This paper looks at transnational immigrant communities living in Canada, focusing on the issues of remittance market development in the south, and some of the most recent initiatives that rich countries and some international development authorities have either launched or are contemplating to improve remittance market efficiency. The author cautions against initiatives from above that could hinder rather than facilitate remittance flows into poor households.

The paper also addresses some of the key issues relating to transnational immigrant communities in the Canadian context and their bearing on Canada's domestic and international development policies.

A number of the key issues discussed include:

The scope of immigrants' transnational agency

• the emphasis on financial remittances alone in international development policy, and how governments of emigration countries might transform them into public goods leads to underestimation of migrants' transnational agency, and to policy marginalisation of the global import of the several other dimensions of immigrants' transnational organising.

Canada's domestic context and immigrants' transnational agency

• policymakers need to be sensitised to, and advised on, the underlying causal relationship between the host-countries' domestic policies and immigrants' transnational organising, and the impacts of these policies on poor countries' development via the scope and intensity of their transnational development activities.

Immigrants' transnational agency and the MDGs

• if transnational migrant communities are a significant development resource potential as currently perceived in the international development community, then harnessing this potential through strategic development partnerships based upon a best practices' framework can significantly contribute to acceleration of progress towards the MDGs.

Policy coherence and immigrants' transnational agency

• in some areas of policy there may be complementarities and synergies between migrant transnationalism and the objectives to be achieved at both the national and international levels, whereas in other policy areas there may be tension. Integrating migrant transnationalism in national and international policies could help to accurately assess the scope of the potential contribution of transnational migrant communities to sustainable attainment of those objectives and identify best practices' options to maximise that contribution.