Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Honourable members of Parliament, good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me. I am speaking to you from the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy, home of the Treaty 7 first nations and home to the people of MĂ©tis Region 3.
Events that happened in Afghanistan in August were unbeknownst to all of us. This segment of humanity was displaced beyond all expectations from their national way of living and forced to seek refuge in safer havens. In August of 2021, Canada evacuated 3,700 Afghan nationals, brought them into the Toronto port of entry and housed them in four hotels.
We had literally eight days as a sector to organize ourselves to provide settlement, resettlement and implementation support to our newfound families. We were very strategic. Even though we had six to eight days, we wanted to have a fully fledged strategic governance structure that spoke notably to roles and responsibilities: one that was nationally coordinated and locally implemented, one that was equitable, one that was socially just and one that every single RAP service provider could take part in.
We wanted to engage all resettlement sector partners so that they all had an equal and equitable voice at the table. We wanted to assign roles and responsibilities so that everybody became part of this national collaboration. Communication between IRCC and the sector was seamless during this time. Once we designed the fully fledged governance structure, we actioned it into a national steering committee meeting. We met every Wednesday to ensure that we were all on board and all supportive of our new Afghan families that arrived in Canada.
Leadership was at its absolute ultimate: It was transformative. It was distributive leadership. Everybody took a stance. It went beyond the single-agency leadership domain into a fully fledged and collaborative collective impact. The sector undertook a trauma-informed practice because we had to address trauma-informed individuals who went through atrocities that you and I would never be able to understand. We also had to ensure that our staff were actually available and able to support these individuals. We wanted to ensure that they had the correct health and wellness to also support the individuals.
Today, we have received 10,050 Afghan nationals who have arrived. What have we done in seven and a half months? Corporate Canada came to the forefront to support the Afghan nationals. They attended our national steering committee meetings. Canadian Tire, Airbnb, Amazon.com and Air Canada came to provide supports in the way of employment, donations and any possible goodwill to the newfound families. Also, Veterans Affairs Canada sent us a list of 3,000 interpreters and their families who wanted to support the Afghan families.
In line with the UNHCR, we developed a needs assessment tool to ensure we learned as much as we could about the Afghan population so that we could better serve them: to not pre-empt what they needed, but to ask them what they needed. We wanted to start at that point and to meet them halfway, not start from point zero.
Airbnb came in and offered us $500,000 to ensure we had temporary accommodations in place ready for the Afghan families. Uber provided us $100,000 to ensure we had transportation for the Afghan families.
We created a generic email account. To date, the centre has received 34,000 emails from individuals who wanted to support the families. We also created an Aghan resettlement website.
Of course, there were challenges: COVID-19. We had received large-scale movements in the years before; however, Afghan nationals were evacuated during COVID-19, and we had to quarantine them in hotels. We had to ensure that their health was checked and that COVID vaccinations were provided to them.
Housing was another challenge they encountered. Of course, the RAP income support was not sufficient to provide for their housing needs. So what we did was to engage 345 housing partners across Canada in a National Event on Refugee Housing and Partnerships—