Thank you for this. Although I don't necessarily take it this way, there was a comment made a moment ago about it being less of a burden on taxpayers when we're dealing with privately sponsored versus government-assisted refugees. I think it's really important that we are all careful in our language. Refugees are not a burden on our communities. They are huge contributors.
I have seen government-assisted refugees—technically this was a BVOR application—show up in my community with nothing, start a chocolate factory and put dozens and dozens of my community members to work. I remember my friend Tareq saying that he experienced for the first time somebody asking why he was coming to Antigonish to take his job. That was the first guy they hired at the chocolate shop.
These are the kinds of stories I hear about from the government-assisted refugees I meet. They run restaurants in my community. There's a young guy named Omar—if you're watching, Omar, hello. It's good to see you.
He opened a lemonade stand outside his parents' restaurant on the Pictou waterfront to save enough money to buy himself a Nintendo Switch. His mom told him about a young boy back home who needed to save money for surgery because he had throat cancer, and Omar spent his summer raising money for some boy he had never met with throat cancer on the other side of the world. Somebody did buy him the Switch, by the way, so it all worked out. But—