Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Feb. 1st, 2007

[Carolyn Vanderlip]

The program can't be responsive. As my colleague was saying to me earlier, nobody can predict three or four years from now where there's going to be a need for resettlement, yet we're submitting applications today. We know there's a need for resettlement today, but we certainly can't predict three or four years from now that there will be. If we didn't have this backlog in processing times, the program could be much more responsive.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

However, the delays are so lengthy that in some countries or regions, people are repatriated to their country of origin before their application can even be processed.

Who participates in these meetings? If disputes do arise, do you manage to come to some kind of understanding with the department in order to address problem and challenges or find solutions?

[Carolyn Vanderlip]

It's interesting that you ask about attendance on the committee. On the SAH side, we are elected for a three-year term, and we can go for a second term if we wish. I'm in my fourth year now.

On the CIC side, the problem I and my colleagues who have been on the committee before me have observed is that people change from meeting to meeting. We find we're constantly starting from square one. It's very difficult to make progress when we see new people at each and every meeting. There are really very few people who have been constant. I realize that people do change positions within the department, and some of that is inevitable, but it certainly makes it very difficult for us to make any kind of progress when you have to explain the issue from square one to somebody new. This has been a major problem.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

The delays surrounding sponsorships are nothing new. After the events of 2001, greater emphasis was put on security. However, has Citizenship and Immigration Canada taken any steps to address some of your concerns? You mentioned resources. For example, there is a backlog of 4,000 applications at the Nairobi office. Have you seen any progress or at least a determination on the part of the department to assign some resources to these particular offices?

[Ed Wiebe]

If I could start with that one, having been on the committee before, I concur with what was said about membership. We had quite solid membership on the CIC side during those years. They would explain when there was a change in their membership so we wouldn't be surprised by new members we weren't familiar with. There was collegiality and a commitment to that during those times. I can't speak as much to the current status, but that was our experience at that time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Okay, that's seven and a half minutes.

Mr. Siksay.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

I want to thank you all for being here today. I really do believe this program is a great example of policy and program delivery in Canada. It's something I think we've been honoured for by international organizations, by the United Nations. I want to thank you all for your commitment to it, under some difficult circumstances, as you've made very clear.

I want to ask Heather, and maybe Sarah, to say more about the visa-office-referred program you put in place. It sounds to me that you were trying to do an end run around the criticism you were constantly hearing and come up with another model that addresses the concerns. But it also sounds like the department hasn't seen fit to run with it. I'm wondering if you can tell us more about the model and the response you had.

[Heather Macdonald]

It was a model. It was small-scale. We committed in the 25th anniversary year of sponsorship to taking 25 cases that were referred by this office as a way of honouring the beginnings of the program.

We were able to do that. We were receiving numbers of cases from both Kenya and Bogota; hence I had very good relationships at that time with the visa officers. We took them in numbers of six or seven at a time. We matched very carefully and appropriately across Canada. We had community profiles matched to refugee profiles. We were documenting it and evaluating it, as I understood the CIC was.

We had some worries that we might lose everyone to secondary migration and wondered how we would handle that. That proved not to be the case, actually. We did lose one or two. We had some medical problems that weren't noted in the profile, but it was a wonderful program, and it whetted the appetite. People just came out of the woodwork to help.

I do remember checking with some colleagues in the department about this time a year ago, before we did a promotional piece in our in-house magazine, our observer mandate, stuff like that.

Can this continue? I was assured it could continue. I put the campaign out and was greeted with all these wonderful applications in the fall. I cannot get any other visa-office-referred cases. And in our church it's getting critical. We have many caught in the backlog. We now have this surge forward. I can't offer any visa-office-referred cases, and frankly, we're looking at it and wondering why we should be investing resources. This isn't a good use of our time. We should move on.

I have been involved in the program since 1979, as has Ed. I'm deeply committed to it, but if my supervisor says there's nothing there to commit to, I have to move on.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

My goodness, that's pretty serious stuff.

