Ottawa Immigration Strategy
The Ottawa Immigration Strategy (OIS) was developed following a period of more than 18 months of consultation and analysis. The strategy sets long-term priorities in six areas: economic integration; health and wellbeing; settlement; language; education; and community and institutional capacity development.
To devise the strategy, expert teams worked together to incorporate the diverse perspectives of individual immigrants, service providers from the settlement, social, health, and education sectors, employers, government officials, and civic groups, including immigrant and ethno-cultural minority associations. As a result, the OIS reflects a broad, local consensus on how to improve immigrants’ integration outcomes while enhancing our city’s economic and social development. The OIS was formally launched at City Hall on June 20, 2011.
- As a community-wide plan, the OIS is a collective vision and a roadmap for coordinated and collaborative action.
- As a strategy, the OIS reflects our capacities and outlines new opportunities to proactively address the challenges.
- As a future direction, the OIS builds on Ottawa’s history, traditions, unique qualities, and strengths to address current and anticipated needs.
- As a social development tool, the OIS is a comprehensive plan for improving economic development, enhancing service delivery and coordination, investing in innovation and knowledge transfer, strengthening civic participation, and building bridges between groups, sectors, and institutions.
The OIS is dynamic and long-term. It builds in mechanisms for adjustment and course correction as awareness deepens and our community learns by doing. These mechanisms include a flexible governance and leadership structure; a community forum to enable public input; and technical lenses to address the unique needs of subsets of the immigrant population, including Francophone immigrants, immigrant youth, immigrant women, and visible minority immigrants.