CERIS Toronto

Table of Contents

Midterm Activities Report -- Metropolis Project

Part I. Objectives and Overview of the Centre and of the Key Activities

Part II. Partnerships and Collaboration

Part III. Research and Research Outputs

Part IV. Research Management and Communication

Appendices

Midterm Activities Report -- Metropolis Project

CERIS Toronto

Part I. Objectives and Overview of the Centre and of the Key Activities

Canada admits approximately 220,000 immigrants and refugees each year. They come here as strangers, but, as they and the institutions of Canadian society change, the strangers become us. Directed by two criteria, excellence and relevance, CERIS has created a program of innovative, multidisciplinary and collaborative research focused on the effects of immigration both on the new settlers and on the receiving society.

CERIS research aims to inform immigration policy and practice. At first glance, this seems a relatively straightforward goal. After all, most researchers like to feel that their work is relevant, that is, that their investigations are rooted in real-life problems, and that their findings will make a difference. Likewise, most potential users, whether policy makers or practitioners, recognize the importance of investigative excellence, which one author has described as "...strict adherence to a series of research rules that give objective validity to results (Frenk, 1992). Despite the apparent complementarity of scientific and policy needs, the history of contact between their respective practitioners is far from inspiring. In a recent study, for example, health care researchers reported that their work was relevant but under-utilized, while decision-makers described the research community as unhelpful and inaccessible (Woodward et. al., 1997).

CERIS has striven to create something more appropriate to the Metropolis objectives than either the "science push"or "demand pull" models of scientific/policy discourse (Landry, 1999), both of which have serious shortcomings. The science push approach assumes academics know which questions to ask, and that, while they are investigating them, policy makers and practitioners will be queuing up to wait for their answers. History has proved this assumption wrong. Policy makers and practitioners have their own ideas about important questions, and their priority concerns often differ from those of academics. The science push model has had far too little real world effect. In the demand pull model, users -- usually government or industry -- exercise control over what they feel they need by contracting research. Although this approach may help guarantee utilization, the fact that it emphasizes instrumental, short-term goals, rather than the generation of new ideas and the advancement of concepts and theory is a serious limitation. In addition, the pull model fails to recognize the potential value of non-contractual interaction between research, policy and practice. Excellent research generates more than a product to be consumed in the pursuit of policy; it has the potential to create "value added" benefits such as new ways of  conceptualizing problems. Rather than science push or demand pull, CERIS is committed to an "integrative" model of research which, as suggested by Frenk (1992), is "a systematic effort to have each project solve a problem as well as advance knowledge."

Although it forms an important component, of CERIS’ framework, the integrative solution does not do full justice to the Toronto centre’s particular orientation and scope of activities. According to the integrative model, the utilization of knowledge depends on productive interaction between two fairly discrete bodies such as, for example, policy makers and researchers. Who, however, is the policy community? Although policy is initiated and framed by various levels of government, the boundaries of a democratic system’s policy community extend beyond government to include a wide array of participants. Non-government stake-holders not only share in the articulation of policy questions, but play an important role in determining how, and even whether policies are implemented. The many changes to Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s (CIC) proposed revision of immigration legislation occasioned by the Minister’s community consultations provides a cogent illustration of the principle that stake-holders must be ensured an opportunity to articulate policy questions and to provide an informed response to proposed answers. Within Metropolis, CERIS has taken the lead in making explicit the emphasis on creating partnerships to promote direct interaction between researchers and policy makers at all levels of government, as well as immigrant-serving agencies, ethnocultural groups and other non-governmental organizations. CERIS’ dissemination efforts include these bodies as well as the public at large, to which the centre, as well as its government and community partners, are ultimately accountable.

Frenk (1992) asserts that the integrative model for maximizing knowledge utilization has two basic requirements: 1. Assurance of academic quality, and 2. Proximity to stake-holders, including policy makers. CERIS’ structures and activities, described in greater detail in later sections of the report, include an annual retreat which brings together policy makers, practitioners and scholars to help define research priorities; representation by universities, government, and community stake-holders on the Centre’s Partnership Advisory Council and its Management Board; encouragement of project proposals which feature academic, community and policy partnerships; adjudication mechanisms for project proposals which emphasize both relevance and excellence; the maintenance of a resource centre; and dissemination activities that have included stimulating publications in peer-reviewed journals, preparing special reports for stake-holders, participation in civic, regional and national immigration and refugee initiatives, hosting public forums, creating and maintaining a website, publishing a newsletter, and an electronic monthly bulletin.

Priorities in immigration and settlement research are always changing. A research centre must have flexibility, but it must also have depth. It should have the capacity to respond to those questions demanding a political temporal framework, which is often short-term, as well as others which must be framed within a scientific perspective, which tends to be long-term. To meet these needs, CERIS has organized a research infrastructure based on 5 domains, and 3 frameworks for action. The 5 domains, Economy, Education, Housing and Neighbourhood, Health and Community, result from a confluence of need and expertise -- need in the form of research priorities defined both locally and nationally, expertise in the concrete form of the scholars and community partners who collectively constitute CERIS. The centre has recruited outstanding scholars to head the respective domains: Economy: John Shields, Professor, Dept. of Politics, School of Public Administration, Ryerson; Education: Barbara Burnaby, Professor, Dept. of Curriculum Learning and Teaching, University of Toronto; Community: Myer Siemyaticki, Professor, Dept. of Politics, School of Public Adminstration, Ryerson; Housing and Neighbourhood: Robert Murdie, Professor, Dept. of Geography, York; and Health: Samuel Noh, Associate Professor of Medical Sociology, Dep’t. of Psychiatry, University of Toronto. With the domains as a guiding framework, CERIS has stimulated and carried out 3 types of research activities: Requests for Proposals (RFP), Major Research Initiatives (MRI), and Special Projects.

