Brian Bell is a former Canadian government employee who worked in refugee settlement for the Canadian Employment and Immigration Commission between 1979 and 1981

Interviewer: Okay, so go ahead Brian.

Brian Bell: Okay. Well, good morning. I’m Brian Bell. I worked in the settlement branch of what was then Employment and Immigration… the Employment and Immigration Commission, I believe. My recollection is shady at best, but between about 1979 to 1981, I was… I think I was Chief of Settlement Policy, but my ambiguity suggests that it wasn’t all that important what my title was, but I was just in the branch. There were about, my guess would be, about 9 or 11 people, but my emphasis was on sort of policy-related things rather than operations, and I had come from the employment side of the commission. And when I left in ‘81, I went onto a central agency, so it was just really a two-year period in the immigration portfolio. So, I’ll just leave it at that unless there are further questions, Kim.

Interviewer: Well just to go into a little bit of depth I know you were only there for two years, but what was your day-to-day work life like? What were the sort of tasks and responsibilities you remember?

Brian Bell: Again, I mainly remember my preoccupation was with the refugee settlement officer initiative. I spent most of my time working with the regional CEC people who were responsible; they were the settlement… the chiefs of settlement in the regions. And I was sort of the liaison between them and headquarters; I worked very closely with the obviously the director of settlement, Janet Zukowski, and also extremely closely with the recruitment and selection people; Kirk Bell, Mike Molloy, Martha Nixon. So I was kinda the, to some extent, the intermediary between the Bells, Molloy’s and Nixon’s who were looking after sort of the big picture, the movement, particularly the Boat People, the Indochinese Refugees that were the infamous 60,000 refugees coming over in a very short period of time and sort of the liaison between them and the settlement branch. And more importantly than our people in the region who were the day-to-day people dealing with, among other things, but primarily the private sponsors, both individual sponsors and sponsors for organizations or umbrella groups and whatnot. So, it was just a matter of conveying information about movement and needs and requirements from above but also making sure that the different people and the different regions, there was good information flowing among them in terms of what they were doing. How they were doing things, what their needs were and conveying them back up to in a sense, you know, to people in recruitment and selection, the Molloy’s and Nixon’s, to make sure the whole system worked smoothly, and I think it worked extremely smoothly. Not through my doing, but I think it was just a combination of people and circumstances that made it flow. So I also got involved at times in things like the… there was a program for financial assistance for the refugees, but that was handled mainly through the employment center, so not a lot of involvement there, but there was also an immigrant settlement adaptation program, a service program that assisted refugees in communities, and we had a small amount of money that went to support that program. And I also did some work with the Secretary of State in my last year around the whole issue of language training for newly arrived refugees and immigrants. So there were small policy initiatives in that respect, but it was mainly just working, just day in day out, on the refugee settlement initiative and programs, or officers.

Interviewer: Were there any obstacles that you ran up against? Particularly during your work with the refugees, liaising between the different groups?

Brian Bell: Two different groups?

Interviewer: The immigration and the settlement workers.

Brian Bell: Not really. I mean, I think…And again, I didn’t, you know, there was a lot of day-to- day stuff. And some of the, you know, the excellent description of the day-to-day stuff are… I just recently reread and looked at Running on Empty, a book on the Indochinese Refugee movement between ’75 and ’80 that was written. But there are a couple of chapters in there, one on coordination, and then there’s a chapter … there is a chapter on the liaison officers, and I think those two chapters… Naomi Alboim, who was the Director of Settlement in Ontario, she for example, writes an excellent piece, an extremely accurate piece on sort of what it was like at a sort of provincial or regional level and working with the provinces and the municipalities. But also with refugee sponsors groups, both umbrella and specific. And then there is also a subsequent chapter on the refugee liaison officers, and I think the accounts there are excellent, you know, describing the interface sometimes between the employment side of the department and the immigration side of the department at the street level, so to speak and I mean, I just, as I say, they are excellent, excellent pieces and I think they describe very well that you know, things worked, I think, amazingly well. I worked in the federal public service for twenty years, mainly in policy things, like policy across the whole spectrum of sort of social services and health services. And I think the level of coordination and collaboration from a local level right up through to the national level was really quite amazing. And it was amazing, I think, largely in many respects because of the people who were in those positions because a lot of it, as I understood it, just happened overnight, and there wasn’t time to put in place the structures or hierarchies and everything to quote, “make sure it worked.” And so it was just… it was the goodwill, I think, and clearly, it was the signals that were being sent again, from both the top and the bottom, said that no matter how we had to make this thing work, we had to make it work.
And it did work. And the people in place, you know, the democrats and again the refugee liaison officers, were just incredibly capable of working with, you know, the Employment Centers, Immigration Centers… Immigration Centers tended probably to be a little more structured and more, you know, rules-based just by virtue of the way they had worked for years and years. The Employment Centers, I think, had a little more sort of toughness around how they operated and were able to… and they were being asked to work in an area they had never worked in. So… but in both cases, I think people just were able to respond to the situation extremely well. So, you know, I am really hard pressed from my experience, to say if there were barriers and certainly at again the headquarters level it was just, you know, the communications among other things were excellent and we… people got among each other daily, there was trust, there was expertise, there was experience. And it just made the whole thing, it made it work.

