I'm going to take that question in two parts, because I am familiar with the BVOR program—a very unfortunately named program that we refer to in short as BVOR—as a policy mechanism within the Canadian landscape. I am also very involved in the private sector funding you referred to, which for a time-limited moment is subsidizing the sponsors' part of that program. I'll tackle both of those pieces.
The first question you asked was about how the BVOR program works and how it's different in its operational dimensions to what we often call the private sponsorship program. I prefer to call it the naming program, to be clear on what's different.
In the private sponsorship program—or the naming program—individual Canadians or groups of Canadians are able to identify the individual person somewhere in the world who they wish to sponsor. They put that name in and position a series of documents to show why that person should be coming in as a refugee. The Government of Canada then takes responsibility to find that person anywhere in the world to conduct a series of interviews and assess whether they're a refugee. If they are, and if the sponsorship group is approved, they will be able to come through as a sponsorship.
I'll contrast that with the BVOR program, which begins with a UNHCR referral to the Government of Canada. The Government of Canada then does its screening to assess whether this is a refugee who meets Canadian criteria. It also does medical, security and health screening. That person is then offered to sponsorship groups within Canada who are interested in sponsoring.
Because of that very different back end, there's a different operational timeline required between when an application to sponsor is received and when a landing can actually happen. In the one variant, the refugee is pre-approved before she is introduced on paper to the sponsorship group. In the second variant, a name appears to the Government of Canada, and, using its visa offices, it goes and finds them and starts the process of screening. It's very different from an operational perspective.
The other thing that's very different in Canada at the moment is that there is a huge demand to do named refugee cases. We refer to that as the echo effect. There are a lot of people who have arrived in Canada in the last few years who have left loved ones behind. They are currently asking either their own sponsorship groups, or others in the community who they encourage to form sponsorship groups to bring their loved ones to safety. Because of the echo effect, we've had a surge of applications in through this naming program. A lot of those cases we expect will be family reunification cases. That has put a lot of demand on an already slower operation model,
You're absolutely right. The difference in timing is significant. We see wait times of three to five years, depending on the location of the named refugee in the named model. We see landing times of a few weeks in the BVOR model. It's absolutely very different.
I'll speak to your second question on this current moment for Canada's BVOR program. There has been a lot of interest in Canada in retaining this very dynamic sponsorship model. There is a multi-year wait-list that reflects that, but there has been less awareness and less interest in taking BVOR sponsored refugees just over the last short term. There are a number of theories about that, including the fact that the echo effect has encouraged sponsors to support the loved ones of people already here. We can explore that further if it's of interest.
In response to that, a number of community organizations have looked at ways of encouraging the use of the BVOR program and educating Canadian sponsorship groups about the availability of the program. One of those interventions has been led by my organization, the University of Ottawa Refugee Hub. We've partnered with a number of philanthropists who offered to subsidize the sponsor portion of the sponsorship.
You correctly identified a second difference in the BVOR program. Sorry, I skipped over that. In the naming variant, the sponsor bears the responsibility for 100% of the settlement costs for the first year. In the BVOR program, that's split fifty-fifty between the sponsors and the Government of Canada. The 50% that's borne by the sponsorship group is for a time-limited period, being fully subsidized by a group of philanthropists through our organization and a partnership with Jewish Family Services, which is working with us on this.
That has mobilized a long wait-list of BVOR sponsors. Whereas we started a few weeks ago thinking there's a shortage in that space, there's now a long list of people waiting to support BVOR-sponsored refugees, and we have some work to do now to unpack what that tells us about the operational models and the strains on the system.