1. RFP: CERIS has held four RFP competitions to date -- annual calls for proposals followed by peer-review of submissions. In all, CERIS has funded 37 projects, described in greater detail in Part III as well as Appendix I. During the most recent RFP cycle, concluded in April of 1999; five projects were approved for a total of $90,158.00 in funding. One of the project submissions was judged very exciting, but in its current form, beyond the scope of an RFP. Discussions with the investigators regarding a possible transformation into an Major Research Initiatives (MRI) are currently underway.
2. MRI: MRI’s are studies whose scope is larger than the average RFP, and which are considered projects of the centre as a whole. Three MRI’s, described in greater detail in later sections of the report, are currently underway. The first is a national investigation of the health and development of immigrant and refugee children in Canada, the second a study of Toronto’s accommodation to diversity, and the third an attempt to create a method for reliable and replicable documentation of racial discrimination in the media. CERIS’ MRI committee is currently working with two other teams of investigators to develop additional projects within this framework. The first is a study of Francophone immigrants in the GTA. The second project, an international study comparing Toronto and New York, will map health care resources and utilization by immigrant communities.
3. Special Projects: Two recent projects illustrate CERIS’ capacity to respond quickly to the emergent needs of federal funding partners. These include a research training program for community agencies undertaken in response to needs articulated by CERIS’ Partnership Advisory Committee (PAC) and funded by the CIC regional office, and a study of equity and access to health care, a collaborative effort of CERIS and Health Canada’s regional office.

The centre has developed important national and international collaborations. During the past year, CERIS worked with the other centres to create the Citizenship Education Research Network (CERN) to address the issue of education for citizenship. CERIS has also taken the lead in developing an inter-centre collaboration entitled the New Canadian Children and Youth Survey (NCCYS), a national study of immigrant and refugee children modeled on the HRDC/Statistics Canada National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth. The centre has worked closely over the past year with Toronto’s Centre for Urban Studies (CUCS), as well as the Centre for Research in Women’s Health of the University of Toronto, supporting SSHRC-CURA applications by these bodies. In partnership with the CUCS, CERIS is participating in the UNESCO-MOST project. By attending national and international Metropolis meetings as well as conferences sponsored by other bodies, and by hosting national and international scholars, the members of CERIS have benefitted not only from the exchange of ideas and experiences, but from the opportunities provided to develop international collaborations.

Training a new generation of scholars is an important role for the academics at CERIS, while at the same time the collaboration among academics, community partners and students acts as an important incubator for research in immigration. The centre has attracted a large number of students to work as members of the RFP, MRI and Special Project teams. To further increase the centre’s visibility, CERIS held a highly successful conference in the fall of 1998, designed to inform students about the centre and about the importance of policy relevant research.

No matter how excellent it may be, research which is not effectively disseminated cannot inform policy and practice. As described in a later section, products of CERIS-funded research have begun to find their way into scholarly publications, including a special Metropolis issue of the Canadian Journal of Regional Science, during the past year. . In addition to the dissemination activities already described, CERIS has in the past year, reached out to a wide audience of scholars, policy makers and community partners through its newsletter, its web-site, its working paper series, and its monthly seminars which highlighted research findings resulting from the RFP, MRI and Special Project initiatives. In addition, the centre collaborated with the Open College program of radio station CJRT to develop and produce a 12-part radio series entitled "Strangers Becoming Us," which was broadcast in Ontario as well as Alberta, and which has recently been issued in a package of 6 one-hour cassettes. CERIS is currently acting in a consultative capacity to The Toronto Star for its year-long series entitled "Beyond 2000," an attempt to portray changes in Toronto brought about by immigration and increasing diversity. During the current Kosovo crisis, CERIS is been working with the regional office of CIC, as well as partner community agencies to supply research-based information to facilitate the resettlement of refugees from that region, to address local community concerns about the refugee arrivals, and to mitigate inter-ethnic spill-over from the Balkan conflict. The synergy of university, government and community partners makes it possible for CERIS to respond to emergent and changing situations.

Part II. Partnerships and Collaboration

CERIS benefits from its rich university environment as well as from increasing collaboration among Toronto-area researchers and their local, regional, national and international partners. The University of Toronto is the largest Medical-Doctoral institution of higher learning in Canada; York University is Canada’s largest comprehensive university, and Ryerson Polytechnic the largest primarily undergraduate university in the country. The synergy resulting from the tri-university partnership has created an unprecedented opportunity for research linkages among universities within and across domains, to which senior researchers are increasingly attracted. From its inception, CERIS has developed partnerships with policy makers at national, regional, and local levels. The center’s emphasis on collaboration with policy and community stake-holders enriches the research questions it addresses, helps ensure that RFP. MRI and special project results will contribute to improved policy and practice, and facilitates their broad dissemination. More recently, CERIS has initiated or participated in collaborative projects with other Metropolis centers, and has begun to forge links with the potential for international ventures.

Inter-university Partnerships

As detailed in Part IV, each of the three founding universities is equally represented on the CERIS management board, and among its three directors. Research domain leaders also come from each of the three universities. Although the adjudication process is based solely on the quality of applications, the fact that each of the founding institutions is represented among the Principal Investigators for the RFP and MRI projects funded to date, and that the projects themselves often involve inter-university collaboration attests to the complementarity of expertise and scholarship that these three universities provide.

Structure is no guarantee of function. One of the reasons that CERIS functions well is because it enjoys the support of three exceptional vice-presidents who feel a sense of personal commitment to the centre, and who work very well together on its behalf. CERIS also benefits from its location: the quotidian evidence of the importance of immigration and settlement for Canada as a whole and for Toronto in particular over-rides traditional academic rivalries, and helps to create a spirit of commitment to a common enterprise.

The three universities have worked together to sensitize a new generation of scholars to the importance of immigration research. On October 3, 1998, Dr. Paul Anisef and Dr. Robert Murdie from the York campus, and Dr. Harold Troper of the University of Toronto held a one day colloquium for junior faculty and for students of Ontario universities. Because the colloquium took place on a Saturday, the organizers felt that attendance by fifty people would constitute evidence of success. Instead, more than one hundred and twenty (120) participants attended, including one hundred graduate students. The colloquium benefitted from the presence of Mr. John Biles, representing both Canadian Heritage and CIC, who spoke about career opportunities for researchers within policy bodies.

