Thank you for inviting me to the meeting today.
I am an executive committee member of the CCR, and I also work as the director of family and settlement services for MOSAIC in Vancouver. I have been working with the sector for about 24 years.
I am going to highlight some of our observations and recommendations for the committee study.
CCR is a national non-profit organization committed to the rights and protection of refugees and other vulnerable immigrants to Canada. We have about 180 members across Canada.
It is really important to encourage Canadian individuals and groups in the resettlement of Syrian refugees, and we see that harnessing goodwill from Canadians is essential. We should continue to involve and have active community engagement with Canadians.
Additional funding for Syrian refugees by the Treasury Board is a good investment.
Throughout our services to Syrian refugees we notice many new private sponsors, many new community groups that want to help. We think it would be good if there was some support through settlement organizations to work together with them on how to help resettle the Syrian refugees into the community. We would suggest the government consider this.
In terms of the integration challenges, an ideal is for Syrian refugees to be closer to their families. For many reasons—housing, the availability of jobs, or even schools—it may not happen and we think it would be good if settlement organizations could intervene or work earlier with the resettled Syrian refugees, even when they are in temporary accommodation, to make some good arrangements. We can make sure there is the desire; we know that through our experience. Many of them will eventually move to where there is community support or family support and that will make their integration in Canada more meaningful.
The availability of employment counselling and placement services is important, we know that. Many of them have high hopes of finding employment in Canada because they really want to be part of the community and contribute to the Canadian economy. We also know that many of them don't speak English well or they don't have any work experience so settlement support in finding a job, resumé writing, and labour market information is important.
I will give you an example from Vancouver. Working with the Province of B.C., there is going to be a survey on working with the employer and looking at the occupational profile of refugees, particularly the Syrian refugees in metro Vancouver. That means we can work with the employer community and have better matching and have the employer know what skills the refugees are bringing so they can match easily with the employer and have the refugees work well there.
We understand that in big cities it is always a challenge to find affordable housing. We think that settlement organizations or the sector could have a worker specific to housing, educating Syrian refugees on landlord and tenant rights, and how they can negotiate to make living there meaningful.
On the education of refugee children, through the IRCC there is a program called settlement workers in schools. It is a good way to make sure that refugee children can integrate well into the school system.
With the ESL program, the LINC program, 62% of Syrian refugees indicated they don't have any English language skills or French language skills. We also know that there's a long waiting list for LINC, particularly for level one and pre-literacy. We think that at this point we could be looking at some informal alternative to the LINC program to support them because many of them really want to be part of the community. There is an opportunity to recruit more volunteer teachers, to develop curricula, and to have conversation circles to support them.
While we are doing that we'll be looking at best practices and also looking at some of the information guidelines on how to work with refugees, their community profile, and some of the ethical and professional issues of working with immigrants and refugees.
Those are the recommendations that we have.
In terms of medical support, we would like to see.... Yesterday I got an email about the interim federal health program, IFHP, cut-off rate for dental, particularly for many of the refugees who are in a really bad situation in terms of dental care.
There are many refugees who can't hear particularly well—