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This chapter provides information on the specific programming needs of victims of torture pursuing higher education, and policy and practice guidelines which will support them in that pursuit. This is a community-based participatory action research project that brought together partners who had educational, research, practical, and real-life expertise in working with marginalized groups on this complex issue, with each partner playing an essential and a vital role in the research. A partnership between George Brown College, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the Wellesley Institute, and the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture established this community-based participatory action research project. The project established innovative outreach for people seeking to integrate into Canadian society through education following experiences of torture and war as a means to aid in the meaningful integration of survivors into Canadian society. This work is scalable to other settings (e.g., universities and colleges across Canada) and groups with experiences of marginalization (e.g., Aboriginals, visible minorities, etc.).

In 2017, 22% of the Canadian population are foreign-born immigrants and one in five is a visible racial minority. Canadian schools and classrooms mirror the diversity of the society and are populated with more and more immigrant and refugee students from diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds each year. Uprooted from their home countries and familiar environments, immigrant and refugee students experience barriers and challenges in new living and educational environments. The increasing number of immigrant and refugee students and their unique educational needs and challenges have called building welcoming and inclusive schools a priority in Canadian education system. This chapter addresses the urgent need for high-impact policies, practices and praxis to build welcoming and inclusive schools for immigrant and refugee students through cross-sector community engagement. Based on several empirical studies, critical and extensive literature review and authors’ professional reflections, this chapter introduces a theoretical framework of building welcoming and inclusive schools for immigrant and refugee students and introduces the promising strategies of engaging community stakeholders, including educators, students, parents, governments and community organizations and agencies.

This chapter focuses on Guided Entry into New Teaching and Learning Experiences (GENTLE), a reception centre designed to welcome student refugees and facilitate their early integration into schools in the Thames Valley District School Board in Ontario, Canada. Our examination focuses on the values and policies that guided leaders’ decision-making, the practices educators employed, as well as the allocation and use of resources to ensure Syrian refugee students were integrated successfully; each issue constitutes a noted gap in the related academic literature. This chapters draws from direct accounts of the eight education leaders, working at each level of Ontario’s educational governance structure, who played a role in the integration of Syrian student refugees in Ontario. The case underscores that fulfilling humanitarian visions, such as welcoming and integrating thousands of refugees, requires a nimble, well-coordinated, strategic and adequately resourced response; the response must be grounded in a wide range of evidence, including local/anecdotal insights, to achieve an inclusive vision for education. Aspirations to fulfil such a vision must be nurtured, learned, shared and collectively earned by educators operating at all levels of the system, which remains a perpetual work in progress. Implications for leader practitioners and researchers include the need to critically interrogate educational programming for refugees offered at all levels of the school system, inspire educators of varying perspectives to commit to a particular vision of inclusion for newcomers and manage resources morally, strategically, sustainably and flexibly.

The objective of this chapter is to analyze educational leadership policy in New Jersey, US, and Ontario, Canada, focusing on the inclusion of the unique needs of systematically marginalized students, specifically refugees and forced immigrant (RFI) youth. Modes of inquiry are qualitative document analysis of New Jersey and Ontario leadership policies, preparation requirements, and standards. The objective of this paper is to present an extensive literature review of policies related to educational leadership and supporting RFI youth and their teachers as well as to reveal gaps in policies and examine pre- and in-service training requirements. Within the field of comparative and international education, this chapter highlights the institutionalization of trends in educational leadership at state or provincial levels and how these macro-level policies influence educators’ abilities to meet the needs of students from marginalized communities, such as refugees and immigrants.

Recent invasions, coups, civil wars, and ethnic crusades have caused many individuals and families around the world to flee their homelands for fear of their own safety. The exodus of refugees to foreign nations causes a strain on those nations’ health care systems and resources. With the assistance of outside organizations, these countries can develop a health care management system for refugees that provides for both their immediate survival and long-term health stability, while preserving critical national resources. This chapter reviews the refugee problem and presents the short-term tactics and long-term strategies undertaken by seven very different national governments to care for the refugees that cross their borders. A model of a sound health care management system is used to incorporate the best practices of each country into a framework for approaching this multi-billion dollar issue.

