Stephanie Kane Davies with Southeast Newcomer Services helped me shed a light on the hoops that Newcomers have to jump through. “A lot of newcomers that arrive, they leave there parents back in the country where they immigrated from.”

And the Newcomer Services recently held a workshop to help people better understand the paperwork involved to get parents or grandparents to Canada.

“Cause Canada awards 10,000 its like a lottery per year for parent or grandparent to come to Canada. So basically, fill out the application and if they approve you, then an invitation would be sent to you. Even though there’s more than 10,000 people that apply for the application, they invite you. They’ll only invite 10,000 to actually go through the application process to allow the parents to come to Canada.” And with over 95,000 applications to sift through in an average year, it may be a while before it actually happens.

“So there is a lot of information, cause it deals with your income, how many people are in your household. There’s a lot of rules and regulations that you have to be eligible for, in order to even be considered. It doesn’t make the process any easier, but that’s just Canada. I mean there is a process you have to go through.”

Stephanie took it one step further to help out newcomers even more by helping set up another information night to help with tax season. “February 5th at our office from 6:30-7:30 and this is a good tax plan strategy for newcomers and even local Canadians, cause a lot of times we don’t understand what we should be filing on our taxes, what we can claim. Cause some newcomers they don’t understand, that they have family members at home and the country that they came from. A lot of them are trying to send money home to help support their families. So they don’t understand what should be claimed and not claimed on our Canadian taxes. So this is a good learning session for newcomers as well to properly file for Canada.”

Please register for that so they know numbers and can be better prepared. You can call the Southeast Newcomers Office at 306-637-4920.

Stephanie would recommend that all Newcomer’s just go to their office because they can help them get you settled. And refer you to the resources that you will need.

In prepping for the cold they help out with that too. “Because a lot of newcomer’s are not familiar with the cold, so we have some programs, especially with our Swift program we recently had a fundraiser for a donation of jackets for newcomer kids who don’t have jackets yet.”


Some of the resources that they set you up with.
“Souris Valley Museum, Estevan Library, a lot of times the Bruins for hockey games so we refer them to Affinity Place for the communities local events. So a lot of those resources and of course the Daycares, Hospital andPolice Station so they know the important emergency services too that are locally.”

And Stephanie on behalf of the Southeast Newcomer Services would just like to say, “Welcome to Estevan, welcome to Canada, we’re here to help you. We’re happy that your here, and this is a safe place for you. And we’re welcoming you into our Community.”