Thank you so much.
Honourable Chair, vice-chair, and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be with you today and for the work you are doing on behalf of newcomers to our country.
My colleague and I both work for refugee claimant serving organizations in metro Vancouver, and the current study under way on settlement services across Canada is a very important activity. We're grateful to have a chance to provide some input for you today.
Just over a year ago, a study indicated that Vancouver was the least affordable city for housing in North America, making housing unbelievably difficult for the 2,300 asylum claimants who have been arriving in our city annually.
Unlike government or privately sponsored refugees, asylum claimants have no one to welcome them on arrival. As a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention, Canada has an international obligation to provide protection and a refugee hearing, but also has an obligation to provide help for asylum claimants in their access to basic human needs upon arrival.
For a combined 33 years, Journey Home Community and Kinbrace Community Society have been stepping into that gap by providing a wraparound plan for housing, support and accompaniment for these new arrivals.
We've learned some things in our work. First, living with and assisting refugee claimants all these years has helped us to understand the sector and develop some well-designed communities that have been effective in helping refugee claimants integrate well.
Secondly, we've learned that asylum claimants arrive with incredible skills, education, professional and business backgrounds, and have a strong desire to move forward with their lives and make a difference in their community, just the kinds of new Canadians we hope for. With a little assistance up front, we can set them up for success, and help them become strong, contributing members of our communities.
Today we come with some community-based solutions for how we can change the current reality into a cohesive plan for new arrivals. Our organizations are part of Vancouver's multi-agency partnership, which is a network of some 40 agencies with non-profits; businesses; all levels of government, including IRCC; the Immigration and Refugee Board; and Canada Border Services Agency. We meet monthly and the focus of the network is exclusively refugee claimants. There is a strong spirit of collaboration and goodwill.
Our vision, as a partnership, is that newly arriving asylum claimants would experience a cohesive approach for support along the whole housing continuum from arrival to something more permanent, and that no refugee claimant be without supported housing. Our immediate dream is that we develop a refugee claimant reception centre, a landing place for new arrivals where they can receive housing, orientation and support for the first few weeks of their journey, and then supported pathways out of the centre into the wider community.
Such a dream is garnering strong community interest and stakeholder support. It will take all levels of government and private funding. We have begun to see such support coalesce in Vancouver.
Allow me to read a short excerpt from a support letter of one stakeholder, BC Housing, British Columbia's crown corporation for social housing. This is from one of the associate vice-presidents of BC Housing:
It was a pleasure meeting with you to discuss Journey Home Community's desire to develop a Reception Center for refugee claimants and housing as part of this vision. We would very much like to commence exploring suitable housing options for these individuals and to that end we may be able to offer some program funding to achieve this.