Settlement Agencies in New Brunswick:

Answering the Call for Population Growth?

By Professor Luc Thériault

University of New Brunswick

Dr. Thériault will present the results of a 2011 fact-finding tour of non-profit immigrant settlement agencies in New Brunswick. At a time when the province is in need of immigration to prevent depopulation, these agencies are partnering with governments to offer services that are of key importance for the settlement of newcomers, including in non-urban communities. Based on semi-structured interviews with 21 key informants working in 18 organizations, the author first draws a portrait of the services offered by the agencies and the clients they serve. He then describes the resources available to the settlement agencies and the mechanisms they use for governance and to perform their functions in an accountable and transparent manner. After paying particular attention to some gender-related issues, he summarizes the main challenges self-reported by the agencies. He also stresses that settlement issues tend to be very locally driven, and that the non-profit settlement agencies can count on a number of competitive advantages to fulfill their mission. A brief discussion is offered of some key policy issues before concluding on the tension observed in the relationship between governments and the non-profit sector in the delivery of settlement services. Policy recommendations are extracted from the study.

BRING YOUR LUNCH.; COFFEE AND TEA WILL BE AVAILABLE.

All are welcome

Saint Andrew & Saint David United Church, 164 Germain St. Saint John, NB

May 10, 2012 at 12PM

Issue 22 focuses on Volunteers and a  Saint John Votes Edition with all the information you need for the upcoming municipal election

Voter turnout is often used as a measure of “civic engagement”. It is one way to gauge citizens’ involvement and their efforts to help shape the community’s future. The higher the turnout, so the theory goes, the higher the level of participation in the life of a community. If this is something we value, then the voters in Saint John need to pull up their socks and more of them need to head to the polling stations on May 14^th.

In last year’s federal election the national turnout rate was 61.1 percent. The turnout rate for the province was a healthier 66.2 percent. The rate for the riding that takes in Saint John came in at 58.0 percent, the lowest of any of the ten constituencies in the province.

Similarly, in the 2010 provincial election, Saint John’s Harbour riding had the lowest voter turnout of any of the province’s 55 ridings with 49.9 percent of eligible voters going to the polls. The voter turnout rate for the province was 69.56%. – higher than any of the 9 ridings in Greater Saint John (Quispamsis came closest with 69.3%).

Need more evidence that civic engagement in Saint John, as measured by voter turnout, is weak? During the last round of municipal elections, fewer than half of eligible voters in Saint John (49.94) bothered to vote. Interest in the District Education Council for District 8 was anemic – of 13 sub districts only 3 required an election – 6 were acclaimed and 3 were filled by Ministerial appointment.

There is a group in Saint John that wants to see the turnout rate increased in next month’s municipal election. SJ Votes is a group of individuals and organizations under the umbrella of the Urban Core Support Network (UCSN) that is devoted to increasing voter turnout. It is focusing its efforts on Saint John’s five priority neighbourhoods where poverty rates, according to the 2006 census, range from 35-65 percent.

The group made its presence felt during the last provincial campaign when it collaborated with Elections NB to make the electoral process more inclusive and accessible for the residents in Saint John’s priority neighbourhoods. Some residents voted for the first time and many reported that they had a better understanding of the value of their vote.

In 2010 the number of polling stations was increased in the five neighbourhoods, local residents were hired to work on Election Day, a door to door canvas encouraged people to vote and an election issue of Around the Block was printed. On Election Day a free transportation service was available, community BBQs were organized and short term childcare services were provided. SJ Votes is organizing similar events for the upcoming municipal campaign.

Why are turnout rates so low in municipal campaigns? There are three schools of thought for this. Some argue that most citizens are relatively satisfied with their council. Low voter turnout is interpreted as a sign that voters’ interests and needs are met.  In 2008 fewer that 35 percent of the Town of Rothesay’s voters showed up at the polls and the incumbent Mayor was acclaimed. It’s quite possible that most of Rothesay’s voters are content with their local council.