[Heather Macdonald]

It is serious.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

At this point, if you're somebody who's been that directly involved for that long and you have run up against that kind of a brick wall—It sounds as though you've been trying to accommodate the concerns you've been hearing.

[Heather Macdonald]

Yes. In my annual report to CIC, I said that we would take a minimum of 20 visa-office-referred cases a year. We are working to our ultimate goal, which is that 50% of those in our program would be named by sponsors, that they would be sponsor-referred in Canada. The other 50% would be referred by the visa officers, who would give us cases that needed a home.

We are open. We're involved in the care and group processing, but we're not so committed to a group processing model, because they tend to come in clumps, so we have to react quickly. We would like a steady flow. We're there to do our screening, to do our training, to get the profiles, and to do some clustering of groups together so they get support.

I think there's something there, and I don't understand what the problem is.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

You've had no feedback from CIC about what the problem is. Were there questions raised with the initial program?

[Heather Macdonald]

No. What I have heard is that they can't give the United Church special treatment, and I'm saying that I'm not asking for special treatment. Make it available to every SAH in the country. That's all I've heard.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Martin, you used an interesting statistic. You said that there was $44 million that private sponsors put into this kind of resettlement work annually, and that's at the current levels. Can you say a bit more about where that number comes from? I gather there would be a potential to increase that dramatically if the numbers were increased.

[Martin Mark Ill]

Yes, thank you. Generally, when a sponsor wants to submit an undertaking, then we must meet the criteria. One of the criteria is that we show that we have all the funds available, that we can take financial responsibility at least for one year, and in some special cases for two or three years, for the newcomer upon arrival. Even in the program we bring these people in as landed immigrants, and they are able to work, and I'm very happy to see that in most of our SAHs, 70% to 80% of the people become taxpayers within a year or even less. Still, this money has to be put aside, and we must make sure that we meet this CIC criteria.

There is public data that says that once I submit a sponsorship application for one single individual, I am liable for $9,500. For a couple, it's $15,200. So basically these funds are frozen and waiting, because once we submit a case, we have to put this money aside, and we cannot use it for anything else, because you never know when the refugee will come. There is not even an estimated time when the person will be here, so we must be ready.

This causes a huge problem in the system, that all our human resources are committed, and all our funds are committed to this. We take it very seriously. It's very unusual to have a default or breakdown through a fault of the sponsor. So I think this commitment makes it very hard for us when there is an average processing time of three or four years.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

So is the $44 million figure you used just the money the sponsors have to put aside, or does it include things like the other assistance they would offer in terms of locating furniture or volunteer time? Are those things extra or on top of that as well?

[Martin Mark Ill]

It's an extra, so we don't even calculate the time and all of that. Well, I'm a paid person and a lucky person because I'm paid for what I love to do, but everybody else in our archdiocese in Toronto is a volunteer. They are doing these things free of charge, which are not counted.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

In terms of the delivery of a settlement program, that figure is lowballing it in a sense. In terms of making a commitment to refugee resettlement, we're really saving the government a significant amount of money in terms of delivering a very successful program.

[Martin Mark Ill]

Definitely.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Mr. Siksay.

Mr. Komarnicki.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I welcome to the committee the various members and groups you represent. A lot of your statements have certainly been insightful. I think, as Mr. Wiebe mentioned, there are certainly challenges in the program. When we look at the underpinnings, there's no doubt this could be a win-win situation for both sides, so to speak, and for the refugees as well—and there's no shortage of refugees, that's for sure.

I appreciate the fact Mr. Wiebe mentioned, that he has 600 rural congregations and quite an infrastructure that could perhaps be utilized better. It would seem that when you have that kind of facility, we would certainly want to cooperate and work with you to use the efficiency that's already there. I want you to know that I personally appreciate what you're doing and agree with you that this is one class or category that can be improved significantly. I realize the backlog in itself is a problem, because it's pretty hard to measure up to something that occurred three years ago. Most people would like to react within the year or within months, as it would make it much easier. So we understand that. But I also appreciate that you have been discussing these matters with the immigration department of Canada and that they are looking at some ways to tackle this. I guess one way is by putting more resources into that.

