Longueuil unveils new action plan to create a more inclusive city

Longuey has a new action plan to try to create a more inclusive and equitable city. It’s being integrated into every service in the city, including housing. Afin Lulalalika is a member of Longue’s executive committee responsible for immigration and intercultural relations. Thanks so much for coming in. Thank you for having me, Deborah. I’m very excited. Thank you so much. It, it is exciting. It’s a big action plan and there’s a lot of work to do. First of all, though, I’d like to know why did you decide that you needed to do this action plan? What was the impetus? I really think that a city like longer, which is a big city, it’s considered a big city. It’s the fifth biggest city in Quebec and the the, the third agglomeration should be representative of its people. You know 30% of the population of longer is from diversity. And we have seen with COVID all the issues that actually came from it, all the intolerances that we can see as well. I thought it we we thought it was important to have an action plan that address how the issues have evolved and to be able to to to put into place some measures and allow the people to recognise themselves into the city and feel like they are included into the city. So it was important to have a brand new Cos we’ve had an action plan before in 20/20/15, so almost 10 years you can imagine. Definitely need an update and actually not only an update, it needed to to be able to include today’s issues and how fast they evolved. So it was it was important to actually elaborate such a plan. Now what’s interesting here is this is not just a bureaucratic thing, right? You’re you’re reaching out into the community and you’re you’re talking to businesses, talking to landlords and you’re including them in, in, in in this wave of trying to bring change to the city. So can you explain to me, you know, first of all, let’s look at the priorities. What will be the priorities of this action plan? The priorities, I would say they’re in four categories. We have to look into the priority as the CD being a service provider. How is it that we provide the services that we could look at our programming, cultural programming, the way we think our sports and leisures programming, our different type of action plan like family plant. But it also can go all the way up to when we serve the people, how do we do we make sure that everything, every service that we have, they actually know to go get them. They recognize themselves into the service provided and they feel included, but also how do they feel like they participate into allowing them and their aspiration to influence the decision of the council. So that is a way one of the priorities. Second priority would be as a as a work environment it has to be able to also represent the population. Right now at longer we only have 11% of employees that represent the diversity while the city has 30% would because it’s important also that the people recognize themselves into the employees that serve them and also it’s important to have the diversity within the employees to be able to know all the issues to on the on the ground, right. So we want to look into that as well. So though I’ll just interrupt you because I know that we we don’t have a lot of time, but just in terms of housing because I know that’s a big focus for Quebecers in general. But in longue you’re, you’re going to be taking this approach to housing as well and you’re going to provide some tools to to landlords and and to business owners. So what would those tools look like in order for someone from a racialized or diverse community who’s looking for a new home so that they don’t find the same challenges that happen over and over and over again. So we want to develop is intervention tools that will allow awareness first of all to the landlords in terms of housing access, for example, like a person that actually wants to access housing. Those tools will raise awareness to the landlords to be able to understand the housing is one of the fundamental rights and it’s important for the health of the people and the fact of the health of the city for the people to have affordable housing but also to have dignified housing. So those are the tools that we want to develop and we will develop for the landlords now for the promoters, we want to develop tools for them to to be aware and maybe go into regulations. That’s why we’ll see how the implementation will go to to understand that when they have a housing project to think about implementing affordable housing for everybody to be able to have access because in the population of longer, there’s a huge pocket of poverty and 25% of that pocket of poverty is from diversity. So it’s important for everybody to feel included and to have that fundamental right, I would say, to to be able to have access. So everything else follows health, education follows. So I know this is just getting under way. I hope we can talk again as this program gets into play and and we can learn more. Thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for inviting me, Deborah.