Bob Parkes

Bob Parkes: I worked for what’s called the settlement division at the Ontario Regional Headquarters from the summer of 1978 until late spring 1987. I began as a program specialist in settlement, and by the time I left, I think I was still the acting Director of Settlement.

Interviewer: So what was your day to day work life like that you remember?

Bob Parkes: Well, it depended on the day and what you were doing.

The main settlement programs were the Adjustment Assistance Program, which was a financial assistance program for newly arrived independent immigrants, and the Immigrant Settlement Adaptation Program, which was a funding program for community agencies. I worked on a purchase of service arrangement, particularly to fund settlement services. It was not actually until 1978 that the 1976 Immigration Act and the 1978 regulations came into force, and one of the things those regulations did was create the programs that became a main part of our work for the next few years.

One of those was the group sponsorship program, and combined with that was the authority to designate certain classes of persons who were in refugee-like situations but didn’t necessarily meet the definition of a convention refugee. Those designated class persons were also eligible for group sponsorship. In the summer of 1978, when I joined the regional office, they had already begun a training program within the office about what the group sponsorship program was and what the changes in legislation relating to the designated classes consisted of. So we did training for immigration officers and, in the early days, doing presentations to the community.

By the summer of 1979, things really started to swing into gear and we did a lot of presentations to communities about the group sponsorship program and what it allowed them to do. The Adjustment Assistance Program was actually delivered by the Canada Employment Centres. The settlement division was housed within the immigration side of Canada Employment and Immigration, and I actually sent an email earlier on to Raph Girard about that, because he seemed to be wondering how that worked and it brought back memories of how it worked. We would get policy directives from Ottawa in bilingual format, describing a particular program or a change or some new policy. Often, they would come from the Deputy Minister’s office signed by the Deputy Minister and addressed to our executive director in the region.

Our executive director had a number of people underneath him, but there was a director general for immigration. There was a director general for employment and a director general for labour market adjustment programs. The employment director general was focused on, I think, what they called ‘operations’, which really related to the district offices and the employment centers across the region. Labour market and development were the programs that CEIC had to help people find work or get retrained and so on.

There was a sheet listing all the people who had to sign off on this memo before we could send it out to the field office, and yeah, occasionally there’d be some running around. The other thing I always thought about this is that National headquarters prepared a memo and sent it to the region. We at the region took a look at it and added our thoughts from the regional level. In Ontario, the bureaucracy was set up with, after the region there were district offices, and then there were the local centers. And I always used to think that at the regional office, we gave our interpretation, sent it to the districts, the districts adjusted it for how they thought it should go and the front-line offices basically found out how they were going to make it work, that’s the way it went. So that was a very bureaucratic element, but it worked because, even though some of us were immigration and the other folks were employment or whatever, ultimately, within the regional office structure, everybody reported to that executive director who had the responsibility for the entire region.

In settlement, what became kind of interesting is that we had a lot of interaction with the labour market people—because within the labour market, they had their own specialists responsible for things like the Adjustment Assistance Program, but there was also the training branch that had all the various training programs that were available to people going to CEC looking for work. The main one that we got involved in was language training. At that point in time with the language training, what CEC provided was language training for a head of household who was destined to a labour market. And for the most part, seats were purchased from community colleges within the province of Ontario.

The other kind of dynamic we had to deal with, with other people at regional offices, was the finance branch. This was from a couple of aspects because we were responsible for monitoring the budgets for both the Adjustment Assistance Program and ISAP within the region, and making payments through ISAP to the community agencies that we had contracts with. One of the other facets of that was budget monitoring—how we were spending compared to the budget we had—and that got to be quite a challenge in later years with some of the designated class programs of people arriving, because we were spending a lot of money.

A whole other group was an administrative group that we had to deal with—just around facilities and that kind of thing. I guess we didn’t deal so much with that except if there were some special issues.

