Sure. Thank you.
Before I do, I want to offer a response because I think this is an important thing for people to understand about this particular conflict. Every refugee initiative that we've launched has a similar security screening process. One thing that my eyes have been opened to is that it's really challenging to respond to a crisis for a refugee purpose in real time as it unfolds.
If you look at Syria, we were dealing with hundreds of thousands of people who had fled, starting three years earlier. The groups that we were pulling people to Canada from were in camps in Lebanon and Jordan and had already been processed by the UNHCR. To deal with people as a conflict emerges and still apply a rigorous security screening process is a whole new level of difficult that I don't think we've dealt with—certainly not in my lifetime.
To Mr. Baker's question, my honestly held belief is that Canada is the best in the world when it comes to resettling people for humanitarian purposes. If I go back to the middle of the pandemic.... I was with the High Commissioner for the UNHCR just a couple of weeks ago in Ottawa. He made the point to anyone who would listen that Canada kept the global system of resettlement alive over the course of the last few years when some other players around the world retracted and the world was shut down for reasons that we all appreciate now.
From my perspective, I was blown away when I came to learn that, in the year 2020, Canada resettled one-third of the total number of refugees resettled around the entire world. I think this is something Canadians should be really proud of. It's not just a government thing. Canadians and communities across the country have embraced refugees with open arms.
On a relative scale of commitments in Afghanistan, on a per capita basis, we're the ball game. On a raw numbers basis, the United States is the tops because they had such a massive evacuation effort. Australia's made a significant commitment with 31,500 over the next four years. I pulled some of these numbers ahead of time. I see that the European Union has a total just shy of 40,000, with 37,000. New Zealand has just shy of 1,500. The United Kingdom has 20,000 over the next few years. They may go further because they have two programs, but I haven't seen clear targets on one. The U.S., of course, has provided support for the resettlement of up to 95,000. We've been working with the U.S. to have some referrals that they've evacuated be resettled in Canada. Some of those people are in process already.
Those are most of the big players on the scene when it comes to the Afghan refugee resettlement. By this time next year, with the exception of the United States, I expect Canada will probably surpass not just where other countries are but potentially their entire goal over the life cycle of this entire effort, which sometimes spans four or five years.
From my perspective, we're owning up to our reputation as being the best in the world at what we do, and this is what we do.