New government policies put a damper on private refugee sponsorship

In the past six months, thousands of highly motivated people across Canada have come together to form sponsorship groups to bring in Syrian refugees, raising millions of dollars to support them in their first year. Given the priority the new Canadian government was giving to Syrian refugees, most have been optimistic that a family would be assigned to them soon and arrive within a few months.

But at the end of February, when the government had fulfilled its election promise to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees, it quietly and without warning changed its policy and the flow of refugees to sponsorship group was almost completely stopped. It appears that the majority of the 8,000 privately sponsored Syrian refugees who have arrived so far (17,000 were government-sponsored) were old applications initiated and in the pipeline long before the Alan Kurdi photo and therefore not part of the nationwide community private-sponsorship trend that started in September 2015.

To voice their anger about the change in government policies, more than 300 members of sponsorship groups gathered in a downtown Toronto church on March 30. The very emotionally charged meeting was convened by John Sewell, the former mayor of Toronto, who summed up the main policy changes that will result in a considerable delay in bringing in Syrian refugees:

1. The government has released all re-assigned and temporary staff processing Syrian refugees and closed processing centres in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. This means we are back to a system where it takes months to process and register a family through regular visa offices.

2. The government has released re-assigned temporary staff in the Winnipeg processing centre and no longer prioritizes Syrian families. Processing times used to be 10 days; now we are back to a three month processing time for a family.

3. There will no longer be a special priority for Syrians: they will be treated like other refugees, which means a long wait.

Syrian refugees will also have to pay for their flights to Canada again.

Arif Virani, Parliamentary Secretary of John McCallum, the Minister of Immigration Refugees and Citizenship, was at the meeting and told us that sponsorship applications received until midnight on March 31^st – the next day!- would most likely still be processed in 2016, or early 2017. Obviously, a day’s notice for this deadline was not enough for most people to finish filing their application.

What can you do?

Write a letter to minister John McCallum (john.mccallum@parl.gc.ca) and copy his parliamentary secretary Arif Virani (arif.virani@paarl.ca) and your own MP (or better yet meet with your MP) to highlight / convey your displeasure and emphasize the following messages:

a) Government staffing / processing capacity should be restored immediately to pre-Feb, 28th levels in order to process existing and upcoming Syrian refugee applications as quickly as possible

b) No caps should be put on private sponsorships of Syrians since they are privately funded and settled - and therefore don't strain the government's settlement agencies or budget.   Furthermore, from an economic point of view, this would be a stimulus measure as there is upwards of $30mm sitting in bank accounts waiting to be spent by private sponsor groups in settling refugees. Spending this money would stimulate the economy more than leaving it sitting in bank accounts.

c) All Syrian applications currently in the pipeline, or submitted within the next 3 months, should be expedited as the Syrian situation is a huge, unique and global crisis and deserves our support and focus.

d) Overall, the government should seek to support private sponsorship groups that have formed across the country - and not abandon us in favour of their own Syrian GAR refugees.  They can do both. Privately sponsored refugees are more successfully settled compared to agency-settled refugees and have better long term outcomes (income, English skills, remaining in Canada etc.)

Please do share this information with your networks and encourage people to communicate with their MPs and Minister McCallum - we are at a cross-roads and the more people who clearly communicate with the government on this issue about what we expect government policy should be, the more likely that the Syrian refugee crisis will get the attention it deserves and private sponsorships will get the support they warrant. 

For more information and updates on this issue, go to the Toronto For Refugees blog.

What do these policy changes mean for the Ripple Refugee Group?

We had handed in applications for two more families to Lifeline Syria, but they had not been sent to the government yet. One of our group members worked until the early morning after the March 30 meeting to finalize these applications with the Lifeline Syria team to meet the March 31 deadline. We are working on the applications for two more case files and hope that the government will extend the deadline – if not, we may have to wait for a year or even longer before they will be able to come to Canada.

Where are the Syrian refugees?