In December of 1978, my director sent me down to Longueuil to an army base there, where reception was set up for a group of people who came off a boat called the Hai Hong.They had some charter flights coming directly into the base and a reception center to deal with the new arrivals. I really didn’t know a whole lot about settlement before I got there, I just thought it would be an interesting place to work.

Going to the reception center in Montreal, what was interesting is that I ended up working with a lot of employment people there, and it was concerning destination selection for people—and then arranging transportation and notification of arrival and all that kind of thing. I really didn’t get much involved with any of the immigration processing. I always found that kind of interesting because before I came to settlement, I’d been an immigration officer, both at the airport and an inland office in Mississauga, since December 1972. So it was interesting being there with all these employment people. They didn’t really seem to know what to do with me either, but we found things for me to do, and so that was kind of interesting.

And one of the things that came out of that—because this is one of the questions you had asked about “things you really remember”—I think there were 4 flights that arrived and we were arranging for people to go across the country because that’s what was happening. The people were usually going onward by plane but somehow the railroads thought they should get involved. So the last group of people going from Montreal to Toronto went by train and I went with them. And as we got close to Toronto there was kind of a murmur among the people. My Vietnamese was never good. There was a murmur on one side of the train and on the other side of the train, I remember this elderly man sort of looking out the window, trying to understand what was going on. He was on the side of the train facing south, he was looking out towards the lake. The people on the other side could see the skyline of Toronto and when I took him over to see the other side of the train, his reaction was amazing to see, I always remember that.

So anyway, that was my experience being at the reception center. Subsequently, they set up centers in both Montreal and in Alberta, Griesbach, I think it was called as I remember, and someone from Ontario again went to both those sites to be on-site and representing Ontario. The planes arrived at those centres and then people were processed and sent on to their final destination. Eventually, we got to the point where the plane started arriving directly at Pearson International. There was a lot of work that was done with people—immigration folks at the airport to set up a mini reception center there. They actually did a really good job and I was a bit surprised in terms of… what word do I want to use… When I worked at the airport in at the port of entry, I would say that the predominant attitude was one of enforcement. I never really quite fit into that, which is why I ended up in settlement, but in the end the port of entry people adapted there and I think they did a really good job over those years for those people coming directly to Toronto and passing through there.

I don’t know if I can describe a normal day cause things changed all the time. The first year I was there, other than the Hai Hong group, there wasn’t a lot of action. Then things really started going later on in 1979—I guess it was all the press about the camps and the boat people and all that kind of stuff. The group sponsorship program really took off, and we did a lot of responding to requests for speakers to come out and explain the program. I guess one of the things that I and the director Andre Pilon did one time was go meet with Howard Edelman and a group of people in Toronto—they were concerned about what they could do.

I don’t know where we got the phone call, but we were told that these people were meeting and that they wanted someone to come and talk about the sponsorship program. Howard Edelman really kicked off something called Operation Lifeline.

The way Howard tells it is that it was all Andre’s fault, because he went there that day and told them about the group sponsorship program and then things really took off with group sponsorship. That became a major program that we were involved with within the settlement division. More staff were brought in. Many came from the—I can’t remember whether it was still called the job creation program then, or the employment development branch—to assist us and join us and one of the key people there that came over was Naomi Alboim. That sponsorship thing was quite the thing for a while. One of the things that came out of that was getting ourselves set up at the regional office with our own matching center.

A system was set up and believe it or not, it was all done by fax, we didn’t have computers. Overseas offices would send a list of people arriving on a flight to CEIC headquarters in Ottawa, or who were selected to come to Canada. The settlement national headquarters would then decide which province the people we go to. These are not people that weren’t named sponsorships. A sponsor could name a particular person or you could just say you wanted to sponsor anybody. Ottawa would decide which province someone would go to and they would send us that information. Then we, in turn, would communicate throughout Ontario with employment centers (in the case of government assisted refugees) or the immigration offices (if it was a group-sponsored case). Then information would go back to headquarters about a destination being selected and eventually we would get a notification of arrival. That would let us know who is coming when and then notify people through either the employment centers or the immigration centers, about those actual arrivals.