Others suggest that electors do not see themselves as having enough at stake to vote. The technical matters of planning and zoning designations, traffic densities and program budgeting are seen to be too complex and irrelevant for ordinary citizens, particularly those that rent.

Finally, political scientists argue that low voting levels relate to “political efficacy” or the feeling by voters that their participation will not in any way influence the course of events. This is often summed up in the saying “You can’t fight City Hall”.

When Statistics Canada asked those that did not vote in the 2011 federal election why they stayed at home, more than 27% replied that they were “not interested”  (this included those that felt that their vote would not have made a difference in the election results), nearly 23% claimed to be “too busy”  and almost 4% “forgot to vote”.

So does it matter how many vote? Maybe it doesn’t. But it does matter who votes – and whether those who participate are more or less evenly spread across all segments in the community. Do equal numbers of men and women, all income and occupational groups, newcomers and old-timers, and groups defined by race, religion, or sexual orientation turn out in roughly equal measure?

If those who stay home are concentrated in certain groups, then, over the long term, their interests and concerns are likely to be ignored.

So who does vote? Researchers point out that:

Voting rates increase with age. Young people tend to be more concerned about employment prospects than mayoralty candidates’ speeches. It has also been suggested that young people know little or nothing about how the political institutions that run the country function. In a study following the 2004 federal election, it was claimed that there were “striking” gaps in young Canadian’s knowledge of politics.

Voting rates increase with education. In the last federal election, the voting rate among people with a university degree was 78%, compared with rates of 60% or lower among those with a high school education or less.

Employed people were more likely to vote and among this group, those working in the public sector or in high-skill occupations are the most likely to vote.

Homeowners vote in much higher numbers than renters. Homeowners are vested stakeholders and, unlike renters that have the property tax bill hidden in the rent, receive an annual notification (and motivation) to vote.

Among family types, single parents with young children are the least likely, and couples with no young children the most likely,  to vote.

These are systemic challenges. In the meantime SJ Votes is doing its bit to increase voter participation. The group believes that increasing voter turnout in the priority neighbourhoods will make elected officials pay greater attention to the issues within these neighbourhoods. The more that voters in the priority neighbourhoods exercise their franchise, the greater the chance their interests and concerns will be on the public agenda. SJ Votes will launch its campaign at a press conference in Crescent Valley on Monday, April 16.

Brenda Murphy is Coordinator of the Urban Core Support Network

Randy Hatfield is Co-chair of the Urban Core Support Network

This article appeared in the Telegraph Journal on April 12th,2012

The Forum will be held at UNBSJ Grand Hall (corner of Charlotte Street and Kings Square)  at 12 noon and ending at 1:30 PM.

If you have any questions you would like to ask the candidates, you can submit them via facebook, twitter,  or email (info@sjhdc.ca).

We look forward to seeing you next Friday at UNBSJ Grand Hall!

The proceeds of this event go to the Saint John Youth House project whose goal is to construct a permanent facility to support and house homeless youth in the Greater Saint John Area. The event will take place on April 21st at 7:00 pm at Théâtre Susan B. Ganong.

It takes a village to raise a child, and it will take a community to battle youth homelessness in Greater Saint John. We believe there can be dignity, safety and a future for at-risk youth, but only if we can work together. This evening will not only raise much needed resources to support our community’s most vulnerable members, but will bring us together to hear about the the struggles.

Earlier this month CBC quietly announced that it was moving the production and broadcast of the provincial afternoon radio program Shift from Saint John to Fredericton in September. We need a community campaign to have this decision overturned.

At the risk of sounding too parochial, the Human Development Council (HDC) believes that Saint John should continue to be the home of Shift. We urge the CBC to reverse the Corporation’s decision.  Opposing Shift’s move is not too much of a stretch for the HDC. Our mission statement is to “coordinate and promote social development in greater Saint John.” We believe in a robust local media – both public and private – that informs citizens and helps us understand the issues that face us as we work to become a more inclusive community. And we believe that paring the local station to a regional morning show of two and a half hours a day, five days a week, leaves the station too vulnerable to future cost cutting and consolidation efforts. More groups and individuals need to voice their opposition to the move.