Partnerships with Policy Makers

Policy relevance is a major goal of CERIS-funded research and is one of the criteria for which all proposals are evaluated. From its beginnings CERIS has actively encouraged partnerships with policy makers. Policy makers from the City of Toronto were involved in a number of different key activities including: the Partnership Advisory Council, CERIS’ meetings in Ottawa hosted by the Metropolis Secretariat and subsequent invitations to and dialogue with representatives from federal, provincial, and local governments. While the first research retreat in June of 1997 included a small number of federal and local policy makers, by the second retreat in September of 1998, a full morning was dedicated to formal presentations by national policy makers and their representatives, and the afternoon saw similar presentations by regional and local policy makers and community organizations.

Linkages to policy makers were also furthered when Dr. Paul Anisef and the York office of CERIS designed a one-day conference to introduce CERIS and its goal of policy relevant research to graduate students and junior faculty. Mr. John Biles, representing both Canadian Heritage and the Metropolis Project, also spoke and offered to facilitate their participation. Another CERIS dialogue with policy makers developed with an invitation to representatives of Canadian Heritage and the Metropolis Project Team to participate in a discussion with CERIS researchers, facilitated by Professor Kenise Murphy Kilbride, on issues related to social justice in order to increase the focus on justice within the research agenda of CERIS, with a view to expanding the discussion to the other centres. Other important partnerships have been developed with local policy makers in Toronto: CERIS continues to be an active participant in the Advisory Committee on Immigration and Refugee Issues in the City of Toronto, chaired by Toronto Councillor David Miller; and currently underway is the project on Toronto’s settlement history designed to offer insight on our city’s history to participants at the Fourth National Metropolis Conference.

Community Partnerships

The egalitarian model that CERIS designed for creating partnerships among participating universities and community groups had as its purpose the facilitation of wholly respectful interactions among the participants, despite the obvious inequalities of resources among the three universities, between the universities and other partners, and among the various community partners. The model attempts to integrate knowledge based on academic research with that based on the lived experience of immigrants and the groups, both community and governmental, that work with them and plan services for them. This model finds strong echoes in the exciting new Community-University Research Alliances (CURA’s) that SSHRC is forming.

CERIS’ community partnerships began with the three major organizations participating in the proposal’s design. They are the United Way of Greater Toronto (funding 200 agencies last year), the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto, and the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (representing 149 settlement agencies, over 50% of them in Toronto). These community partners made significant contributions to the development of CERIS’ mandate and to the collaborative working model that has been instituted. Each of these three groups have maintained one seat on the Management Board of CERIS and offer their strengths to its deliberations in spite of the increasingly heavy workloads, diminishing resources and staff changes they face in their primary workplace.

In addition to the seats on the Management Board held by the founding community partners, CERIS facilitated broad-based participation in the organization through creation of the Partnership Advisory Council (PAC). Original membership categories on the Council were:

• local and regional government representatives,
• planning councils and interagency networks,
• multiethnic or settlement service agencies,
• health, and
• education.

To respond to the burgeoning interests of academic, community, and policy-making bodies there have recently been added representatives from:

• housing,
• youth, and
• employment, training, and labour.

The Partnership Advisory Council is described more fully in Part IV and the Appendices.

Most of the partnerships with community groups form around specific research projects. However, as academics and community partners succeed in having their proposals accepted in the annual research competition, the result is collaboration not just in the research itself but also in the dissemination of that research through the monthly CERIS seminars, joint presentations of papers at conferences, and co-authorship of articles for publication in various journals and newsletters.

Other partnerships have been formed for special purposes, such as the one with Open College at CJRT for the purpose of creating and broadcasting Dr. Morton Beiser’s Strangers Becoming Us: Immigration in Canada, a series of radio programs on history, economics, public policy, education, health, the arts, and other topics as they relate to the lives and contributions of immigrants to Canada. As a research centre dedicated to immigration and settlement issues CERIS has been included in several other Toronto-area projects such as:

• the GTA Forum;
• the "Vital Signs" project of the City of Toronto; and
• The Toronto Star’s "Beyond 2000" Series.

Inter-Centre Collaboration

The Centre has not only provided an impetus to focused research on immigration and settlement to the benefit of Toronto but has also developed new partnerships with the other three Metropolis Centres resulting in a number of joint initiatives. One of the first partnerships was developed through the Education domain and focused on citizenship and civic education. CERIS researchers, with colleagues from other the Centres helped form a new network, the Citizenship Education Research Network (CERN), dedicated to this topic. They develop collaborative, independently funded research and organize presentation of findings. Also jointly established by the Centres is the Metropolis Education Research Forum (MERF), which schedules meetings and immigration papers for the annual conference of the Social Science and Humanities Federation. This year, the CERIS Education Domain leader, Dr. Barbara Burnaby of OISE, is the organizer and convenor of the MERF.

In the Health Domain, Professor Sam Noh has worked extensively with Carol Silcoff of Health Canada to make health a more prominent issue in the research agendas of all the Metropolis centres, and has in addition, created a special focus on discrimination and well-being to guide future research. Also, Dr. Morton Beiser has created an inter-Centre partnership with two other centres (CRIMIIDU and PCERII) and anticipates future involvement by the third (RIIM), along with community partners Canadian Heritage, Health Canada, and the Laidlaw Foundation, for a major research initiative entitled Newcomer Canadian Children and Youth, a study of the health and well-being of children and youth in Canada’s major urban centres.

Other recent inter-centre partnerships cross various domains such as: the special issue of the Canadian Journal of Regional Science (1997) with articles fostered by CERIS Board chair Dean Carl Amrhein, the submission of letters of intent to SSHRC, and the workshops designed for the International Metropolis Conferences in Israel and Washington.

Collaboration beyond Canada

CERIS has continued to develop its international research connections. Collaboration has been supported through Visiting Scholars who have come to the Centre to work with CERIS researchers, presentations at International Conferences, invitational guest lectures by CERIS researchers delivered at universities around the world, and international collaboration on research projects.

