Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, honourable members and guests for giving me the chance to appear in front of the special committee on Afghanistan.
The federal government, and particularly IRCC, should stop playing politics with us because it is a matter of life and death for our parents and siblings.
We represent a large group of former interpreters who helped keep Canadians soldiers safe for so many years in Afghanistan.
Let me give you a sense of how hard it is to live in Afghanistan for an interpreter's family who supported the Canadian mission there. In this month of Ramadan, our families are fasting and hiding from the Taliban government and its supporters. This is what our families are going through in Afghanistan. For example, the Taliban raided the house of one of our former interpreters. His brother burned all the documents, and he was only able to send one of his brothers to Pakistan. He tells me he cannot afford all of his family members travelling to Pakistan at the same time and arranging for them to live there. His family is still living in Afghanistan, and they do not know what will happen to them tomorrow. They constantly change their location.
We have had dozens of meetings with IRCC. We have wanted positive results from one week to the next. Why not assign 10 or more case numbers a week to our families' cases? Why not ship 15 cases a week for a final decision to the Abu Dhabi office? We seem to be getting the opposite. We ask the same questions every week, and either the answers we get back are negative, or they tell us they are still chasing these questions.
I will give an example of some of those questions.
We want the IRCC to include four or five family members who left Afghanistan before July 22, 2021. In this current public policy that is made for extended families, the status of those four to five family members in their country is temporary, and they could be deported back to Afghanistan, but the IRCC is not willing to do that.
Moreover, the IRCC must stop double-standard policies. Why do I call them double-standard? It is because IRCC provides a one-year RAP, resettlement assistance program, to SIM applicants, but they recently changed it for families. The website says that our extended families will not be covered under the RAP program for one year when they come to Canada.
How can I or another former Canadian interpreter support his parents and siblings to rent them a place for the first year or uphold them well? None of them will have a basic job when they arrive in Canada.
The Minister of Immigration made promises directly to us, and we want him to keep these promises. We want him to process the rest of the applications and assign case numbers to those applications that have been waiting in his office for more than three months. He personally told us, “We control paperwork, and I will make sure, and my team will make sure you guys will have case numbers for your applications within two weeks,” but for more than 65 persons, our applications are still being ignored or not being assigned any case numbers.
Second, he also promised us that the first batch of our extended families would arrive in the first quarter of 2022. We want him to keep this promise. We have zero family members arriving under this current policy. We want him to include these four to five families. These are also our families in third countries. They are temporarily living there, and they will be deported.
We want him to do more and talk to the Pakistani delegation to provide our families with a single travel document or to provide passes so that our families can travel to Pakistan without passports, which we have a problem with.
We want him to talk with the Qatari government about securing chartered flights from Kabul airport to Doha or UAE, because Qatar controls airports in Afghanistan currently. We want to ask him to provide the same sort of services to our families as they arranged for the same program. We want him to keep his promises and do his moral obligation.
Thank you, everyone.