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.