Visiting Scholars 1996 – 1998

Dr. Dirk Hoerder, Department of Migration Research, Universitat Bremen, Germany

Dr. Christiane Harzig, Department of English Studies, Universitat Bremen, Germany

Dr. Joe Darden, Dean, Urban Affairs, Michigan State University

Dr. Morton Weinfeld, Department of Sociology, McGill University and the Montreal Centre of Excellence

Jeff Fuller, MSc, RN, RPN Migrant Health Research Fellow, Centre for Research into Nursing and Health Care, University of South Australia

Dr. Damaris Rose INRS-Urbanisation, Montreal

Dr. Ron Shor Hebrew University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Dr. Sarah Wayland University of Maryland (graduate)

Visiting Scholars 1999

Dr. Gila Menahem Tel Aviv, University, Israel

Melissa Permezel PhD student from Australia

Other noteworthy visitors during the past three years include: Dr. Vijay Kumar Sharma and Dr. Chandra Mohan, specialists in Canadian Studies and Literature, who came on an extended visit from India; policy advisors Roy Blinker, Robert Flos, and Zuhel Gul from the Dutch Ministry of Home Affairs who were interested in Canadian policies on multiculturalism, immigration and integration, particularly the social aspects of integration; and a high ranking governmental delegation from France, including M. Gerard Moreau, Member of the National Audit Court and M. Andre-Clement Decouflé, Population and Migrations, Ministry of Employment and Solidarity who came to learn more about Canada’s policies on multiculturalism and its implications for social integration.

International Research Collaborations

Over the past three years CERIS researchers have participated in a number of international conferences, guest lectures and developed international linkages for collaborative research. Some examples of these international linkages are:

Director Dr. Morton Beiser, Associate Directors Dr. Valerie Preston and Professor Jeffrey Reitz, and Mwarigha M.S. of the Social Planning Council of Toronto represented CERIS at the International Metropolis Conference in Milan, Italy (1996).

Dr. Morton Beiser was invited to present two lectures on refugee settlement at Oxford University.

Later in that same year Dr. Morton Beiser initiated discussions with colleagues in New York at the Immigration Center, New School for Social Research and at Columbia University (1996). Discussions for development of a comparison of immigrant children and youth in New York city with those in Canada’s urban centres as per the New Canadian Children and Youth Study, are underway.

Dr. Valerie Preston, Associate Director of CERIS, was discussant for a session at the annual meeting of the Science History Association in Washington, D.C. (1997)

Drs. Morton Beiser, Kenise Murphy Kilbride, and Marie Truelove attended the second annual International Metropolis Conference in Helsinore, Denmark (1997).

A delegation of Swedish professors and other educators from Faculties of Education at several universities in Sweden visited CERIS (1997).

Dr. Kenise Murphy Kilbride was invited to present guest lectures to various departments in the Universities of Gothenberg and Orebro (1998).

CERIS researchers were active participants in an international symposium "Rights to the City: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cities in a Global Age" in Toronto, (1998).

Drs. Mary Chamberlain of Oxford Brookes University and Harry Goulbourne of the Centre for Policy and Health Research in Britain continue to collaborate on the CERIS-funded research project Upward Mobility Among Second Generation Caribbeans Living in Toronto. (See Appendix I)

CERIS continues to develop its links with the American Centre for Migration Studies (CMS), one of the most established centres for research on migration and settlement and home of the International Migration Review, an important journal in the field. An overview of the Metropolis Project and the work of the Centres will appear in a forthcoming issue of the IMR (See Appendix III).

Drs. Morton Beiser, Larry Bourne (CERIS affiliate, Department of Geography and Centre for Urban and Community Studies) and Richard Stren, Director for Centre for Urban and Community Studies) worked with the Management Of Social Change Project (MOST) project, attending their conference in South Africa. A book based on those discussions is forthcoming.

Dr. Kenise Kilbride has collaborated with the EC-funded CHIP Project, and Khan Rahi’s presented the CERIS model to researchers in Thailand.

Part III. Research and Research Outputs

In its first year of activities, CERIS elaborated its basic research agenda and consolidated the administrative mechanisms required for effective governance. For CERIS the second year saw an expansion of the research program, a consolidation of effective working relationships with our community and government partners, and an expansion of the infrastructure required to support large-scale dissemination of the research findings. The third year of activities was marked by success in our efforts to secure additional funds and a subsequent, dramatic increase in the scope and diversity of our research and dissemination activities. Our fourth year of activities will be marked by a further expansion of activities, increasing the scope of our research agenda, concretizing and deepening inter-centre collaboration within the Metropolis project, and implementing plans for international comparative research.

Since the centre’s inception in the fall of 1996, CERIS has funded in addition to the $60,000.00 allocated to the MRIs below, a total of 37 projects through the annual funding competition and peer-reviewed adjudication process. Number of projects and funds awarded in each year: 12 in 1996 ($143,250.00); 11 in 1997 ($147,651.00); 9 in 1998 ($209,283.00); and 5 in 1999 ($90,158.00). In total CERIS has awarded $590, 342.00 to fund 37 RFP research project in four funding cycles plus the $60,000.00 for the MRIs to total $650, 345.00.

Together these projects involve:

• 126 academics (faculty)
• more than 100 post-graduate, graduate and undergraduate students working as research assistants
• 47 community-based researchers and research assistants and
• 81 partnerships with community organizations.

These RFP projects involve academics from various departments and research centres at the three founding universities (Ryerson, Toronto and York) plus other Canadian universities and colleges from coast to coast (St. Francis Xavier, Queens, Seneca College, Guelph University, Simon Fraser, UBC, University of Calgary, University of Alberta, McGill University, and Brock). Four projects involve cross-project linkages with other CERIS RFP teams, and one includes international collaboration with academic researchers at two different institutions in Britain (Centre for Policy and Health Research, and Oxford Brookes University).

See Appendix I for an overview of CERIS’ entire RFP research portfolio.

Research Publications

An initial list of research publications resulting from CERIS’ Metropolis grant has been appended (see Appendix III). It should be noted that the first of CERIS’ RFP research projects (from 1996 and 1997) have only recently been completed; additional peer-reviewed research publications from these 23 projects are either planned, in the works, submitted or forthcoming (please see individual project descriptions). Final research reports summarizing the research questions, methodology and results of these completed projects are also available and have been posted to CERIS' website. A list of publications and final research reports for the 9 funded 1998 RFP projects currently underway will be available at the beginning of next year; those for the 1999 RFP projects announced recently the year thereafter.