We haven’t seen the business case for moving Shift to Fredericton. The show has been here since it began in 2005. Before that the provincial afternoon show, Mainstreet, was put together in Saint John. In fact, when the Saint John station first went on air in 1978 it had its own afternoon show. (It had a morning and noon show too!). Current host Paul Castle and the other two production crew have strong links to the community. Presumably the costs of relocation would have to be borne by Mother Corp.  Are there savings to be enjoyed or is the move a harbinger for further consolidation?

We would argue that supporting a community’s capacity to report on local issues is as much a social investment as it is a business investment. The Saint John station had already lost three positions. The loss of Shift would reduce the number of staff to around a dozen. Moncton has a morning show and it serves as the Atlantic headquarters of Radio Canada.  In Fredericton there is a morning show (broadcast on both radio and television), the supper hour television program and management positions for the province. Saint John’s capacity ranks a poor third.

The Corporation and those who support the move (many, presumably, from Fredericton) should play the cost saving/efficiency/synergy card with caution. That reasoning, taken to an extreme, could call into question the “viability” of CBC’s presence in many of the country’s smaller communities. If efficiency is the sole criterion, proponents of Maritime union would have had their way years ago. We would argue that the national public broadcaster has a major role to play in providing news, analysis and voice to smaller communities. Like it or not, the province is blessed (or burdened) with three principal cities. Their residents deserve local radio programming and production.

Losing Shift leaves us too exposed.  Frankly, maintaining a facility for a local morning show is too tempting a target for mid to high level CBC bean counters that will look at NB’s population (755,000 according to the 2011 Census) and the three production facilities in the province. The federal budget will be released on March 29; last September it was reported that Heritage Minister James Moore wanted to cut CBC’s budget by 10%.

According to the CBC’s mandate, set out in the 1991 Broadcasting Act, the programming provided by the Corporation should:

i. be predominantly and distinctively Canadian, reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions…

vi. be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means and as resources become available for the purpose…(emphasis added)

Moving Shift to Fredericton, in combination with the public broadcaster’s mandate to seek efficiencies, calls into question the viability of CBC Saint John.

Bert Lance, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Jimmy Carter, is credited with originating the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In the case of the decision to move Shift to Fredericton we ask: What’s broken?

UPDATE

The March 29th budget confirmed big cuts to the CBC:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/03/29/federalbudget-flaherty-cbc-cuts.html

According to.Richard Stursberg,executive vice-president of CBC English Services from 2004 to 2010 it is time to talk about the future of the CBC “before it is too late”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/television/federal-budget-poses-threat-to-cbc-stursberg-argues/article2387386/page2/

Randy Hatfield is the Executive Director of the Human Development Council.

For a CBC radio interview on the Report Card  with Executive Director, Randy Hatfield Check out:

http://www.cbc.ca/informationmorningsaintjohn/2012/03/20/projects-to-help-homeless/

Saint John’s Uptown Clinic, based out of St. Joseph’s Community Health Centre, treats individuals with addictions to opiates such as Dilaudid, OxyContin, and sometimes heroin. The innovative clinic is run by two dedicated nurse practitioners, Dana Manzer and Erika MacDonald. Dr. Duncan Webster—one of the region’s infectious disease specialists—assists with medical care and acts as the clinic’s medical director. In addition to provision of methadone maintenance therapy, the clinic provides primary health care to a patient population largely without family doctors who have a myriad of health issues. Critical medical support is also provided by Dr. Ray Braun, Dr. Sabine Jurgens, and Dr. Jay Williamson.

