Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's processing the applications that are volunteered by the private sector, which doesn't actually have a quota. It's always termed “targets”. It's a range.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  CIC would say they match their resources to the targets that are out there. For government-assisted, as I said before, there is an actual quota that each mission has to meet. They have to get so many government-sponsored out of their region to Canada within that year. But private

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The resources have fallen behind. They have diminished to the extent that they have fallen behind, and that's created backlogs. Part of it is not just numbers of visa officers but the number of posts that do it. Nairobi, for instance, has to attend to 16 or 17 countries, so the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  One of the issues with the government sponsorship is that there is a quota. They need to fill the 7,300. Visa posts need to deliver that number. If there are high numbers at posts or not enough resources, the private sponsorships wait behind, because they have to attend to the go

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think there's a strong commitment from sponsorship organizations to protect refugees. As you have heard, refugees also have families in every case; we cannot get away from that. Our first mandate, priority, and interest is to protect refugees. This happens to be an overseas pro

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the program started and continues to have that additional component available to private sponsors--and that is strongly held in the community. For some, those kinds of cases are more compelling. The cases they wish to name feel more compelling because they have connection

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If I could start with that one, having been on the committee before, I concur with what was said about membership. We had quite solid membership on the CIC side during those years. They would explain when there was a change in their membership so we wouldn't be surprised by new m

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm Ed Wiebe, and I'm with the Mennonite Central Committee in Winnipeg. Mennonite Central Committee Canada has been a sponsorship agreement holder—or SAH, as we call them—continuously since the inception of the program in 1979. We operate the program out of five provincial offic