Wilma Jenkins
Wilma Jenkins worked for the Department of Manpower and Immigration (and its successors, Employment and Immigration Canada and Citizenship and Immigration Canada) from 1976 to 2009. Starting on the front line at the border in the summer of 1976, she moved to Toronto, where she spent the balance of her career. In this interview, she speaks about her experiences in overseeing the settlement of refugees in Canada. She offers some specific recollections of assisting with the arrival of Southest Asian refugees in the late 1970s, as well as those Kosovars brought to Canada under Operation Parasol in the late 1990s.
This interview was conducted in April 2023.
The content of the interview has been edited for clarity.
Interviewer: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? For example, your name, how you got involved in immigration and settlement, and the years you worked?
Wilma Jenkins: My name is Wilma Jenkins. I got involved with immigration when I successfully applied for a summer job at the border in Sault Ste. Marie. I then made a request to move to Toronto as an immigration officer and then pretty much stayed in the department for my entire career. I started in 1976 and retired in 2009.
Interviewer: Can tell us a little bit about your day-to-day work life? What were your usual tasks that you had to go through?
Wilma Jenkins: I began at the border as an examining officer and did that for a bit. That consisted of examining the people coming to Canada, determining their admissibility, deciding whether or not they could come in, and deciding whether or not they had to be deported. There was a fair amount of autonomy in that position—I actually was ordering deportations at a very early juncture in my career.
But the laws changed after that, meaning that there needed to be a review in between the examination and the deportation. So my very first job had a lot of decision-making authority, really, considering the level of the job. From there, I worked as an immigration officer, which consisted of granting people work permits, student permits, extensions to visitor status, assessing their eligibility for permanent residence status, and writing enforcement reports—so pretty much the full range of an immigration officer’s duties—and it was in that capacity that I was seconded to Longue Pointe, in Montreal, to work on the Vietnamese refugee arrival.
I was assigned as the liaison officer from Ontario, and was responsible for destining arrivals to various communities in Ontario. There were quite a few people from the Quebec region doing other duties in the unit, but I was basically analyzing the arrivals information and, for those families that were going to Ontario, looking to see whether they had relatives already in the area, and what their occupation was, and then notifying individual offices around Ontario tp prepare for their reception. So, once again, there was a fair amount of decision-making authority on my end concerning the actual destination to which the refugees would go.
After working as an immigration officer, I went into the management track as a supervisor, manager, and director. My final job was Director of Settlement and Intergovernmental Affairs in Ontario, and I was there for the implementation of the first Canada-Ontario Immigration Agreement, or COIA (2005).
Interviewer: Did any policy or institutional changes occur during your time in immigration?
Wilma Jenkins: Well, the 1976 Immigration Act came into force shortly after I started, so we worked very briefly with the old (1952) Immigration Act. Many outdated or discriminatory provisions that had been in the earlier Immigration Act were removed by the 1976 Act, so I had to adjust to those changes. And then again, I don’t remember the year or the title, but there were substantial amendments to the Act to have more focus upon refugees [Ms. Jenkins is referring here to C-86 (an Act to Amend the Immigration Act). It was introduced in 1992].
And policy changes—I mean, there’s so many, I can’t remember them all now. Certainly, when it comes to refugee acceptance, from the time that I started until the time that I finished, there became much more focus on accepting at-risk refugees, a higher overall number of refugees, the implementation of group sponsorships, and all sorts of mechanisms to increase Canada’s capacity to support people in need.
Interviewer: When working in settlement specifically, how much liberty did you have when looking for solutions to individual or systemic problems?
Wilma Jenkins: Quite a bit, so my experience at Longue Pointe was completely the opposite of what I had done up to that point in the department. When I worked in Sault Ste. Marie I had no prior exposure to the refugee element of the business at all, and only just a little bit during the time I had worked in Toronto—so it was all fairly new to me; I was the only person representing Ontario region in the unit in Montreal.
So, on the ground, I was basically it. Anytime there was any kind of issue or problem, it was up to me to solve it—so I really felt empowered to go ahead and do just that. I didn’t have to check back with anybody in terms of dealing with individual cases.
In terms of systemic problems, I can say that throughout my career I felt completely enabled to identify issues that I thought were a problem and to raise them to whatever level I felt necessary in order to solve them. I wasn’t always able to carry out those changes, but I never felt impeded in terms of bringing it to someone’s attention. And, where possible, I wasn’t impeded in trying to fix systemic issues that I thought I could fix.