In terms of employment center versus immigration center, I don’t know if it ever made any difference to us in settlement. That went on for a number of years and I never actually got directly involved in that process as I recall, but it was interesting to see the work they did, and one of the people that was involved in it for several years was a colleague by the name of Albert Lee. I just wanted to mention him because he did a really good job over the years. It was funny, people didn’t see Albert face to face, they didn’t know who he was. When Albert came to work in settlement he was already middle-aged—he wasn’t a youngster at all—and he was Chinese. It was just interesting to see the interaction he could have with people. He was a sweet talker, what can I say, sometimes, and just in terms of convincing people that this was a good family to take, that kind of stuff, so that was quite a thing. The Immigration Adjustment Assistance Program was financial assistance, and was set up to support people on a par with local or provincial social assistance programs, that level of assistance. So it was like social assistance, it provided for basic needs

Accommodation was one issue as well as clothing, furnishing, kitchen utensils, and all that kind of stuff. When I first joined settlement, they took me down to a unit, a Canada Employment Center, that at that time was located in a federal building on Jarvis Street. There was a unit there with some guys that must have been doing the job for some time, as they were experts and they knew what they were doing. It was only recently that I saw some of the history about the evolution of things, from the creation of Manpower and Immigration and then Employment and Immigration and the transfer of responsibility to employment centers. So the timing about when that all started, I’m not really sure, but by the time I met these guys in 1978, they were experts and they knew what they were doing.

The immigrant flow at the time, I don’t really know because we didn’t have designated classes yet—they were either convention refugees or perhaps members of some special program that had been created along the way. There were the Ugandan Asians, there was a Czech movement, there was a Hungarian movement back in the fifties. That was probably different, because back then it was still the immigration folks that were dealing with newly arrived persons. I actually had a seasoned veteran from immigration tell me one time what he used to do when he started with immigration was to meet people at the train and take them out to the farm where they were going to be working. In later years, I worked with a guy whose family had come from Holland after the war and he claims that they took his family to a farmer up in the Sudbury area somewhere, and they lived in the farmer’s barn for the first 2 years in Canada. So that’s the way it was back then.

Anyway, the Toronto CEC guys, as I said, were experts. I’m not sure how much experience some of the ones in the other employment centers had, but we began to find that every, just about every major receiving center in Ontario had an employment counselor who was damn good at what they did in terms of the settlement of people. One of the ways I got to meet a lot of them—aside from you know, the arrival stuff and that kind of thing—is that with the Immigrant Settlement and Adaptation Program, one of the requirements was that we had to be like auditors and go out and visit the agency, look at their books, and see how they were doing.

The contracts were set up on a purchase of agreement based on a certain number of hours of service in the year. And, on top of that, there was this element of—it was only supposed to be for recent immigrants, the services that we were purchasing. So we had to make sure they were only seeing recent immigrants, but that’s an interesting dynamic in itself. So I used to visit agencies all across Ontario doing monitoring visits. And the protocol was that if someone from regional office went to a local office or local area to do business with someone in the community, they would inform the local office that they was coming into town and more often than not they would visit the local office just to meet the people and chat with them. I got to see the relationships that existed. Raph Girard was asking about when this aspect of CECs working with the community came about, and when I started to think about it I realized I couldn’t answer the question—because when I got there it already existed, in most places.

The employment people, to my mind, knew their community, they knew the resources in the community that they could call upon. They had links with the community already by that time. After speaking with Raph, I started Googling these things to try to get my memory going again, and there are a few things I came across that were kind of interesting. I sent the information to Raph, but one was information by the Canadian Council for Refugees and about some of the history there, and they started talking about how long some immigrant agencies had been around in Canada. They mentioned Montreal, they mentioned one in Montreal, I didn’t know that one. But Jewish Immigrant Aid, for example, I dealt with them on a regular basis in Toronto. Italian Immigrant Aid is another one that was mentioned and COSTI. By the time I came to settlement and was doing the immigrant settlement adaptation program, many of these agencies had been around for a long, long time.

