Northern Policy Institute surveying northern Ontarians about immigration, personal wellbeing

The Northern Policy Institute (NPI) is urging residents of northern Ontario to fill in a series of surveys on its website, which include questions about personal wellbeing and attitudes toward immigration. 

People in Sudbury, Timmins, North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay might also receive phone calls from pollster Environics this spring asking them more about immigration.

It's part of the policy institute's annual Measurement Month, which tracks attitudes and experiences of people in the region so that the institute can use the data to evaluate programs, said Charles Cirtwill, the institute's CEO.

"For example, when [Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada] launched … the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot, one of the things they wanted to do was see a positive uptick in the attitudes toward immigrants," Cirtwill explained. 

"And so by having these surveys going on at the same time, we're able to kind of say whether or not that attitude tracked with the increased investment and the increased awareness of immigration."

The institute launched Measurement Month in 2021 because the north is so large, and its population is so dispersed that data gathered by Statistics Canada frequently has too many gaps in it to be useful, Cirtwill explained.

While measurement month typically occurs in February, this year's got off to a late start – the surveys were posted Feb. 21 – and will extend into March.

The telephone poll will occur in May.

The annual initiative includes a survey of employers' feelings about the economy and their plans to hire new staff.

It includes surveys for the general public about personal wellbeing and attitudes toward immigration.

It also includes surveys about the experiences of newcomers and the experiences of racial minorities when it comes to racism.

This will be the third time Environics has polled people in the north about their attitudes toward immigration since Measurement Month began in 2021, Cirtwill said.

The previous two surveys carried out in 2021 and 2023 show a slight decrease in positive regard for immigration.

In 2021, 82 per cent of northern Ontarians said immigration had a positive effect on their community.

That had dropped to 77 per cent in 2023.

The number of people who believed that there was too much immigration to Canada rose from 26 to 30 per cent during the same time frame.

The number of people who believed that immigrants take jobs from other Canadians dropped from 22 to 19 per cent.

Some of the most significant drops in positive regard for immigration happened in Sudbury, where the number of people who felt that immigration was good for Canada fell from 87 to 77 per cent.

On the other hand, Thunder Bay bucked the regional trend by posting increased positive regard for immigration across nearly every metric.