As Canadian immigration policy increasingly selects 'flexible' immigrants based on their human capital, it correspondingly problematises immigrant families. In drawing on interviews, conducted over a 5-year period in two different neighbourhoods in the Greater Vancouver area, we followed the paths of family households that recently immigrated to Canada. We argue that households not only provide fundamental support in the migration process, but also enable immigrants to adopt flexible strategies to deal with precarious circumstances and thereby begin the process of integration. Rather than being a 'problem', immigrant households, and particularly women's support roles within them, may be a critical lynchpin to successful integration.Résumé En même temps que la politique canadienne en matière d'immigration vise de plus en plus des immigrants «souples» en fonction de leur capital humain, elle rend problématique la situation des familles immigrantes. Par le biais d'entrevues effectuées au cours d'une période de cinq ans dans deux quartiers différents de la région de Vancouver, nous avons suivi le cheminement de familles récemment immigrées au Canada. Nous alléguons qu'en plus de fournir un appui fondamental pendant le processus d'immigration, les familles permettent aux immigrants d'adopter des stratégies souples leur permettant d'affronter des circonstances précaires et donc d'entamer les démarches de l'intégration. Plutôt que de constituer

This article uses the concept of continuity of care to examine the implications of health-system restructuring for workers and staff in the BC home support system. Home support primarily serves frail seniors living in poverty and has the potential to provide assistance with tasks like bathing, dressing, and toileting, as well as offer social support and relational care to isolated clients. Through presentation of qualitative data from focus groups and interviews with home support workers and clients in the Greater Vancouver area, we demonstrate how the casualization and intensification of work in a context of increasing client acuity levels has diminished both continuity and quality of care. This article discusses how restructuring in the home support sector in BC has reduced the overall number of persons under care in the system, disrupted continuity of care, and compromised quality.

This article re¯ects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It speci®cally takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co-constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in-depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story-telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of womanhood' in Canada, routes to a desired`integration' and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as`desirable' immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological re¯ection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken-for-granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of`the other'. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the speci®c space of the interview, were intricately involved in`telling it like it is' for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.

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