Your hosts  Lynn, Levon, and Marc.   (the half hour audio is below, the full hour-long video is at the bottom)

This week the Link was on location at the Montreal Convention Centre (Palais des Congres) for the 2017 Immigration Expo.

Listen

Our guests included Jonathan Chodjai, president of the Immigration Expo who spoke about the history and growth of the now annual event, and the kinds of services, information, and opportunities it provides to newcomers

Kalina Bacher-René joined us from the Quebec Order of Engineers. She explained about the process and requirements for professional engineers immigrating to Canada in order to get one’s engineering certification in Quebec. The information also has relevance to other provinces, and indeed to other professional classes.

Fan Zang is the International Recruitment Officer for Montreal’s Concordia University, He spoke of the services available for foreign students and the advantages of study in Montreal, and Canada. He also spoke of his own experience as an international student and why he chose to stay and live in Canada after his studies.

Lawyer Pierre-Olivier Marcoux spoke about legal aid in Canada. He works with the Centre Communitaire Aide Juridique de Montreal (Community centre legal aid, Montreal). He talked about how legal aide can help newcomers with little financial resources if and when they get tangled up in Canadian laws. He said newcomers occasionally get into trouble because they don’t always understand the laws in this country and emphasised the importance of contacting legal services to avoid the situation getting worse.  He also noted that sometimes legal aide can help mediate or mitigate a problem before it gets into the legal area of a court or lawsuit situation.

Donald Igbokwe , professional licensed immigration consultant and president of The Canadian Association of Professional Immigration Consultants (CAPIC-ACCPI also joined us. He talked about the services a consultant can offer, and the importance for potential immigrants to ensure that if they use an immigration consultant, to ensure that the person is licensed and registered to ensure quality of service and to avoid cases of fraud.

And Pierre-Emmanuel Eyelom  joined us representing Scotiabank, which is one of Canada’s major banks.  He gave advice on some important financial issues that newcomers would need to know about and understand, such as the importance of, and how to establish, a credit rating, and services that are available to newcomers to help them in financial matters in their new country.

Images of the week