Thank you very much.
Thank you for the introduction. My name is Julia Porter and I am the settlement social worker with the Association for New Canadians. We're an organization that's community-based, not-for-profit, based out of St. John's, Newfoundland. We offer resettlement assistance programs and immigrant and settlement assistance programs to newcomers in St. John's, Newfoundland. We primarily work with government-assisted refugees and immigrants. We don't often work with refugee claimants.
One of the main things I wanted to speak about with respect to the bill, concerning my own experience, is around the strict timelines. Going from 60 days to 19 months seems like quite a large leap. Working with the clients that I work with, who may come from rural areas or who may have family members scattered over different parts of the world, it's really very difficult to get certain documents or everything in order that they may require. So 60 days before the time of the hearing is pretty strict. As well, for the eight days it would be really important that some practices or approaches be put in place, given the sensitive nature of many claims, and maybe even developing partnerships in the community with respect to having certain lawyers who may have to work with the refugee claimants.
I do think it's fantastic that they are planning on resettling more refugees under the private sponsorship program as well as the government-assisted refugee program, but as some other people have mentioned, it's too bad the refugee claimant process is affected by that.
That's everything I have to say from our perspective. As I said, we work primarily with government-assisted refugees, and I'm very glad I got the opportunity to sit here at this meeting.