Sponsors do not submit refugee sponsorships to keep busy, to give false hope to refugees, or to waste visa officers' time. We want the program to work, and we're deeply frustrated by high refusal rates that come after years of waiting and often changed circumstances in the country of origin.
Sponsorship is one of the few routes to protection. Refugees cannot present themselves to Canadian missions abroad; they must be referred to them by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, by Amnesty International, or by a sponsorship agreement holder. Therefore, sponsorship agreement holders are a vital support to Canada fulfilling its international responsibility to refugees.
Over the last 27 years, sponsors have brought hundreds of thousands of refugees to Canada. We have invested time, energy, and our own funds in helping them integrate into Canada. We offer 24-hour support to these newcomers in our communities of expected resettlement, which span the country and are not just in large urban centres. We also advocate for sponsored refugees and help them access appropriate social services.
For our part, we screen cases and consult with partners, whether churches or agencies, in refugee-producing countries and countries of asylum. We visit refugee camps and we visit urban refugees. Our priority is to protect individuals and provide durable solutions to groups of human beings who are otherwise warehoused and forgotten.
Visits abroad are informative. We encounter some excellent visa officers, but many others view the program and view us with a lot of suspicion. Missions abroad are not well resourced to handle private sponsorship, and it seems that private sponsors must bear the brunt of bringing refugees to the program.