The other issue, I guess, is the refusal rate. I suppose a refusal rate of anything approaching 50% is obviously very high, and I gather you're going to do something in terms of education and trying to make sure the understanding is there so that the rate will be lower. But of course a lot of these applications are in the pool.

Coming down to my question, the program obviously has some positive aspects to it and it could work, but there are some strains happening that may put the program in jeopardy, and you need to turn it around. Part of the refusal issue perhaps relates to the family reunification case, and I know you say you've accepted 50% as referrals of refugees from the government side, which wouldn't necessarily pose you any problems.

But there is, I gather, a desire in the community to bring in family members who are in the refugee class. Is that perhaps causing a bit of a problem in the system, or has it caused some of the problem with the three-year backlog and the refusal rate? And does the policy perhaps need to change somewhat to accommodate the desire of your community to bring in members of the family class who are in the refugee class? Flowing from that, sometimes it's perhaps not that easy to find who is or isn't a refugee when you're proceeding from that angle.

Does anybody want to comment on that? Perhaps Mr. Wiebe.

[Ed Wiebe]

I think there's a strong commitment from sponsorship organizations to protect refugees. As you have heard, refugees also have families in every case; we cannot get away from that. Our first mandate, priority, and interest is to protect refugees. This happens to be an overseas program we're working with, and the applicants aren't right here. It makes it difficult—that distance, assessment, and the extra resources we spend on our side to ensure that we are in fact dealing with protection cases. They may also have family elements to them. We recognize that and it's fine; we have a commitment to families as well.

We also have to remember that the assisted relative category is gone in Canada. It used to exist. We've talked about it to CIC. The NGO and members on the committee have brought it up. We brought it up during the years I was on the committee, and there was quite a strong reaction against instituting such mechanisms—no family or assisted relative category, is what we heard.

There are other mechanisms to deal with that aspect in a humanitarian flow, where the family separation issues may be stronger than any other elements, but that is not our primary consideration. We start with the protection issues.

We don't want to lose people simply because they have family connections. We want to bring those refugees who happen to be family as well. That's fine. On what losing the assisted relative category has done, I talked about our in-Canada resources that we spend upfront before we make a decision. It is exactly that. We get a tremendous amount of mail, e-mail, and knocks at the door. I think your constituency offices reflect that as well.

It takes us a long time to assess whether to proceed on the basis of refugee protection, or if we have to say no because it doesn't have enough of the refugee elements in there for us to proceed. You've heard the comments about how difficult it is to do that, because these are people right in our midst who are making these appeals. They appeal again. We recognize they don't have other mechanisms. The definition of family class is tight. We don't have other mechanisms.

We hope there will be exploration by groups such as this on how we can meet those challenges. All of us around this table face them, and they affect us in different ways. It has come back upon us, fingers pointed at us, that we're a family class movement; that's our motivation. It is not. It is refugee protection. People need to have families.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Rather than move toward referral of refugees to communities such as yours so they're pre-approved, pre-screened, and all you need to do is integrate them, do we need to allow for a family class to accept the realities on the ground? Should there be some movement in that area?

Flowing from that, if it were a matter of refugees simply being referred to your community, would that be acceptable to you? They could be expedited very quickly. They wouldn't have that screening process and the rejection rate because they'd be pre-approved. As I said, there's a large pool of refugees who are available for settlement throughout the country.

[Ed Wiebe]

I think the program started and continues to have that additional component available to private sponsors--and that is strongly held in the community. For some, those kinds of cases are more compelling. The cases they wish to name feel more compelling because they have connections overseas as well. They feel that if they refer people when they know the situations, based on connections they have in certain areas, they are compelling cases to bring forward and would easily get the resources around them here in the communities where they might settle.