Montréal is rich in cultural diversity and has built its uniqueness thanks to the many immigrants who have chosen to make it their home. Even today, 60% of immigrants arriving in Québec choose to settle in Montréal.
Unfortunately, while the unemployment rate for people born in Quebec is 5.1%, it is almost triple for recent immigrants. Yet immigrants play an important role in the economic and social vitality of our city.
It is to ensure their full participation in the Montréal economy that Montréal has created a mobilisation movement and launched the Closed Doors Day campaign on 15 January 2020, as part of the “Inclusive Montréal at Work” strategy launched in June 2018.
This large-scale campaign - for which Montréal Mayor Valérie Plante is co-spokesperson with Shahir Guindi, National Co-Chair of the law firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt - aims to highlight the role that all citizens have to play in the professional integration of immigrants.
To learn more about this campaign and to reflect on the place of immigrants in our economy, visit portefermes.ca.
The “Inclusive Montréal at Work” strategy is based on three main components:
1) "Raising awareness", i.e. make the general public aware of the realities of professional integration of newcomers to create a collective awareness of the fact that Integration is everyone's business.
2) "Engaging", i.e., engage the leaders of the business community and large corporations’ public employers so that they share a sense of urgency to act and then to take action.
3) "Building capacities", i.e. support managers who wish to take action to ensure that their action has a tangible and measurable impact on the professional integration of newcomers.
