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Canada's immigration policy is regarded globally as a best practice model for selecting highly skilled migrants. Yet, upon arrival many immigrants face challenges integrating into employment. Where immigrants settle is one factor that has been shown to impact on employment integration. In Canada, regionalization policies have resulted in more immigrants settling in small to mid‐sized cities. It is important to understand how these local systems are organized to promote immigrant integration into employment. Using a systems approach, this paper presents a case study of immigrant employment in a mid‐sized city in Ontario, Canada. Through a document review and stakeholder interviews, a systems map was developed, and local perspectives were analyzed. Results demonstrate that in a mid‐sized city, few organizations play a large role in immigrant employment. The connections between these core organizations and the local labour market are complex. Any potential challenges to the system that interfere with these connections can cause a delay for newcomers seeking employment. As cities begin to experience growth driven by immigration, there is a need to ensure local services are not only available but also working effectively within the larger employment system. Key messages: An important focus of Canada's immigration policy has been to improve employment integration locally.Using a systems approach allows mid‐sized cities to identify local services and how they are connected to promote employment integration of newcomers.Greater connectivity between services can streamline the employment process for immigrants settling in mid‐sized cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Canadian government recently launched initiatives to promote immigrant settlement outside of traditional gateway cities, in small towns and rural areas. These initiatives attempt to mitigate socio‐economic impacts of population decline, and address barriers to successful integration in urban areas. Drawing on the geographies of hope, this paper examines how newcomers navigate hopes as they imagine rural resettlement in Ontario. Based on focus groups with immigrants (n = 50), the findings suggest that newcomers' imagined rural futures are a dynamic and mobile process, shaped by competing hopes for a stable life. Rural imaginaries can sometimes provide a generative space to realize hopes and develop new future aspirations, other times they can constrain hopes for intergenerational futures. We contend that newcomer hopes arise in moments of relocation uncertainty, shaped by competing visions, interests, and priorities at individual and collective scales. Newcomers' expectations of rural futures are always enlivened with a sense of optimism for what has not yet become, but are equally replete with angst and anxiety for the future. This article concludes that future geographic research on migration‐hope‐place interactions, particularly in the health subfield, should engage constructions, experiences, and enactments of hope that mediate relocations and the policies governing them. Key Messages: Newcomers' imagined future hopes are complex and contradictory, playing out unevenly across geography and social groups.The permeability of hope‐migration‐relocation interactions creates tenuous realities for immigrants navigating relocation.Geographic work should examine the creation and termination of hope mediating relocation and the policies governing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the political history of the failed struggle to require companies to justify their plant closing decisions in Canada's industrial heartland of Ontario. Demands for the public review of plant closing decisions began, locally, in the auto town of Windsor in the 1950s and 1960s and reached Toronto with the closure of Dunlop Tire in 1970. Another wave of closures struck in 1980, this time reaching deep into rural and small-town Ontario as well as larger industrial towns and cities, generalizing concern. The resulting Select Committee on Plant Shutdowns and Employee Adjustment, created by the Ontario legislature, took it upon itself to conduct the kind of public review of recent closures that was long demanded. Due to the strength of the political opposition to any interference with management rights, it was essential that proponents could point to precedents in Western Europe. Trade unionists also grounded their argument in favour of government regulation in the moral economy idea that long-service workers accrued a proprietary right to their jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]