For a more complete overview of the various forms and means of research dissemination employed by CERIS to communicate its researchers' research results please refer to Communication, Outreach and Dissemination section of Part IV - Research Management and Communications. For a complete list of dissemination activities see Appendix III A & B.

Major Research Initiatives (MRI)

Thanks to CERIS’ regular consultations with community, municipal, provincial and federal government partners, the centre identified major issues which were not being covered by the RFP process. To address some of these research questions, CERIS has evolved a mechanism called Major Research Initiatives (MRI). An MRI working committee co-chaired by CERIS director, Dr. Morton Beiser and Khan Rahi, current chair of the PAC, identifies projects and topics which call for a greater commitment of time and of resources than the typical RFP. Criteria for recommending a project for MRI funding from CERIS research funds include a) that a project involve a number of centre affiliates in at least one of the five CERIS research domains, b) that it provide an opportunity for comparative research involving other Metropolis centres as well as international partners, c) that it engage the centre as a whole over an extended period of time, and d) that it have significant potential to attract external funding. After an MRI has been approved by the CERIS board, the Lead Researcher(s) work(s) in collaboration with the MRI Working Group and CERIS Executive to seek appropriate additional outside funding, and to provide periodic progress reports.

During the past year, the CERIS board approved funding for three projects recommended by the MRI committee. These include 1) Accommodating Diversity 2) The New Canadian Children and Youth Study (NCCYS) and 3) Discrimination in the Media.

a. Accommodating Diversity. Led by Associate Director, Dr. Paul Anisef and by CERIS board member, Dr. Michael Lanphier, this project seeks to portray the mutual impact of immigration and settlement on the metropolis and on the new settlers who come to live in it. The project will generate an initial volume based on CERIS’ five domains of emphasis, which will synthesize research conducted over the past forty years by academics, governmental offices and community agencies. This initial volume will be followed by a series of books, each of which will be devoted to more intensive analysis of particular themes which illustrate accommodation to diversity in the metropolis. See Appendix I for more detail.

b. Newcomer Canadian Children and Youth Study (NCCYS). Led by CERIS Director, Dr. Morton Beiser, and Dr. Anneke Rummens, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, this major research project will examine the health and well-being of immigrant and refugee children and youth in Canada’s major urban centres. The project’s multi-disciplinary team involves researchers and community partners affiliated with both the Health and Education domains of CERIS, Toronto, as well as the Metropoles et Immigration Centre in Montreal, and the Prairie Centre in Edmonton. Workshops with the collaborating centres were organized in order to define a sampling strategy and to design pre-tests. The $20,000 start-up money allocated by CERIS for this project has been supplemented by a grant of $20,000 from Health Canada which supported a literature review on the health of immigrant and refugee children in Canada. Discussions with other funders, including the Regional Office of Heritage Canada and the Laidlaw Foundation have met with a positive response. With Dr. Morton Beiser as PI, the coalition has submitted a letter of intent for the SSHRCC Strategic Research Grants competition, "Society, Culture, and the Health of Canadians." The project is described in greater detail in Appendix I.

c. Racial Discrimination in the Media. Although the CERIS board approved an MRI grant for this project, its two leaders, Dr. Kenise Murphy Kilbride, Associate Director of CERIS, and Dr. John Miller, Professor of Journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University have decided to apply for outside funding as the sole source of support. The project aims to develop a replicable and reliable method for identifying instances of racially biased reporting in mainstream media.

d. Other MRI initiatives. During a March 1999 review of proposals submitted for its approval as a result of the 1998-99 competition, the CERIS board considered one project which the review committees had judged to be extremely important for policy, but which was inappropriate for RFP funding by virtue of its size and anticipated length. The board referred this project to the MRI committee. Members of the MRI group are currently working with the applicants to develop an MRI proposal which can be considered for funding by the board at its next meeting.

Special Research and Research-related Projects

a. Health Access and Equity. Under the direction of Dr. Morton Beiser, CERIS director, and Ms. Wendy Kwong, CERIS board member, Ms. Doris Rajan completed a report on access and equity in health care in the GTA. The project included a review of access and equity as reported in a study conducted by the Social Planning Council of Toronto a decade ago, two case studies of programs which seem to illustrate significant attempts to ensure access and equity in health care, and conducting focus groups with consumers, main-stream health care providers and providers from ethnocultural agencies. The project was carried out on a contractual basis with the regional office of Health Canada.

b. CERIS-PAC Research Training Project: "Knowledge for Action, Action for Knowledge". In December 1998 the CERIS Partnership Advisory Council launched a project designed to strengthen the capacity of agencies serving immigrants and refugees in the GTA to use relevant research on immigration and settlement issues, to improve their program planning and delivery. Funded by OASIS, The Ontario Region of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, this project will see the realization of approximately fifty workshops, on topics determined by potential program participants, on their specific training and support needs. Approximately one thousand individual training places will be made available in these workshops while approximately fifteen community trainers will benefit from enhanced training.

c. Review of the Health of Immigrant and Refugee Children in Canada. Under the direction of Dr. Morton Beiser, CERIS director, Ms. Angela Shik and Ms. Monica Curyk completed a review of the health status and the determinants of health among immigrant and refugee children in Canada. This valuable review, contracted by the federal office of Health Canada, supplies background framework for the New Canadian Children and Youth Study (NCCYS).

Training and Professional Development Opportunities for Students

Fundamental to the mandate of CERIS and the Metropolis project is the provision of training opportunities in immigration research. In its original proposal, CERIS committed itself to provide at least seventy percent of its funding to student research assistants and ten percent to community research assistants. These targets have been met or exceeded for all three years of adjudicated (RFP) research projects and will continue to be respected in future awards.

CERIS research covers a variety of disciplines within the social sciences, health sciences, and law, attracting a wide group of students. Through their involvement in the research teams, they are acquiring skills such as proposal writing, formulation and implementation of appropriate research methodology, interviewing techniques, data gathering and statistical analysis, and preparation of results for dissemination, including publication. For some, involvement with CERIS research has provided the foundations of students’ theses at the masters or doctoral level.

