Thank you very much for having me today.
I'll give you a bit of background on what I'm about to say.
I'm here from the Centre for Newcomers in Calgary. We're a large settlement organization with a dedicated refugee response and we have a team of people working on the Afghan response. Our scope, though, is not the immediate arrival. After they arrive and have been here for a few weeks or months, we try to provide support to people. We do that through a collaborative effort with local groups—such as the Calgary East Zone Newcomers Collaborative, which is a collaborative of more than 100 different groups—and with national groups, as well. For example, for LGBT people, we work with private sponsors and the Rainbow Coalition for Refuge across the country.
What I'm about to say is based on feedback from the Afghan community leaders locally, Afghan people themselves whom I've met and had focus groups with, service providers that have now provided services to well over 400 people, and various service partners.
Among the most important issues we're facing are the barriers associated with the differential support services based on immigration type. Those are separated among government-assisted refugees, privately sponsored refugees, and refugee claimants, or those seeking asylum in Canada. All Afghans get different types of services based on their status. It's very false, in our minds, and it really needs to be cleaned up.
Those who get the most support are, obviously, the government-assisted refugees. They get all of the services they wish. Although privately sponsored refugees are eligible for those services, they don't always get the services they need, in our experience, because private volunteers and sponsorship groups don't always know about the services, even within their own communities.
Claimants are not offered English-language or settlement support until they become permanent residents. Of course, asylum seekers who have not started their claim get the least amount of support and have to rely on private people for that support.
The other issue I'd like to raise is that this differential response is, to our minds, not well received by claimants—especially knowing that 100% of Afghan refugee asylum seekers in Canada were accepted by the Immigration and Review Board, yet they have to wait months, if not years, to get the services they need...until they are permanent residents. Often, provincial, municipal and private people are pointed to to provide that support, but that, too, is very differential. Provincial and municipal supports do not equal federal supports, which are provided through IRCC. That differential on supports truly needs to be eliminated.
Equality of service, across all refugee statuses, is extremely important. As one of the last panellists said, a prima facie noting of a refugee as they arrive, regardless of how they arrive, is extremely important. That also extends to what's going on in Afghanistan at the moment. We are also receiving dozens, hundreds, of requests from people from Afghanistan who are either internally displaced or recently displaced outside of Afghanistan, asking to come to Canada. There's very little we can do with them, given the lack of response by IRCC in those areas and private sponsors' inability to respond.
With that said, I know my time is up. I'm happy to answer questions later.