Interviewer: If you can recall what sorts of initiatives or programs were available during your time in settlement?
Wilma Jenkins: Back when I worked in Longue Pointe, we had the initiative to receive Vietnamese refugees. It was a massive influx. We had settlement language training at that point, I’m quite sure. We certainly had far fewer mechanisms in place for refugee settlement and language training than we do now. With COIA and the changes in the logic models, there were tons of new things possible.
We started doing settlement work in libraries, settlement work in schools, and specialized professional language training. We conducted “talking circles” with Canadians to help Canadians learn more about the refugees and to help the refugees learn more English. There were hundreds of ideas we came up with for different programming through COIA that ended up becoming part of the logic model at the end of the day—but back when I was working in Montreal, a lot of the time we were sending people to places that hadn’t had any refugees until that point.
For example, we sent a group of Hmong people to Chatham because they had agricultural experience, and that type of work was more likely to be found there. We were sending people to Northern Ontario, which didn’t really have any kind of infrastructure in place to deal with them—but the refugee might have had a cousin or a friend of a friend who lived in that area.
I don’t know if they had sufficient support in place once they got there, to be honest with you. But beyond language training and “here’s your coat and winter boots”, I don’t know if there was a lot happening. That could be because I didn’t have a lot of exposure to it, though.
Interviewer: Do you recall your organization ever facing funding issues?
Wilma Jenkins: Around settlement, yeah, for sure! What I understood, and this is only retrospectively, what I understood when I went to work in settlement at the end of my career was just how poorly funded settlement had been up to that point. We were always chasing after resources in the department as a whole. But settlement was like the poor relation the entire time. All of the money and all of the attention went towards enforcement and overseas. There really wasn’t much attention paid to the domestic side of the department, as if the normal inland processing and settlement was always at the tail end. It was a minimally staffed element of the department, and so not a lot of money went with that.
When the COIA was approved, it resulted in a fourfold increase in the settlement budget—it was like an explosion of resources into a sector that did not have the infrastructure to handle it. And it was a department that did not have the policy framework in place to allow it to expand. So we basically quadrupled our budget without the levers that we needed, the policy levers to just implement stuff. We were hiring staff right, left and centre. So, absolutely, there were shortcomings in the funding. Even before I went to settlement, I remember saying that “if we are going to increase the number of refugees, we needd to increase settlement funding, to allow them to settle”. That, in my opinion, was severely underfunded over the years.
That’s why we saw people, you know, doctors driving cabs and working in jobs that they were far too qualified for because there just wasn’t a systematic, organized approach to looking after them once they arrived. It was definitely underfunded, so I was happy to see that addressed.
Interviewer: Thank you for discussing that. So, you briefly mentioned funding. If you can recall, what other sorts of challenges did you face, either at the field level or institutional level?
Wilma Jenkins: I really think it boiled down to an under-resourced situation. There was no lack of expertise or will to try new things. People just exploded with ideas. But did the sector have the expertise to deliver? We ended up conducting training for board members so they could understand their role better and to deliver services better. We carried out more oversight to see whether the resources were being expended properly. In fact, we did determine that in some cases, service providers that we had funded for years were not being completely correct in their implementation. A few were actually channelling money to inappropriate places.
I guess that’s an ongoing challenge—to have sufficient and appropriate oversight, to make sure that there isn’t room for people to misappropriate funds, and to make sure that you’re not just throwing money at a problem, that you have enough training in the sector and enough expertise in the sector to be able to deliver the programs that you’re trying to fund. I also think that societal attitudes towards refugees might have been more of a problem back in that period, because people were not necessarily accepting of them. Some weren’t, and some were.
Due to the rush of arrivals when group sponsorships were implemented—there’s always been an element in Canada that wants to accept more people, but there’s also an element that fights against it.
When did the Kosovars arrive? Is that near the timeframe?
Interviewer: I believe so
Wilma Jenkins: I was at the airport for that. I had forgotten about that—there you go! I can say that I noticed at the time that the attitude towards the Kosovar refugees was different than towards the Vietnamese refugees; people seemed to be more accepting, somehow. Other than that, I can’t think of anything. I mean, institutionally, any time you’re trying to deal with a big influx of people, there are all sorts of operational challenges that come with it.
But I’ll be honest, when you look at the influxes of the Vietnamese and then the Kosovars, It’s really amazing how much that turned around so quickly. We basically set up a whole processing center on the military base in eastern Ontario, and brought in a bunch of people. I was at the airport where we were receiving them right at the onset, and that was quite something—seeing people coming in just shell-shocked. It hit me differently, too, I think, because I didn’t deal with the actual people as much in Montreal. My tasks were more administrative. I would help out sometimes with arrivals, but mostly that was being done by others. I was predominantly in the office making decisions about where the refugees were going.