The methadone clinic, which opened its doors in the summer of 2009, currently treats some 300 patients, while the wait list holds just as many. Julie Dingwell, Executive Director of AIDS Saint John, says the wait list is most certainly an undercount. “We hear from people who don’t bother to put their name on the wait list because they think they’ll be dead or in jail by the time a spot opens up,” says Dingwell. The waiting period is long; thought to be six months to a year, if not longer. In the face of so many wait-listed individuals, only those considered high priority are now being admitted. Dingwell has seen women who have become pregnant simply out of desperation to access treatment.

Methadone has a stabilizing effect on patients’ lives. Dingwell says when opioid drug users enter treatment their life is in complete chaos—they don’t know where they’re going to sleep, if they’ll be able to eat, and how they’ll get money for their next high, but, she says, by giving them the medicine they need every day they have an opportunity to get their life in order. Once they begin to stabilize, patients reclaim their lives in other ways, whether it be rebuilding relationships, moving into safe housing, rejoining the workforce, or moving away from crime and a life in the sex trade.

The Uptown Clinic is unique in that it follows a low-threshold/high-tolerance model. Under this approach, patients can self-refer and will not be discharged for testing positive for drug use. Testing positive is used as an opportunity to fine-tune the dose of methadone or to see if there are other things that can be of assistance.

Dr. Timothy Christie—the Regional Director of Ethics Services at Horizon Health Network and an adjunct professor in Department of Bioethics at Dalhousie University—undertook a scientific evaluation of the methadone clinic after it began operations, the results of which are incredibly promising. The one-year retention rate—the proportion of patients still in the program after a minimum of one-year of treatment—was 95%, the highest of its kind in Canada (compared to a high of 52% elsewhere in the country). During the evaluation period, 170 of the 179 patients were still receiving treatment after one year. Of the remaining nine, three were incarcerated, three voluntarily withdrew, two were transferred to another provider, and one entered witness protection.

The study also uncovered encouraging trends in illicit drug use. At program entry, as expected 100% of patients were using illicit opioids, but this fell to 44% after stabilizing on methadone, and those who continued to use, tested positive less often. The prevalence of cocaine use also decreased: 13% more individuals abstained from the drug after stabilizing. So we see that patients are not replacing opioids with cocaine, as initial criticisms of the clinic would have had us believe. (While methadone has no biological effect on cocaine, there is a synergistic effect if users can be retained in treatment.)

These changes were felt on the ground. After the clinic opened, AIDS Saint John’s Needle Exchange Program noted a significant drop in the number of needles distributed (this has since increased in the face of the clinic’s lengthy wait list). Dr. Christie’s evaluation also pointed to a 62% reduction in crime. Saint John Police Chief Bill Reid has long been a proponent of methadone treatment citing the strong link between drug use and the city’s crime rate, particularly armed robberies and other violent crimes.

The cost of treating an opioid addiction is $5,882 per year per patient, while the cost of not treating is thought to be $45,000 when areas such as crime, healthcare, and lost productivity are factored in. So we pay either way, but treatment is far cheaper and the earlier it’s started the better.

According to Dr. Christie’s study, the cost of providing methadone treatment for one individual for one year breaks down as follows: 1) methadone ($128); 2) laboratory cost ($512); 3) program costs including human resources ($954); and 4) pharmacy costs ($4,289). If you follow the math, the medicine itself is pennies a day, while 72% of the cost of treatment is in pharmacy dispensing fees. Because patients must go to a pharmacy daily to drink their methadone (only a select few have permission to receive “carries”) they represent an entirely different population than the average pharmacy user. While most of us fill a prescription once a month for a one-time dispensing fee, methadone patients fill theirs daily, now at a cost of $9.40 per day.

With a wait list of 300 strong, sick individuals are not able to access the medicine they most desperately need. So Dr. Christie and Dingwell are studying this allocation of resources to determine if there could be a different way of doing things. Areas of study include looking at whether the wait list and shortage of resources can be addressed by delivering methadone to patients through a public pharmacy system.

The next municipal election is only nine weeks away. The deadline for plebiscite questions has passed and the deadline for receipt of referendum questions is March 16^th. The deadline for nominations is April 12^th.