The CBC's Ontario Today aired an interesting show today about what it takes to sponsor refugees, featuring the efforts of Lifeline Syria, a group that is trying to get 1000 Syrian refugees into the GTA, and others. Our very own Raghu called in and voiced some of the frustrations our group is facing:

Where are the Syrians on the sponsorship list? Why are there  bottlenecks to find sponsorship agreement holders? Why does the Canadian government make it so difficult for a motivated group such as ours to sponsor refugees?

Listen to Ontario Today: What it takes to sponsor refugees

"Maybe mother's day isn't the best day for this"

It’s a Sunday morning in May and I’m a little nervous.  Claudia and I have invited quite a few people to a refugee awareness event at our house for this afternoon.  But it is Mother’s Day and a lot of people have already indicated that they can’t make it. 

I’m hoping we won’t be wasting the time of our 3 invited speakers, each of whom has lots of experience in this area and who will be donating their Sunday afternoon in order to meet with us.

As it turns out, we end up with a pretty full house with over 30 people showing up. It seems that the refugee issue is resonating with people.

The first speaker, Yosief Araya, works for the Refugee Sponsorship Training Program (RSTP). The program is funded by the federal government and is designed to support Sponsorship Agreement Holders (SAHs). Yosief explained to us the different ways in which private citizens can sponsor refugees.  One option is to nominate people for the Canadian government to recognize as refugees (so-called “named” refugees). The process takes between 24 – 48 months and sponsors receive no financial support from the government. 

The other option, which seems a better fit for us, is to sponsor refugees through the “Blended Visa Office-Referred Program”. These are people who have already been identified by the UNHCR as refugees, have been accepted by Canada and are “ready to travel“.  This latter category requires very little paperwork on the part of the sponsoring group and the refugees can arrive into Canada within 1 to 4 months. Under this program, at least five people have to form a constituent group and have to pay for more than half of the sponsored refugee’s costs in the first year. Yosief told us that Canada plans to bring in 800 to 1000 refugees under the blended refugee settlement program in 2015. 

We learned that the main focus of Canada's blended VOR program in 2015 is on the following populations: Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Congolese, Burundians, Burmese, Bhuanese and Colombians.

Yosief is followed by Khwaka Kukuboo of the United Church of Canada. Faith communities have historically been a leader in forming groups to sponsor and settle refugees and the United Church has been one of the biggest players in Canada. Khwaka shared a document with profiles of refugees currently available for sponsorship with us. The vast majority are from Eritrea, followed by Burmese. Surprisingly, there are no Syrians on the list.

Our final speaker was Larry Peloso, representing the Metropolitan Community Church, which has been a leader in advocating for LGBT refugee issues and sponsoring and settling refugees who are being persecuted for their sexual orientation.

I think many people in the audience found it surprising that the Canadian policy for most refugees is that they must be sponsored and settled by private citizens in order for them to be allowed to come to Canada.  While European governments will pay for and arrange the settlement of refugees, it is private citizens who must undertake both the cost and the time to settle many of the refugees coming to Canada.

There was also a discussion about how big a problem the current refugee situation is. Globally, there are an estimated 60 million people who have been displaced due to war and persecution. 13 million have been forced to flee their countries.  

We talked about how easy it is to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the crisis, to become paralyzed when confronted by the need.  But then someone pointed out that while our sponsorship of a single refugee family would only represent a drop in the bucket, really a drop in the ocean , that in fact for that one family, for each of the individuals within that family, it is a pretty transformative ‘drop’.  That in fact that family will be moving from a refugee camp where they are living in limbo, with no clear hope for the future, to Toronto where whole new avenues of possibility and opportunity will open up for each one of the family members. 

Ending our meeting with this discussion regarding sponsoring a refugee family, providing a hopeful future where it doesn’t exist right now, and thinking specifically about what it must be like for the parents themselves to see their children in need, it suddenly seemed appropriate that we were holding this event on Mother’s Day, in a safe place, on a sunny afternoon.  

Andrew FitzGerald