Interviewer: So you would say then the relationship between settlement offices and agencies and these community partners were already very established by the time you got there?

Bob Parkes: Yes, I think so. I mean, I think when the Southeast Asian Indochinese movement was really gearing up, we did some training for people from across the region, and I’m sure it was Naomi—we must have done some training about how you develop relations with people but just about everywhere I went people already had their connections to the community.

And one of the other dynamics about it was that the community agencies were usually pretty vocal advocates on behalf of their clients, with the employment center in terms of support the employment center could provide, and access to training programs and that kind of thing. I think one of the other things I found was that funding of community agencies in many—I don’t know this for a fact, but it seems to me that maybe it was in the late ’60s and early 70’s that various job creation programs were set up for nonprofit organizations. Many people took advantage of those to establish services—that also helped develop them.

Another thought I should mention is that of intergovernmental relationships. In Ontario, there was the Ministry of Recreation and Culture. They had active programs as well— one of the things they had at that point in time was Ontario welcome houses for newcomers. I remember that there were provincial staff at the airport meeting newly arrived immigrants, to give them information about living in Ontario, and they also had funding programs for community agencies, and most of the organizations ISAP funded also got funding from the province. There were also interdepartmental relations in that another player in the community was the Secretary of State for Multiculturalism. I think I read somewhere that the Multiculturalism Act came into force around 1974.

The Secretary of State people also funded community agencies, and that’s where it got interesting. We, with immigration and ISAP, were to focus on services to newly arrived immigrants—while the Secretary of State looking at a more long term resident in terms of community issues. I thought in many ways it was kind of an artificial division because some people adapt more quickly than others. In Toronto, we did a lot of work with people from the multiculturalism directorate, the province’s culture and recreation, and I guess it was still Metro Toronto at that point in time—they had also set up a multiculturalism directorate at the time That’s another element where we were involved.

When I arrived at settlement, they had already established a coordinating committee for all these groups, who met on a regular basis to try to make things work better. Ultimately, what they did, they decided to have some community representation on the committee as well. And one of the key people that joined this as a community representative at the time was Shirley Hoy. Shirley Hoy went on to do a lot of things. Anyway, that’s well beyond the timeframe we’re looking at, but there was a lot of interaction going on, and I guess what comes out of it for me really is the opportunity to meet and interact with a lot of people—people who were like-minded and shared similar goals in terms of settlement programs.

Interviewer: So there is something that we’ve discussed with other interviewees, which is the element of individual initiatives. So what sort of leeway was there for settlement workers and those working within settlement to take on problems, using their own initiative and ideas and that sort of thing?

Bob Parkes: I think that there were certain boundaries of what you could do, and you had to operate within those boundaries, but at the same time, maybe it’s not so much initiative—it was the attitude about how you approached it that made the difference.

Some people would go further than others in terms of assisting someone. As an immigration officer, one of the things that always stuck in my mind is where my authority came from to do something—that’s what I was guided with, in a lot of ways. We had the immigration act and regulations—they didn’t really spell out a lot of stuff for settlement, but we had policy guidelines that came from Ottawa that we had to follow.

To me, it was more attitude than initiative because it was pretty much laid out for us about what the job was to do—it’s how we did it where people varied in their approach.

Interviewer: Another question that I have, and I know you’ve touched on certain elements already, was what were the biggest challenges and obstacles during this time, whether it be systemic, you know, case by case, that sort of thing?

Bob Parkes: Well, I think money was always a problem—budget.

On the ISAP side, community agencies were always looking for more to serve clients. On the Adjustment Assistance side, as numbers grew, we never seemed to have enough money. A real problem area was that of temporary accommodation for new arrivals and then, later on, permanent accommodation. This made the temporary stay longer, so that was a problem as well.