Interest is starting to pick up and potential candidates are testing public opinion and deciding whether to put their names on the ballot. The tough city budget that was finally adopted last month and this month’s ongoing defamation trial of the City’s pension board against former City Councillor John Ferguson are keeping municipal issues on the public agenda.

The Human Development Council (HDC) is organizing a mayoralty candidates’ debate in April. We hope to engage candidates for the mayor’s job in a discussion of social issues—through the lens of municipal government—and see where they stand on issues like recreation and public transit. We’re also guest co-editing a special issue of Around the Block on the theme of civic engagement and, in particular, voter turnout.

In addition to challenging candidates on local issues, we’d like to engage our members and the general public in thinking about a broader theme like voter eligibility and whether non-citizen permanent residents of the city should be allowed to vote.

Between 2003 and 2006, the HDC was a member of Inclusive Cities Canada. The federally supported initiative involved five social planning councils across the country in a study of social inclusion: the Social Planning and Research Council of BC, the Edmonton Social Planning Council, Community Development Halton, and Toronto Social Planning. While Saint John focussed, in part, on youth engagement (a youth cabinet emerged briefly as a result of our work), our partner in Toronto looked through the social inclusion lens and examined, in part , the newcomers’ experience. In the paper The Municipal Franchise and Social Inclusion in Toronto: Policy and Practice  they contended that municipal voting rights in Toronto should be extended to non-permanent residents in the city. The mayor at the time, David Miller, offered his public support along with community organizations and other city officials. Nothing came of it; municipalities are “creatures of the provinces” and provincial legislation determines the rules and eligibility for municipal elections.

Should NB be the first province in the country to extend the franchise in local elections to permanent residents? It happens elsewhere. In a 2008 paper by Daniel Munro for the Democratic Deficit Conference at Harvard University it was noted:

Since the mid-1970s, nearly two dozen states have adopted non-citizen voting arrangements of some kind either to repair a perceived democratic deficit or to facilitate newcomer integration. Non-citizens who have resided in The Netherlands for five years, for example, are permitted to vote in municipal and regional elections alongside Dutch citizens. In Sweden, non-citizen residents have been permitted to vote in local and regional elections since 1975 and they are eligible for election to local office as well. In New Zealand, noncitizen residents can vote in local and national elections. And the United States is no exception: In a half dozen towns in the state of Maryland, non-citizen residents vote in municipal elections alongside American citizens.

Proponents of extending the franchise see the evolution of voting rights as a work in progress. They use the democratic argument that those affected by laws and policies should have a say in who will make those laws and policies. After all, non-citizen residents own property and pay taxes. As well, voting is seen as a way of promoting immigrant integration and instilling a sense of belonging. It could also help newcomers to develop citizenship capacity and skills.

Opponents claim that extending voting rights to non-citizens cheapens citizenship for those who already have it. The right to vote is seen as a reward of—and should await—citizenship, unlike the fundamental freedoms, legal rights and equality rights set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The provincial government’s website is welcoming to newcomers. It proudly boasts that:

 In New Brunswick you can be yourself, celebrate your culture, and experience other cultures. Living in New Brunswick means being part of a vibrant community and a growing economy.

Should our neighbours who live here and pay taxes yet lack citizenship have the right to vote in municipal elections?

We’ll start the debate: YES!

Join us for the launch of Experiencing Homelessness 2012, a report card on housing and homelessness in Greater Saint John and our province.

• Where: The Resource Centre for Youth (TRC), 28 Richmond Street
• When: Monday, March 19 at 11am
• There will be refreshments and copies of the report card on hand.

Short talks on

• Saint John Youth House, a proposed 10-bed transitional housing facility for youth
• The STAR Network, a new multi-sectoral table that facilitates homeless/at-risk individuals‘ transition into safe affordable housing
• A retrospective on developments in the housing and homelessness file over the past year

Allare welcome but RSVPs are appreciated: Kathryn Asher, Researcher, Human Development Council, kathryn@sjhdc.ca, 636-8549.