Thank you.
Honourable members, this is my sixth or seventh time appearing as a witness before this committee. I have to say that it's very nice to see so many new faces here today.
I'm an immigration and refugee lawyer. I have been working with immigrants and refugees in one capacity or another for over 21 years.
For over 10 years now, I've also been working a lot with sponsored refugees, both groups of five private sponsorships as well as sponsorship agreement holders. As a result, I've gained a lot of insight into the pros and cons of the system, both as a lawyer and as a volunteer. Never in my career have I seen so much public interest in the issue of refugees. I often joke with my friends that it suddenly made me very interesting at cocktail parties, which has never happened before.
There are other speakers on your list today who are active in the area of settlement work, and they're probably going to speak a lot more intelligently about that specific issue than I can. As a lawyer, I will focus my advice on how you can use the legal process of refugee selection to choose more wisely and increase the chances of better integration of refugees at the back end. In that respect, I will advance three pieces of advice.
First, focus more on privately sponsored refugees and less on government-assisted refugees. Second, publicize, clarify, and encourage the self-supporting refugees category. I'll tell you what that is in a moment. Third, develop your own priority selection criteria rather than relying so heavily on UNHCR selection of Canada's refugees.
Starting with the first issue, I don't think there can any longer be any doubt whatsoever that privately sponsored refugees show much better and faster integration outcomes than government-assisted refugees. Any person actively involved in settlement will tell you that same piece of information. There are exceptions, of course. We can all think of exceptions of people who we know who were government-assisted refugees who've done wonderful things, but as a general rule, privately sponsored refugees tend to settle down faster. That makes sense, because refugees have a much softer landing when each family is received by a prepared team of people in Canada who have been waiting for a long time and preparing carefully for their arrival in Canada. Their settlement plan, which is part of their immigration package, focuses the sponsors' attention on what to prepare for. It ensures that not only the manpower but also the funds are going to be in place well in advance.
Furthermore, privately sponsored refugees most often have some pre-existing connection to Canada, whether that's through a family member here or through a supportive religious or ethnic community. This is how they get sponsored in the first place. They find jobs much faster because they already know people in Canada. I can testify to that first-hand, because I've hired one of the newly arrived Syrian refugees in my office. Why did I hire them? The sponsorship agreement holder reached out to me and specifically asked me if I had place to hire one. All of this is at virtually no cost to the Canadian taxpayer. Frankly, I think it's a bit of a no-brainer. Not only does it save money, it also imposes very little pressure on settlement infrastructure: no shelters, no hotels, no welfare.
I don't think it's selfish for us as a country to want to select those people who have the best chance to adapt most quickly to our economic system. That's not to say to get rid of government-assisted refugees entirely. Certainly, we want to help those kinds of people who don't have connections in Canada, but we should do it as we have the means to do so. However, despite that, I would definitely suggest focusing more on private sponsorship of refugees, which I think is the most intelligent and the most economically responsible choice.
Attached to prioritizing the PSR program, I would add that the quota system you've heard so much about this morning really needs to be revised. The sponsorship agreement holders are very frustrated with the way that the quotas are being managed. I'm hearing from a number of different SAHs that the system needs to be more predictable and more transparent. If possible, there should be a multi-year plan as opposed to an ad hoc plan, because the ad hoc plan means that from year to year, the sponsorship agreement holders never know how many spaces they're going to have at any given time.
You have to understand that running a sponsorship agreement holder requires an immense mobilization of manpower, both paid staff and volunteers. Volunteer enthusiasm is not something that you can turn on and turn off like a faucet; it's something that has to be managed over a period of time. The advantage we have right now is that there is unprecedented public enthusiasm over refugee sponsorship. Why would we want to squash that by telling them year after year that we don't know how many people you're going to be able to bring, that one year it's going to be high and one year it's going to be low and nobody can properly prepare?
Here's the second issue. I would be interested to know how many people around the room today even know that Canada has a self-supporting refugee program. Has anyone heard of that, heard that you can basically sponsor yourself to Canada? I didn't think so, because 99% of the Canadian public have never heard of it either.
In the immigration refugee protection regulations there are three ways that you can come as a private refugee. One is to be sponsored. Another is to be government sponsored, but there's a third one called “self-supporting refugee”.
It's very important because, as somebody has mentioned this morning as well, not all refugees are poor. There are a lot of people who came from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries that were very affluent before the war. Many people had money invested abroad. Many people were already living abroad and got stranded by the war and were not able to go home, but it doesn't mean that they're poor and have no money.
I would think that this program that nobody really knows about should be promoted in public so that people would know it is an option. The public should be educated on how they can use it, because in the 20-some years I have been doing this, I literally have never seen anybody use this program.
The question becomes “Why?” It's very difficult to get any information about it and nobody really seems to know how it works, but if we're talking about integration of refugees, wouldn't it be wonderful if you had a group of refugees who could come in under their own financial support and be able to put themselves through the system without taking any resources from anyone else?
Finally, here's the third issue. I agreed with what Mr. Allos said earlier, that there's a huge difference between protection needs of refugees and resettlement needs of refugees. All refugees who run away from their country need protection; however, only a certain fraction of those refugees are never going to be able to go home. Who are those refugees who are never going to be able to go home? They are mostly minorities—not only religious minorities, but also ethnic minorities and sexual minorities and women at risk of gender violence.