Discrimination has been identified as a major stressor and influence on immigrant health. This study examined the role of perceived discrimination in relation to other factors, in particular, acculturation, in physical and mental health of immigrants and refugees. Data for US adults (18 +  years) were derived from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Mental and physical health was assessed with SF-12. Acculturation and perceived discrimination were assessed with multidimensional measures. Structural equation models were used to estimate the effects of acculturation, stressful life effects, perceived discrimination, and social support on health among immigrants and refugees. Among first-generation immigrants, discrimination in health care had a negative association with physical health while discrimination in general had a negative association with mental health. Social support had positive associations with physical and mental health and mediated the association of discrimination to health. There were no significant associations between discrimination and health among refugees, but the direction and magnitude of associations were similar to those for first-generation immigrants. Efforts aiming at reducing discrimination and enhancing integration/social support for immigrants are likely to help with maintaining and protecting immigrants’ health and well-being. Further research using larger samples of refugees and testing moderating effects of key social/psychosocial variables on immigrant health outcomes is warranted. This study used multidimensional measures of health, perceived discrimination, and acculturation to examine the pathways between key social/psychosocial factors in health of immigrants and refugees at the national level. This study included possibly the largest national sample of refugees.

Settlement services in Canada have only recently started offering support and programming for emotional wellness issues faced by newcomers to Canada (immigrants who have been in Canada for less than 5 years). Funding for such services has steadily increased over the past 5 years, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Greater investment in ensuring the emotional wellness of immigrants is spurring new settlement services and programming. These include a wide array of configurations and approaches across the different geographies of Canada. This is evidence that providing such services for newcomers is in the early stages of implementation, characterised by experimentation and precarity. Mental and emotional wellness programming is in contrast with more established services, such as those meant to provide language learning, where common assessment tools, measures of proficiency and progress are well established. With funding from the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), this chapter features data from a 2-year project that examined emotional wellness services for immigrants offered in four cities in western Canada between 2018 and 2020. The study used surveys and interviews with clients and focus groups with front-line staff to understand client needs and discern the issues and impact of emotional wellness programming. Findings include apparent limitations in staff capacity and expertise to provide help when needed, the inappropriateness of service models meant for other contexts and complex funding requirements resulting in issues of access and the overall precarity of such programming.

This chapter analyzes governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in a highly decentralized federal country. Canada has a decentralized approach in many policy areas, including health care, in which provinces are the primary decision-makers and service providers. This decentralized health-care system allowed provinces to respond according to regional and local contexts and needs. The capacity building and the policy learning related to previous crises and horizontal coordination were key to policy responses to the pandemic. Moreover, unlike other countries, Canada did not centralize decisions throughout the pandemic, and did not reinforce competition and uncoordinated actions. The federal government also has had a central role coordinating COVID-19 policy responses. Nevertheless, Canada faced some challenges stemming from the lack of uniformity across the country, especially related to regional and local restrictions, enforcement mechanisms, testing, and travel restrictions.

This article addresses the claim, particularly popular in the 2000s and implicitly resting on a segmentation view of the labour market, that a flexible labour market-driven immigration policy (within the EU as well as from outside), often associated to a ‘Canadian model’, would respond to the economic needs of continental European countries.

A comparative historical approach is applied, including analysis of historical series of unemployment and migration data and a qualitative analysis of secondary sources on Germany, Spain and Canada, selected as best representatives of different labour market and immigration regimes. The research asks to what extent, and how, immigration has been used as a ‘buffer’ for labour market uncertainty.

Against ideas of a ‘Canadian’ model advertised in Europe (e.g. Germany), the historical and quantitative analysis shows that Canada itself has moved from short-term labour market-driven immigration policies to more long-term approaches. In fact, there has been a stronger labour market-migration link in Spain, but not without problems,

The article is a small-N comparison of critical cases, that is most different labour market models. Major demographic and geographic differences exist between the three countries, which raises even more scepticism about the suitability of a Canadian model in Europe.

The policy implications are centred on the detected paradox of labour market-driven immigration policies: in order to be sustainable, they need to have a long-term orientation and involve some degree of social integration policies.

The article adds to comparative studies of migration policies through a stronger link to labour market analysis and in particular issues of uncertainty and segmentation.