With the continuing expansion of the scope and variety of our research program and dissemination activities, other training opportunities have developed at CERIS. A number of doctoral fellows, postgraduates and graduate students wrote literature reviews to help prepare the CERIS submission to the first stage of the Immigration Legislative Review. Working on the CERIS Resource Centre, MetaDatabase project and WebSite development are three placement students (to date) from the Department of Urban Studies at York University, along with two masters students and a doctoral student from our three partner universities. Previously, a University of Toronto urban studies student consolidated employment-related technical expertise working on maintenance of our WebSite. The CERIS-PAC Training Project is coordinated by an OISE / University of Toronto doctoral student, and the pilot stage research of the NCCYS was carried out by a post-doctoral student from the University of Toronto.

Facilitating access to Metropolis license immigration data has also provided opportunities for researchers to learn and to share skills. The University of Toronto data librarian has provided training to the data librarian at Ryerson and York, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada has provided training on the IMDB to a Ryerson researcher who will continue to pass these skills on to other CERIS researchers.

In the fall of 1998, CERIS took the initiative to greatly expand its outreach to students interested in immigration research. On October 3, more than one hundred and twenty (120) persons attended Building Research Links: A Working Seminar on Immigration and Settlement in the Greater Toronto Area, a full-day interdisciplinary seminar. Along with senior CERIS researchers and representatives of government and community partner agencies, the majority of the participants were graduate students eager to learn more about the Metropolis project and build links within their areas of research specialization. These students were encouraged to maintain their involvement with CERIS through formal affiliation, donation of their unpublished theses for our Resource Centre and Website, and participation in our research seminars and ongoing activities.

With the expansion of CERIS’ activities and profile we have witnessed as well a continually-growing demand by graduate students, postgraduates and foreign-trained researchers for paid opportunities for apprenticeship with CERIS. At present, the demand exceeds by far the possibilities and the CERIS Management Board is examining ways to meet some of these expectations. The Table of Student Involvement appears in Appendix II.

Perspectives for CERIS Toronto for Year Four

In June of 1999 CERIS will, for the third time, organize formal consultations on research priorities with our government and community partners. Information gathered from this process will be used by the Management Board to develop our fourth Request for Proposals, with the adjudication process scheduled for the later winter of 2000. Research funds from both our fourth and our fifth fiscal years will be budgeted towards this fourth research competition, allowing for a generous pool of funds for the RFP competition as well as additional support for new projects recommended by the Major Research Initiatives (MRI) Working Group and approved by the Management Board.

During this coming year, CERIS will also:

• develop an active research agenda within the Social Justice area. Participation by CERIS researchers in the Social Justice Seminar scheduled for May, 1999 in Ottawa will be followed by an open forum the same theme in Toronto in the fall of 1999. The Management Board will then assess the best form to develop these activities, including the possible establishment of a Social Justice Domain;
• host the fourth pan-Canadian Metropolis conference, on the theme "Working Together for the Future -- Partnerships in Immigration Research and Policy". Collaboration with the other Metropolis centres and partners will ensure this conference advances the agenda of policy-relevant immigration research.

The upcoming year will witness the materialization of a number of partnerships and collaborative ventures established during this past year, including:

• the publication scheduled for the fall of 1999, with funding and publicity support from CERIS, of a special issue of Canadian Woman Studies on immigrant and refugee women;
• the October, 1999 workshop, supported by CERIS, entitled "Sisters or Strangers?: Immigrant Women, Minority Women and the Racialized ‘Other’";
• the production by the City of Toronto, with funding support from CERIS, of an analysis of 1996 Census data focussing on an updated interpretation of inequalities for immigrant and ethnoracial communities;
• arising out of Dr. Beiser’s collaboration with the MOST (Management of Social Transformation) Project, the publication of a book devoted to international comparison of strategies for coping with rapid demographic changes in urban centres. All of these initiatives are resources for expanding and refining the program of the fourth pan-Canadian conference we are hosting at the end of the year.

In the upcoming year CERIS will also see two MRI projects:

• the New Canadian Children and Youth Study (NCCYS) develop from a pilot project to a large-scale, pan-Canadian research initiative involving active collaboration among the Metropolis research centres;
• the Accomodating Diversity project complete and publish its findings in the first of a series of books on ethnic and racial diversity in the GTA.

We expect to also initiate and develop two new MRI projects. The first will focus on the settlement and integration of Francophone newcomers in Ontario. The second will focus on mapping health care services and health care utilization by immigrants in Toronto. Discussions are also underway with Dr. John Billings of New York University to conduct comparative analyses among immigrants in New York.

Other upcoming CERIS activities include:

• developing additional inter-centre collaborations in the Education Domain through various activities including the discussions scheduled during the meetings of the Learned Societies in June, 1999.
• participation in the fourth international Metropolis conference organized for December 1999 in Washington, D.C., an additional stimulus to CERIS’ efforts to engage in international collaborative research;

• continuing to host visiting scholars, and the incorporation of international scholars into the plenaries and workshops at the CERIS-hosted conference in March, 2000;

• facilitating access to Metropolis license data for Metropolis researchers including providing training on IMDB and LIDS data.

A number of special CERIS projects initiated in the previous year will come to a conclusion in this coming period:

• the CERIS-PAC Training Project, funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (Ontario Region), will deliver training workshops on access to immigration research sources and methods to community groups;
• CERIS will complete the first stage of work in the MetaDatabase project, the development of an online and integrated source of information on immigration databases in the GTA;
• the results of the Health and Social Services Equity and Access project, completed in March of 1999, will be taken back to our researchers and community and government partners for interpretation and possible further development.

Maintaining and improving an effective communications and dissemination network over the next year will continue to require careful as well as adequate material and human resources.