But during the Kosovo initiative, I would sometimes be out on the floor when flights would come in, and there were officers in tears, just in tears. I’ll never forget one little boy who had watched his parents thrown in mass graves. It was really shocking and fresh, right? It was literally coming off the plane, with nothing.
Interviewer: I know you’ve just shared a memorable moment. Thank you for sharing that. Would you like to share any other impactful moments or anything that stands out to you, or recall anything during your time working in immigration and settlement?
Wilma Jenkins: Yeah, that was something else. Another incident really sticks out in my head, that really struck me when I was in Montreal. I was in my twenties at the time and I came from Northern Ontario, hadn’t seen a lot, so watching the people arriving—we had flights coming in from Bangkok, I think, and Hong Kong and there was a difference, a marked difference in what the people coming off each flight looked like. The people from Hong Kong would have suitcases and seem to be, you know, better dressed and whatnot. The people coming from Bangkok often just had things in bags, they were literally the boat people that left with nothing, and again the look on people’s faces and the sheer and utter feeling of being lost. I remember seeing fish sauce for the first time. They bought fish sauce so that people would have that comfort of home.
It sort of strikes you, the complete and utter devastation in people’s lives, to have been shifted like that.
And then, with the Kosovars, two things: I remember sitting in on a conference call— we were setting up the base and trying to figure out how we we were going to structure it, right? And somebody suggested, “So we’ll get them off the plane, and we’ll take them so they can have a shower”. I just said, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You can’t take people who have just left their war-torn country and send them to the shower. Stop and think about this for a second, okay?” Things like that happened because it was all very much being done on the fly. So we switched it around, and a lot of those people decided to go back home and be repatriated when things settled down, and I think that was a bit of an awakening for a lot of people. Everyone had assumed, oh yeah, they all want to come to Canada and stay, land of milk and honey, but many of them went home again. They were too far separated from everything that they were familiar with, and things had settled down a bit.
I was at the airport when we sent the first plane load back, and there was a fair bit of interest in that because there had been a bit of controversy at the base about the flight going home—there were quite a few who were anxious to get home. I think there was one person in particular who was causing a bit of a fuss. I don’t know if it was a me interest or an HQ interest, but anyway, I was asked to make sure that the flights took off okay. I had twisted my ankle that weekend, so I was on crutches and had to walk to the very last gate on my crutches to make sure that this flight took off, and it was, for some reason, not leaving. So the person who went with me went to check it out, and then some guy came out onto the tarmac and hit one of the cargo doors with a big stick [laughing]. Are you kidding me? The plane had a mechanical problem, anyway, so the cargo door wasn’t shut properly apparently, and so it did take off, and it landed okay, and everything was fine. But that really stuck out in my mind, not the notoriety but the attention that these big one-off influxes receive can be quite overwhelming.
But of all the things that I’ve seen in my time… I mean I was there for SARS, I saw a lot of certainly high profile things, people dealing with those big influxes with such composure and organization and dedication to the department, everybody that worked on it. There is always no shortage of volunteers—resources get flung at it where they are needed. I think the department really did well in managing those crises, I really do. They’ve managed to pull things out of a hat more than once.
Interviewer: Thank you. If you have an opinion, what are your thoughts now on the changes that have occurred in settlements and immigration? How do you think they compare with what happened during your time working in the field?
Wilma Jenkins: I very much have an opinion. As I said before, I went to settlement at the end of my career and came to the conclusion that it’s great to take in more people, but you have to be prepared to settle them properly, and we weren’t doing that.
So the Canada-Ontario Immigration Agreement was a huge step forward and it did a lot to create new programming, to have a more synthesized professional outcome-based approach to settlement, and I think it has definitely improved compared to what it was like back in the day. And I think that plays out in how well the department handled the Syrian refugee crisis. Each time we’ve dealt with these large movements of people, we’ve progressed in terms of our efficiency and capacity. I wasn’t there for that, but from people I have spoken to I know that it went pretty well.
Interviewer: Thank you. My final question to you would be, do you have any final thoughts, any anecdotes, or anything that believe should be shared?
Wilma Jenkins: Other than that I wish I had a better memory, no! [Laughs]
Interviewer: Well, thank you, Wilma, for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate your input. It was great.