One of the things that we used to have to do was to forecast our expenditures. There was a budget review, I think it was probably every month, and we had someone from our finance department who was like our financial advisor, and they used to come to us to tell us—okay this month our forecast is we’re going to be, and we usually were going to be over budget on adjustment assistance, and they’re putting me on notice that when this was being reviewed with the executive director that they might call me to explain why this was happening.

I soon realized that they never called, and the thing was, what are you going to do? I mean, you have to pay your bills, and the flights kept arriving. Eventually, it became quite a problem, and it caused a problem for me that caused a lot of stress —because we ran into difficulties, particularly around the temporary housing issue—and the fact that contracts had been given to a landlord in Parkdale, who was kicking people out of his apartments so he could fulfill his contract with the federal government for temporary accommodation for refugees, and that got really quite messy.

I think it probably had an impact, but in those early days of the Indo-Chinese movement, where we were doing a training session for people from across the region at regional headquarters, I remember our executive director at the time, a man by the name of Jack Boyd, making some remarks. What sticks in my mind is he very clearly stated to people, “this is our job, this is what we have to do, and if you don’t like it, you better leave”. That was the directive that was given.

I think maybe it was coming up on the immigration side of things—I mean, you did what you were told, and that was it—that was a pretty clear message. This was the job that had been given to us as staff, and we had to do it, and if we didn’t like it well then you better move on.

Do I remember meeting resistance and that kind of thing anywhere along the line? Not a whole lot. One of the things I always thought I had going for me was that back in my younger days, I played a lot of sports. I played on a baseball team, and I played hockey, guys from immigration, guys from—Not so much the employment side, so we had this activity—I wasn’t totally one of those softie settlement people that always went easy on folks, right? They knew what I was like on the field. But it also worked well just in terms of the interactions you have to have with people, and if you needed someone in another area to do something for you, you have to have good human relations to do things.

Interviewer: Thank you. I just have one last question, and it’s, do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to share, whether your experience or policy changes that you remember or anything from your time during when you were with settlement?

Bob Parkes: I did make some notes to try and refresh my memory, but I don’t really see anything there that we haven’t touched upon. The big thing I was driven by was that the act and regulations had changed and allowed for group sponsorship and the designated classes.

Interviewer: That’s fine. I just like to thank you. Honestly, for taking this time, we really appreciate it. It’s been really informative what you’ve shared; even if you feel like it’s not a lot, it’s a lot of information, so I would just like to thank you, and I hope you have a lovely day.

Bob Parkes: Well, I guess the other thing that I didn’t mention, some of the best parts of the job were just the interactions with other people.

With the ISAP program, I went to places like Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Ottawa, Kingston, and Windsor—that was sort of my area. The others went to Kitchener and Niagara Falls and Hamilton.

Then there was Toronto, and there were just tons of community agencies in Toronto serving immigrants. We covered the world there, pretty much in terms of immigrant groups in Toronto. Some of them were agencies just for a particular group, others were more multicultural in nature, and I met just a whole lot of people from a whole variety of backgrounds. Maybe they had to be nice to me because I was the funder, I don’t know, but I thought we got along pretty well, many of them.

It was really an eye-opener for me—an introduction to so many different cultures and kinds of people—that made the job quite interesting and enjoyable. I don’t know if anybody has mentioned these folks to you, but a couple of the people that I worked with at the regional office along the way that I didn’t mention earlier were Kerry Reade and Elizabeth Gryte, who went on to do other things in settlement after I left. Unfortunately, they are both passed now.

We had a good group of people working there—it was good while it lasted. I was not happy when I left, but recently thinking about it some more, maybe I hold grudges too much. In many respects, for me personally, leaving for me turned out to be good. I later worked as a grants administrator for the City of Toronto and met even more community agencies for a few years, and then I ended up being the manager of a welfare office, which was a whole other world, but again interesting and probably more financially rewarding, so there we go.

Interviewer: Well, thank you so much. We really appreciate the time. So have a great day and we’ll be in contact.

Bob Parkes: Okay great, Bye bye.

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