Executive summary

Purpose of the evaluation

This report presents the findings of the evaluation of the grant to Quebec. It was conducted in accordance with requirements under the Financial Administration Act (FAA) which calls for departments to review, every five years, each on-going program of grants and contributions for which it is responsible.^{Footnote 1} The evaluation provides an assessment of the relevance and performance of the grant, in alignment with the five core evaluation issues outlined in the 2009 Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) Directive on the Evaluation Function.

The grant to Quebec

The grant to Quebec is the mechanism used to transfer funds to the province of Quebec under a federal-provincial agreement, the Canada-Quebec Accord related to Immigration and Temporary Admission of Aliens (the Accord). The Accord was signed on February 5, 1991 and came into force on April 1, 1991. It is the fourth agreement between the Federal government and the province of Quebec with respect to immigration since 1971.

The funds provided in the grant are to compensate the province of Quebec for the delivery of reception and integration services in the province, following the federal government’s withdrawal from providing these services in Quebec, pursuant to the Accord. The amount of the grant is determined using a specific formula, defined in Annex B of the Accord.

Evaluation scope

The evaluation focuses on the provision of the grant and not on the Accord. While the Accord sets out the rights and responsibilities of the province and the federal government with respect to the number of immigrants destined to Quebec and the selection, reception and integration of those immigrants, the grant is strictly designed to cover the delivery and administration of reception and integration services provided by Quebec (which includes settlement, resettlement and integration services for clients in that province). This is outlined in Sections 24 through 26 of the Accord^{Footnote 2}, as follows:

24. Canada undertakes to withdraw from the services to be provided by Quebec for the reception and the linguistic and cultural integration of permanent residents in Quebec.
25. Canada undertakes to withdraw from specialized economic integration services to be provided by Quebec to permanent residents in Quebec.
26. Canada shall provide reasonable compensation for the services referred to in sections 24 and 25 provided by Quebec, if:
    1. those services, when considered in their entirety, correspond to the services offered by Canada in the rest of the country;
    2. the services provided by Quebec are offered without discrimination to any permanent resident of Quebec, whether or not that permanent resident has been selected by Quebec.

The evaluation covers the period from 2006 to 2011. This timeframe was chosen to align with the coming into force in 2006 of the FAA requirement to evaluate all grant and contribution programs over a 5 year period.

Evaluation methodology and limitations

The terms of reference for this evaluation, including the methodology and the evaluation matrix, were approved by the CIC Departmental Evaluation Committee prior to the start of this evaluation.

The level of effort and lines of evidence used in this evaluation were calibrated in order to take into account the fact that the element being evaluated is a grant. In this instance, the recipient, the government of Quebec, is not required to report on results achieved. As a result, the amount of information available for this evaluation was limited, and the evaluation was calibrated accordingly.

A goal-based approach was used for this evaluation. It addresses the relevance and performance of the grant in relation to its key goal/objective which was to provide reasonable compensation to the province for the withdrawal of services by the federal government, as long as the services, when considered in their entirety, correspond to the services offered by Canada in the rest of the country and the services provided by Quebec are offered without discrimination to any permanent resident of Quebec.

For the most part, a non-experimental design was used, relying heavily on a review of program documents and interviews to answer the evaluation questions. That said, a quasi-experimental design underpins the longitudinal data analysis used in the development of the economic profile of immigrants to Quebec.

Five main lines of evidence were used to collect data and information: a document review, interviews with key informants, an analysis of administrative data, an analysis of longitudinal data, and an assessment of financial information. This provided a good balance of quantitative and qualitative lines of enquiry; however the following limitations are noted:

• The province of Quebec declined to participate in this evaluation. As a result, only publicly available documents were used to inform this evaluation and no interviews were conducted with representatives of the provincial government.
• While Quebec’s Ministère de l’Immigration et des Communautés Culturelles (MICC) publishes an annual report which it submits to its National Assembly, this report does not provide a breakdown of how the grant money is used within the department or by other provincial government departments. As a result, it is not possible to link the funds to specific programming offered to immigrants in the province.
• Finally, while an analysis of the economic outcomes of immigrants destined to Quebec was undertaken, it is not possible to determine to what extent these outcomes are due to the settlement services funded by the province through the grant to Quebec.

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