Thank you very much. I'll try to be fairly quick because I realize time is running short.
I want to thank the committee for inviting me to come here this afternoon. I've spent most of my public service career dealing with refugee issues of one sort or another. I go back, Mr. Telegdi will be interested to know, to the Hungarian refugee movement--I used to be in Toronto trying to help them get settled--to the Czech refugee movement, and all through the Ugandans, the Chileans, the Indochinese. I've learned through this long career that refugee policy, particularly, is a sensitive and very complex issue. It requires a lot of thought.
For example, you had asked, if these people appear, why aren't they simply accepted as refugees? Most of the Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria are not considered by the UNHCR as refugees as such. Because they are fleeing armed conflict does not make them a refugee under the UN convention, and rather than make individual decisions, the UN simply offers them temporary protection because they're fleeing armed conflict. They treat them the same as refugees and they treat them as people of UNHCR concern, but the specialists will tell you there's a difference between a convention refugee and people who flee armed conflict or earthquakes or natural disasters. You have to prove individually that if you were returned, you would be persecuted.
We, Canada, have to cooperate fully with UNHCR policy, and their policy is pretty clear. Their first priority is to try to repatriate the refugees or the people of concern who get out from refugee-like situations. So the UNHCR will not be anxious for large numbers of Iraqis to be brought out of Jordan and Syria for resettlement. They will hope to repatriate them to Iraq. Even today, as you know, there are busloads of Iraqis being returned to Iraq, and the Iraqi government is encouraging them to return to those areas where there is peace.
The second priority of the UNHCR, if they can't return them to their home country, is to resettle them in the countries of first asylum in the regions from which they have escaped. In other words, if they can't send them back to Iraq, they would prefer to see them resettle somehow in the neighbouring countries.
The third, final, and last resort is resettlement in third countries. It's not a preferred solution of the UNHCR for countries to go into Syria and Jordan and take out very large numbers of Iraqis. There's a long story behind that, but it stems from the Indochinese movement, when many countries took large numbers of Indochinese refugees. They did so, and as a result of that, more and more boat people left Vietnam under hazardous conditions, many of them drowning, because they knew if they got out to Thailand or Hong Kong, they'd get a free trip to New York or Ottawa. So there was an international meeting to advise countries to be very careful about third country resettlement.
From the end of the Second World War right up to 1985, Canada did not consider itself a country of first asylum, so we concentrated all our efforts in being a country of resettlement. We saw our role as going to the countries of first asylum and sharing the burden by taking the refugees out of their camps and bringing them to Canada for resettlement, and we did an excellent job on that. Indeed, in 1986, we got the Nansen Medal from the United Nations for our efforts.
By 1985, however, we started to become a country of first asylum ourselves, and as a result of that, we can no longer do both. We can't become a country of resettlement and a country of first asylum. If you look at our last-year figures on the number of refugees we received here, the government brought in about 7,416 refugees from camps abroad. There were an additional 2,976 privately sponsored refugees, but 19,935 were asylum seekers who had been found to be refugees.
I have one final point. It's a question of cost. It's very difficult to get an estimate of the costs of the asylum-seekers in Canada, but I estimate it to be around $2 billion per annum. Now the budget of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to look after 30-some million refugees or people of concern is half of that.
One final point on Iraq. I have heard that there are U.S. reports that—and the department should be here to hear that—Christian Iraqis are having a very difficult time getting registered with the UNHCR and are therefore referred on to immigrant countries that might take them, like Canada. The problem is that the locally engaged staff working out of the embassies in Amman and in Damascus are not favourably disposed to letting the Christians who are fleeing register with UNHCR. That's something the committee might want to look into.