Canada currently has the highest population growth among the G7 nations, driven largely by newcomer immigrants. They’re now key to its future and mentoring is helping them adapt, and hopefully stay, reports Roxanne Reeves in Canada
This year Canada is celebrating 150 years as a nation – one that believes, more than ever, that great ideas can come from anywhere. In small-town Canada, seasoned entrepreneurial mentors of newcomer immigrants are absorbing the ideas and insights of its new residents.
Despite the significantly urban nature of immigrant settlement in the second half of the 20th century, smaller communities and cities are turning to immigration to help boost local economic development.
Take young newcomer, Chin. He’s in his 30s, recently settled, and looking for some perspective on entrepreneurial opportunities. Dissatisfaction back home prompted him to immigrate to Canada from his city of 12 million to Fredericton (regional population 103,500) 1, the capital city of the coastal province of New Brunswick. He has lots of potential, and while he’s not the only immigrant in town and numbers are rising, he’s still in the minority.
Small-town Canada, however, is changing. In cities and towns, one only has to go to the local hockey rink, doughnut shop or grocery store on a Saturday afternoon to see that cultural diversity is much more prominent than it was only four or five years ago.
Many of us are questioning the ability of immigrants to adapt, find a sense of belonging and, ultimately, stay. And we really need them to stay. That’s why mentoring is increasingly seen as an important part of the retention strategy.
Population growth within Canada’s rural areas, towns and smaller cities has essentially flat-lined. For example, fewer than one in five or 18% of all citizens call rural Canada home.2 Seniors now outnumber children in Canada for the first time in this country’s history.3 Due to our ageing population and low birth rate, Canada is going to rely increasingly on immigrants for its economic development, so it must maximise immigration’s economic benefits.
Effective integration
For both immigrants and welcoming communities, effective integration is vital. In Canada, we recently welcomed 39,000 Syrian refugees 4, and one Canadian in five today was not born here.5 In other words, persons belonging to a visible minority comprise around 20% of the Canadian population, and in Canada’s major cities, the proportion of persons classified as a visible minority exceeds 50%.6 By 2040, immigration will account for 98% of Canada’s population growth.7
The process of re-establishing one’s social capital is overwhelming; cultivating relationships with local residents helps anchor immigrants in the new community. But how are these relationships cultivated? Who should reach out to whom? Where should that effort come from?
A two-way process of integration that encourages adjustments by newcomers and the host community is widely regarded as the most appropriate model of integration. Yet the onus is all too often put on the immigrant.
However, on the Atlantic Coast, one of Canada’s smaller provinces is countering this trend. New Brunswick engages seasoned entrepreneurs-volunteers to mentor newcomer immigrant entrepreneurs like Chin.
Entrepreneurs in Canada often deal with significant barriers when starting businesses. Without institutionally complete communities or strong ethnic economies, immigrants are unable to rely extensively on their own community resources – considered instrumental for immigrant business development in large cities.
Good mentor relations help by encouraging trust, and mentees benefit through promoting resource exchanges, information sharing, risk sharing, shared IT knowledge, foreign market development and overall increased network resource access.
Mentors can also accelerate ramp-up time, enable newcomers to avoid mistakes, and share how to thrive in small-town Canada. According to mentors many mentees struggle to both reconcile and internalise the implications of demographic and geo-social changes. 8
Two-way street
The notion that both mentee and mentor have unique personal knowledge they contribute to the mentoring relationship and that perceived relationship success is impacted by this knowledge transfer is not new. 9 And in the province of New Brunswick, it turns out mentor-participants are walking away richer from the experience, and I don’t mean monetarily (that’s contractually forbidden).
Mentor-participants value highly the insights gained from these relationships. Mentors report that exchanges between newcomers and mentors foster globalisation through the dissemination of new products and values across national borders.
