We were working with, typically, 250 to 300, and it increased to about 1,000. Now we're down to about 400 a year, and I wanted to comment on some of the things that happened, but I guess I was muted.
Yes, we are the hub for the settlement of GARs in the region, and I think all of the issues that were mentioned by others, the medical issues and the issues with hospitals and interpretation, are all issues that we deal with. They are issues that don't seem to be recognized by the federal government.
I know that hospitals are a provincial issue, and I know that hospitals have budgets for interpretation, but they don't use them, so we probably spend 70% of our time dealing with medical issues in our community, trying to help people connect to services in the community. We have very few resources for that, and the work isn't recognized.
I think that, as the government thinks about what it can do to support refugees, infusion of funds to support connection to services, particularly in Kitchener-Waterloo, primary care physicians.... We probably have about 90 families right now without a primary care physician, so trying to connect people to doctors is a big part of the work we do, and it's not recognized as an integral part of the overall settlement process.
In terms of the employers, we are trying to work with employers to better connect people to the employment sector. We're working with two employers in Kitchener-Waterloo right now where we provide language training, because there are waiting lists in LINC for ESL classes in our region, and we're working with employers who hire people to provide language training on the work site, so people are working at the same time as they're learning English. We think that more flexibility in the delivery of language services is needed in our community.