• the CERIS Newsletter will be published three times;
• the electronic monthly bulletin will appear ten times;
• research seminars will continue at the Toronto and York CERIS locations;
• approximately ten more papers will be published in the CERIS Working Paper Series;
• development of the CERIS Website will emphasize expansion of the Virtual Library component, including the posting of important unpublished or out-of-circulation papers donated by our community and government partners;
• Website work will also continue in collaboration with other Metropolis centres, to upgrade the operating system, improve the virtual library interface and search techniques, and simplify the procedures for routine maintenance. This communication infrastructure will be used to support, among other vital activities, the dissemination of the results from the 1999 funded RFP projects, the MRI research projects, and the international and pan-Canadian Metropolis conferences.

All these activities will continue to provide a number of training opportunities for students as researchers engaged in the funded projects, as interns, or as staff on a variety of special projects. In addition, during the coming year, the CERIS Executive and Management Board plan to look at the potential, with additional funding support, for policy internships which would further increase the training opportunities at CERIS while also meeting some of the expressed policy needs of our partners.

These planned activities for the coming year represent the realization and indeed the significant expansion of the commitments made at the inception of CERIS. In so far as our plans have changed, the most important of these changes would be the refinement and elaboration of the research agenda through broad consultation as well as the process of adjudication (in some cases this has led to changes in the specific research plans outlined in the original institutional proposal). One visible manifestation of this development is the expansion of our domains from the original three to five (details in the Appendices) with the addition of a sixth Social Justice Domain, a distinct possibility in the coming year.

 Part IV. Research Management and Communication

Management Structure and Activities

Consistent with our original mandate, CERIS has developed a management structure that integrates the unique contributions of our community and government partners, as well as our academic researchers. Our forms of governance have also been marked by flexibility: a capacity of adaptation to changing needs in the research program and priorities. Among the organizational changes during our first three years of activity were the expansion of our research domains, the development of the Major Research Initiatives (MRI) Working Group, and the inclusion of representatives of the Partnership Advisory Council as voting members of the Management Board.

Management Board

The CERIS Management Board consists of three representatives each from the three founding universities (Ryerson Polytechnic University, University of Toronto and York University) as well as delegates from the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI), the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto (SPC), and the United Way of Greater Toronto. During our first year of active operation, the representative of the University of Western Ontario resigned from the Management Board, and ex officio seats were added for our partners from Citizenship and Immigration Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. During our second year of operations, representatives of the Partnership Advisory Council (one voting, one ex-officio) joined the Management Board. Michael Lanphier of York University chaired the Management Board in its first year of activities and Carl Amrhein of the University of Toronto in succeeding years. A complete list of members of the CERIS Management Board during the past year is provided in the Appendices.

The CERIS Management Board has met approximately every two months to address such major issues of policy as:

• determination and supervision of the research competition (RFP and adjudication) process
• expansion of the CERIS research domains and appointment of domain leaders
• consultations on research priorities and partnerships with community and government representatives
• policy support to the Data Committee in dealing with Metropolis license conditions and negotiating the joint data purchase

Partnership Advisory Council

The Partnership Advisory Council (PAC) provides support to the Management Board in governing CERIS. The PAC consists of representatives of immigrant service agencies, community agencies, social planning councils, the education sector, municipal and health planning bodies, the Ministry of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation (Access to Trades and Professions Unit) and the Ontario branches of Canadian Heritage, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and Health Canada. The PAC meets from four to six times per year. Its main purpose is to provide CERIS with informed and critical feedback on our research program and support with dissemination activities. During the past year the PAC initiated a training support program in the utilization of immigration research for community agencies (funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Ontario Region Settlement Directorate) and a Health and Social Services Equity and Access research project (funded by the Ontario region of Health Canada). The PAC is also sponsoring the April, 1999 CERIS Monthly Seminar on: "Defining and Measuring Settlement Services". A complete list of members of the CERIS Partnership Advisory Council is provided in the Appendices.

Executive Committee

The CERIS Executive Committee consists of the Chair of the Management Board, the three directors, and the two staff co-ordinators. The Executive Committee meets at least every two weeks, to co-ordinate and plan activities on the basis of the decisions made by the Management Board. The participation of the Management Board Chair provides an essential level of communication and continuity between the Executive Committee and the Management Board. CERIS Director, Dr. Morton Beiser, reports to the Management Board on implementation of their decisions by the directors and staff, on behalf of the Executive, through his director’s reports. He is responsible for fundraising activities and initiatives, and is a member of the Major Research Initiatives Working Group. See Appendix IV for a complete list of Executive Committee members and other staff members.

CERIS has devoted significant energy to consultation on its research priorities. Research retreats bring community and government partners together on an annual basis with Board members, Domain leaders and funded and affiliated researchers. The most recent of these was held at Ryerson Polytechnic University in September, 1998 attracted about seventy participants including approximately thirty representatives of community organizations.

On the basis of these consultations, the CERIS Management Board established the Major Research Initiatives (MRI) Working Group to support development in areas identified as priorities. Also on the basis if these consultations, CERIS expanded its domains from the original three areas to five. Details of the current MRI projects and a list of members of the MRI Working Group, and a description of the five current domain areas, are included in the appendices to this report.

CERIS’ research program includes projects funded by the centre and carried out by independent investigative teams, as well as "in-house" research supported by internal and external sources of funding. CERIS uses three major vehicles to carry out its research mandate: 1. Annual Requests for Proposals (RFP) 2. Centre-wide Major Research Initiatives (MRI), and 3. Special projects. MRIs and Special Projects are described in Parts I and III.

Requests For Proposals

Each fall, CERIS invites federal funding partners from Ottawa, regional representatives of the federal funders, community agencies, and research scholars to a day-long retreat convened in order to help CERIS staff and board members outline a research agenda, including the priorities it defines for the annual Request for Proposals (RFP). After board adoption, the RFP is announced to the community. The research themes identified for the 1999 RFP funding competition included: Children and Youth; Cohesion, Citizenship and Social Climate; Institutional Restructuring and Policy Change; and Immigrant Women. RFP notices appear in the CERIS newsletter, on the CERIS and Metropolis web-sites, and among the regular announcements circulated by university research offices. In each of its four annual RFP’s, CERIS has encouraged submissions by community-university research alliances. After announcing the RFP, but well in advance of the submission date, CERIS’ academic coordinator has held workshops on writing and submitting proposals. She has also facilitated the creation of partnerships between academic researchers and community groups.

