Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Very briefly, to address this issue about the visa post approach, without evaluating data, Iraqi refugees are going mostly to countries covered by the Canadian visa post in Damascus, and the other visa post is in Ankara. The acceptance rate in Ankara is around 70%, while in Damascus it's around 30%.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I believe that if we had open communication with CIC to make sure we assess the cases in the same way—or the case management, case review—we'd be ready to take into consideration the submitted information and go through cases, at least on par. We could have a fair procedure at every visa post, regardless of the attitude of the visa officer.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's right. I think the status determination of the refugees and those who need an assessment for resettlement has a lot of subjective elements. So it's definitely very difficult to assess in the same way in different visa posts. In big numbers, however, we must say that there is definitely a significant difference, and the Damascus and Ankara examples show what I mean.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think that would be an excellent approach. The last NGO-government committee even started to talk about how the NGOs could share information about country of origin and its human rights and refugee situations with CIC and then we would be on the same page. I definitely believe that more communication should open up, and if guidelines and accountability and transparency issues were put in place, it would definitely help.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Hello, everybody. My name is Martin Mark Ill, and this is my colleague, Carolyn Vanderlip. We are two of the representatives elected by 89 sponsorship agreement holder organizations, or SAHs, from across Canada to represent them on the NGO-Government Committee on Private Sponsorship of Refugees program.