Interviewer: So, you touched on it briefly, but you said that there was a lot of personal initiative happening at this time, amongst all the different levels.

Brian Bell: Yeah, because I mean the refugee liaison officers, for example, many of these people… they had worked in the Employment side of the department, you know, the Employment and Immigration Canada, and most of them or a lot of them came up through the job creation programs of the 1970s. And those programs, you know, you look back on them, I mean, there is nothing like it. And a lot of people would say it’s a good thing there is nothing like it like… you know, I am being fastidious, but I think they were amazing, and they were a product of the times, obviously. But you know, there were things like opportunities for youths and the local initiative’s programs. And these officers, I mean their main criteria was, by and large, youth and would take on the world and, you know, weren’t intimidated by lack of structure or job description and that sort of thing. And these people were very heavily borrowed when it came to creating the refugee liaison officers positions. Many, many of them, and I think most of them, came from that sort of area. So, they were dropped into a highly ambiguous kind of environment. Just basically told, your job is to work in communities, work with sponsors, and just come hell or high water, you know, make this thing… make it work. And they did. They really did, so it was, you know; it was just their initiative and their comfort level with working in huge ambiguities. And again, you know, it is amazing that the more established structures like the Employment Centers and Immigrations Centers and the managers of those things… I mean, there were some cases where managers, you know, had indigestion and probably some sleepless nights because of what the RLOs were doing, but by and large, the managers and… the support was there. The support from the regional directors generally, in Ontario, for example, the RDG had the hierarchy that was… he was the, you know, commissioned presence in the province, a very… a huge province, where you know most of the refugees between Ontario and Quebec were going. But this was a person who had never, you know, experienced or been responsible for, you know, a movement like this. And he put his faith in people like Naomi Alboim, who was hired from the Employment/Settlement structure and became the head of Settlement. And Naomi was, you know, hugely competent, and what she didn’t know, she learned and then passed on.
So, you know, she had the trust and the respect and the support of her RDG, you know, throughout. I am sure there were times where they were at loggerheads, but by and large, you know… that’s what made the system go. It was just quite amazing.

Interviewer: No, thank you. I have one last question and it is in regards to NGOs and other settlement agencies. So you personally, did you ever have any sort of relationship with an organization such as a NGO or settlement agency or local community group? And if so, what sort of relationship was it?

Brian Bell: No, I really didn’t. It was really superficial. I went to the occasional meeting or heard of a situation between an RLO and the organizations, sort of these big sponsorship organizations. I mean those were… those relationships were mainly handled by our colleagues in recruitment and selection. The Molloy’s and that sort of thing. So, for all intents and purposes, I had no extent of a relationship with those people. No direct relationship.

Interviewer: Well, okay then do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share about your time? In immigration and during the Indochinese Refugee Movement. Anything you would like to share before we finish?

Brian Bell: No, I don’t think so. I think I said… I think the program was a huge success. I think it was, you know, it was a reflection in my impression was that you know, it was the people from top to bottom, and it was the times where you know, the department had gone from, you know, between the 60s to the 90s went from Manpower and Immigration with a very strong, you know, employment orientation, to you know the 80s where there was a real recognition in the importance of these humanitarian sort of aspects to the program. And the resources were there and were put in place to support that. And you know, it would be interesting to know if you know, today, if you tried to replicate it, you know, I don’t think you would be able to do a better job with all sorts of foresight and everything else. I think it was just, you know, a unique kind of thing when I was there. And it was kind of a midpoint between the 60s and 90s.

Interviewer: Well, I would like to thank you so much for taking the time to discuss this with me. I really appreciate it even though you did say you didn’t have a lot to share, but I think you did. I think you had a lot of really great information. So, thank you so much.

Brian Bell: Well, my pleasure. I think this is a great initiative so thank you for doing it and thanks to the other folks who have been spearheading it. So, take care, all of the best.

Interviewer: You too. Bye.