According to one mentor and echoed by others, “newcomers offer a window on the world!” The experience also:
- Sparks humility and self-reflection
- Accelerates collaboration and reduces division
- Connects not only cultures but often generations
- Ignites innovation
Mentors found in their mentees a keen sense of adventure, love and respect for family and community, respect for education, eagerness to collaborate in business and in the community, tolerance for risk and failure, the tendency to dream, and a passion born of necessity. In short, they often found their own values mirrored back at them.
Janet Mosher, executive director of the Business Immigrant Mentorship Program, said “the program has deliberately chosen mentors who had a good understanding of diversity to take part in the program but, ‘even they had a lot more to learn’. Until you walk in someone else’s shoes, you don’t know. Each person has something to give and gain. Therefore, with an open mind, we’ve discovered that mentoring can be a vehicle for personal development for both the mentor and mentee.”
Mentors admired coping strategies that Chin and other newcomers adopt to succeed and integrate into the local way of life. Mentors report that one strategy that ran through mentees which they found profound, was resiliency coupled with persistence, initiative and creativity. Each of which anchored mentees in their entrepreneurial journeys and strongly influence mentor perceptions and learning.
Canadians are not always the best communicators of what constitutes Canadian culture. We’re better at telling others what and who we’re not.
According to mentors, learning to become explicitly culturally fluent was an interesting and eye opening challenge: “They [mentees] ask ‘why?’ a lot. Why we do things a certain way here and why we think and act the way we do. They ask, ‘[why] are people constantly nodding at each other on the street? And why are they nodding at me when they don’t even know me! And why are they so friendly?’”
New challenges
Mentors found viewing their own culture through the eyes of their mentees eminently interesting, if not often entertaining and highly enlightening. Overall, mentees assisted mentors in recognising their culture as a ‘culture’ and understanding that they are imbued with values and norms, the effects of which can be far-reaching with the potential to have both reassuring and devastating consequences.
Mentors were exposed, through the eyes of their mentees, to the “unusual” challenges some mentees has faced and to “ignorant” people. In other words, covert or explicit discrimination and other injustices against visible minority newcomers. Mentors learned first-hand as they watched the creativity and resilience that newcomers muster to counter these inequalities.
Their exposure to the challenges that newcomers encountered were reported as “paradigm shifting”; whereas prior to this, they may have given lip service to such pain-points due to ignorance or may have missed them altogether. Now mentors wanted to “get in on this. Mentors weren’t going to take any “bull” from anyone, and they were going to make sure their mentees didn’t either: “know if they’re ignorant to you they’re ignorant to everyone. They’re just nasty. [If they act like that then] they’re no friend of mine and you don’t need them as one either!” 10
Mentors walked away acknowledging not just the blessings of cultural diversity, but the accompanying challenges present in relatively homogeneous small-town Canada. Using an image of an iceberg as a metaphor, mentees showed mentors that acknowledging impediments to smooth sailing was useful and that recognising the iceberg exists benefits everyone.
Later, when I asked mentors to whom or what they attribute their strong leadership skills, more often than not they said from one or more influential individuals – strong mentors. This has now expanded to include influential mentees like Chin and other newcomers. The insights mentees foster in their mentors can inspire new ideas for generations to come.
Mentorship is building the Canada that will take us forward for the next 150 years.
- Dr Roxanne Reeves is a consultant, speaker, author and lecturer at Renaissance College, leadership faculty at the University of New Brunswick
References
3., 5. https://tgam.ca/2vidDj6
5. S Hier, ‘Studying race and racism in 21 century Canada’, in S Hier and S Bolaria (eds), Race and Racism in 21st Century Canada: Continuity, Complexity, and Change, pp19-33, 2007
7. R Reeves, ‘Mentoring newcomer immigrants: Tactics of and recommendations for successful mentors’, in D Clutterbuck et al (Eds.), Sage Handbook of Mentoring, pp358-373, 2017
8. T D Allen and L T Eby, ‘Relationship effectiveness for mentors: Factors associated with learning and quality’, in Journal of Management, 29(4), 469-486, 2003