Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me again to come before the standing committee.
I'm coming just to talk a little bit about what I'm doing every day. I work with the FCJ Refugee Centre. We work with women and children, and we accommodate them.
One of the things I'll do is bring you the experience of working with women who have been detained at the immigration holding centre in Toronto. Some of these women have been in detention for 72 hours or even for eight months. The longer they are in detention, the greater we can see the impact, especially if they have children. They show signs of depression, loss of appetite, anxiety, and so on. The children exhibit behavioural problems, and often they have loss of appetite.
I'm telling you this is because I want to bring to you the alternative to detention. After living in detention they come to our agency, and they look much better. Also, they start to establish themselves in English classes, and the children go to school, and they show more signs of integrating into the community.
We are making this presentation because we oppose the detention of refugees, and the alternative to detention is to integrate refugees into the community, especially refugees—