Review panels, each of which represents a particular area of expertise identified as an RFP priority area for a given year, are responsible for adjudicating all proposals. Although federal funding partners play a central role in helping to set the CERIS research agenda, conflict of interest guidelines preclude their membership on the five person adjudication committees. However, the presence of two community partners on each panel helps ensure adherence to the guidelines for relevance. Each panel also includes two university researchers. A third university researcher who is a member of the CERIS management board acts as committee chair. This adjudication process must now be counted among CERIS’ successes in overcoming traditional university-community barriers. Despite initial trepidation, the university-based members of the adjudication panels found their community counterparts to be as committed to ensuring excellence as they were; in turn, community participants were gratified to learn that researchers valued their guidance in judging relevance. This experiment in university-community collaboration is the subject of a position paper jointly authored by CERIS affiliates Wendy Kwong and Kenise Murphy Kilbride.

Following their adjudications, each of the RFP panels submits its list of recommended projects to a Composite Committee, made up of two members from each of the adjudication panels and presided over by the chair of the CERIS board. After reviewing each of the proposals and considering the total budget available for the RFP in question, the composite committee arrives at a final list of projects for recommendation to the CERIS board. Board approval is the final step in the adjudication process.

Integral to the mandate of CERIS is the establishment of a network of interested academic and community-based researchers, service agencies, community groups, non-governmental organizations, and governmental departments, in order to facilitate the pooling of insight and experience, information exchange, research collaboration, and the dissemination of research results. Affiliates are members of an active research community, with all its various benefits and attendant responsibilities. Such membership is crucial to the establishment of a strong research community of active participants in CERIS’ diverse activities (research initiatives, brownbag seminars, workshops, conferences, and so on). Individuals and institutions may either apply or be nominated for affiliation with CERIS using the relevant application or nomination form. CERIS Affiliation categories are divided into "Researcher" and "Management and Administration" designations. The primary researcher designations are: Fellow, Research Associate, Research Assistant (University/Community), and Affiliated Member (Individual/Institution). Individuals can fall under more than one affiliation category, particularly if they are involved in both research and management or administration. Affiliated members include both university- and community-based individuals and organizations.

See Appendix IV for a complete list of CERIS Management Board, Partnership Advisory Council members and Terms of Reference, Data Committee, Communication Committee, Major Research Inititiaves Working Group members, Fourth Canadian Metropolis Conference Planning Committee, Domain Leaders, CERIS Affiliates (with a description of affiliation), and research teams.

Communications, Outreach, and Dissemination

CERIS has devoted considerable resources to developing an efficient communications infrastructure to support our varied research and dissemination activities. A mailing list database has been developed and routines for automated faxing established. Our newsletter goes out from three to four times per year to about eight hundred subscribers (800), not only in Toronto but also across Canada and internationally. Our monthly electronic bulletin now has about two hundred and fifty subscribers (250) who want more frequent information on our various activities.

After two years of development the CERIS Website and Virtual Library are now fully operational. Content will continue to expand as various CERIS-sponsored research activities reach the reporting stage. The CERIS Website is linked to the sites of the other Metropolis centres, the Ottawa and international Metropolis sites, and the special website hosted by the University of Toronto Data Library for Metropolis license data products. The CERIS Website also includes hot links with a large number of academic, government and community partners involved in immigration research across Canada and internationally, including our federal funding partners in the Metropolis project. It also contains a section on research on access to trades and professions, co-hosted with our partners from the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship.

This past year CERIS moved from the planning to the implementation stage on one of its original commitments – the creation of a Metadatabase, or database of databases, of immigration demographics and research in the GTA. This project will provide a single, easily accessible (Website compatible) source of information on the wide variety of immigration-related databases held by our academic, government, and community partners. This resource-building and outreach project unifies the disparate but invaluable experience in research and data collection of community agencies, planning bodies, university researchers and various branches of government involved in settlement and equity and access issues all of whom are cooperating in its institution and design. The CERIS Metadatabase project is funded by Canadian Heritage as part of the Immigration Information Outreach Project. This funding has also supported our Website development, and the acquisition and cataloguing in our Resource Centre of a unique collection of immigration research papers from our government and community partners as well as CERIS affiliated researchers.

CERIS’ monthly research seminar series is another strategy developed to share CERIS research with other researchers, government and community partners, and the general public. A similar research series is now underway through the York University office.

The CERIS Working Paper series offers researchers a more immediate means of communicating their research findings with an interested audience. Finally, outreach to new scholars in the field was the focus of a one day conference (described elsewhere).

The research findings from CERIS research projects and initiatives are disseminated both within the scholarly community and beyond to policy-makers, other stake-holders, and members of the general public via a variety of different mechanisms to ensure results are disseminated as widely as possible and in the form most suited to the intended recipients. Community partners, for example, assist in research dissemination through their networks, through circulating invitations to CERIS’ monthly research seminar series, and through joint presentations to the academy and to the community. Other dissemination activities include:

• CERIS’ Newsletter (under the guidance of CERIS' Communications Committee) which is received by more than 1000 individuals and organizations involved in immigration and settlement
• The electronic Monthly Bulletin which has more than 250 subscribers
• The Monthly Research Seminar Series which brings together university-based researchers, community and government partners to listen to CERIS-funded researchers, visiting scholars, and guest speakers, to discuss policy and programmatic implications of CERIS’ ongoing research
• CERIS’ Working Paper series
• Final research reports
• journal publications
• professional conference presentations
• invited talks, workshop and conference presentations
• CERIS website postings which include working papers, project research reports, conference presentations, and unpublished Masters and Doctoral student theses
• annual national Metropolis conferences (Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver)
• annual international Metropolis conferences (Milan, Denmark, Israel)
• domain seminars (Justice, Health, Civic Participation, Education)
• CJRT-FM Open College "Strangers Becoming Us" 12-part Radio Broadcast Series
• Collaborations with the media (e.g. The Toronto Star's "Beyond the Millennium" series on immigration)
• visiting scholars, including those from the other Metropolis research centres

Support from University Partners

The three founding university partners, Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, University of Toronto and York University, have provided essential support to CERIS in a variety of ways.