Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 30th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Ms. Villeneuve.

Go ahead, Mr. Tabbara.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to our guests for coming here today. I know you're taking time out of your busy days.

My first question is for Judy Villeneuve. On January 20 of this year, at the City of Surrey's Community Forum on Refugees, you were quoted as saying:

We are fortunate in Surrey to have a number of highly skilled and experienced organizations that have been settling refugees and immigrants for decades. These agencies know what is needed and when it is needed.

In my region of Waterloo, we have been settling Syrian refugees and we've done a fantastic job. We've taken in 4.5% of the Syrian refugees, but some settlement agencies mentioned that there have been cuts to some of their funding. Can you tell us if you've had cuts to your settlement agencies in the City of Surrey and how this might have affected your agency?

[Judy Villeneuve]

Thank you.

As a city councillor, I act as chair and convenor for discussions with our organizations. We have a Syrian local immigrant partnership table that has been working on a plan to strengthen our ability to settle refugees and to employ our refugees and immigrants.

Over the years, organizations have had cuts, and they've also had a change in contracts from the provincial level to the federal level. Understand that they all had contract applications in at the federal level when the Syrian refugee announcement was made; the federal government at that time held off on decisions about funding for their contracts, but we were assured intermittently that there would be extra funding available for our schools, for our ESL classes, and for our organizations to be able to take in the increase in Syrian refugees.

I know that all the organizations in our city could use extra funding for ESL training and apprenticeship training. Those are the two areas that I think would most benefit Surrey. We have local organizations with expertise, organizations that have been here, as I have, for over 25 years. They're well regarded in our city and well supported by the community.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Villeneuve, could you tell us about the administrative and political role of local government and non-governmental organizations in the planning and execution of the settlement efforts?

[Judy Villeneuve]

Our city came together hand in hand, through the Surrey Local Immigration Partnership table, to deal with the issue together. We called a number of forums.

I'll let our senior planner elaborate on exactly the steps we're taking in our effort to bring people together to face this challenge.

[Aileen Murphy, Senior Social Planner, City of Surrey]

For the settlement providers, part of their task has been coordinating their efforts, figuring out where the gaps are, etc. The provincial government has funded refugee response teams for a one-year period to focus on that. As a city, we have made an effort to bring along the rest of the community to be welcoming toward the newcomers. We developed resources and provided them to the general community on how they can get involved in helping. We produced a pamphlet for Syrian refugees settling here, translated into Arabic, that welcomes them to the city and gives them a sense of what's available.

There is actually something going to city council tonight called “Everyone in Surrey Belongs”. It's the Surrey Local Immigration Partnership's strategic plan going forward.

I think the point of our appearing before the committee today was really around our concerns about poverty. We know that Syrians who have arrived in Canada as government-assisted refugees are particularly very vulnerable. We know that most of them think the English language will take some time. They are starting with little to no English.

We also have housing issues in metro Vancouver already, with high housing costs. We're just concerned about people starting off a new life living in such deep poverty.

[Judy Villeneuve]

I'll conclude that statement by saying that our city council, our city management team, and the staff at city hall have all been working collaboratively to help settle the Syrian refugees. On the issue of poverty and refugees in general, we've had a number of public forums with the community to see how they could be brought in, and we have a poverty reduction coalition that continually deals with the needs of our newcomers.

Really, the transportation loan issue arrives on a daily basis. We hear presentations from people in the community about their day-to-day struggles in making ends meet with the high rental costs and the cost of living in British Columbia.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

You mentioned poverty. Do you have any long-term follow-up programs to track the settlement efforts?

[Judy Villeneuve]

We do not have a long-term program that the city is responsible for, but I know we're working with immigrant services B.C., which will have a program to track settlement and will be setting some benchmarks and reporting back to the federal government. I'm sure our major organizations will be reporting back, through their applications and through their grant reporting, on what they see as the challenges and on what their successes have been. They in turn report to city council.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Just before we proceed, our panellists from Surrey showed us some pamphlets and some documentation. If it's not available online, perhaps they could forward those documents to us.

[Judy Villeneuve]

We certainly will do that. Two of our documents are available online, the pamphlets for refugees and for the public. We'll have the report published online just as soon as it goes to city council tonight. We'll also send you our corporate reports and update where we're at with the specific settlement of the Syrian refugees in our community.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you.

Ms. Rempel, you have seven minutes, please.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll start with you, Chantal. You talked about a set of principles that the government could use in prioritizing refugees in terms of the most vulnerable. In terms of recommendations on how the government could approach that, are there certain criteria you would use?

[Chantal Desloges]

Yes. I would target groups who are victims of genocide, although I know that word might not be popular in this room. There is a very serious situation happening with religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East. It's not only religious and ethnic minorities; it's also sexual minorities. You cannot be a gay person in a refugee camp in the Middle East. You simply can't.

Those people will never be able to go home. A lot of the people in the camps eventually, when the situation dies down, will be able to return, but these particular groups, with, I would say, a specific campaign against them based on the inalienable identity of who they are, are the groups that should be targeted, not people who are just general victims of war.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

You also talked about—again, this is a sort of recurring theme—silos between the government-sponsored refugees and privately sponsored refugees in terms of support services and whatnot. You've talked about how there are so many groups across the country and how there's an enthusiasm and a desire to bring refugees into these groups. Do you think there's a way for us to look at a hybrid model?

If the government is setting a target on refugees, perhaps the privately sponsored refugees could somehow be prioritized and then government-sponsored refugees could backfill, or there could be an insertion into those groups. I'm wondering if you could give us some concrete recommendations to fix what we've been hearing over and over again in the media, which is that the government has sort of failed to adequately equip privately sponsored groups with the tools they need from a processing perspective to get refugees into these groups.

[Chantal Desloges]

Yes. I have to say that I really like the idea that Mr. Allos spoke about earlier, which was to collapse the two programs together and make it a blend, so that you don't have a silo of PSRs and a silo of GARs anymore. What you would have is one refugee sponsorship program that is run consistently and uniformly across the board. Allow the government to back up the people who, after all, are willing to do the work for free. Again, that's a no-brainer.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

We heard from departmental officials that they really don't have a sense of the unemployment rate or a way of tracking it in the current cohort of Syrian refugees. Do you think that's important in terms of a social outcome and to ensure we're monitoring social inclusion and integration among this cohort?

Do you have any suggestions around how we can better monitor employment rates and then, conversely, use that data to come up with better strategies to help refugees integrate into the Canadian economy?

[Chantal Desloges]

I'm not an expert in that, but I would say that more information is never wrong. Certainly, tracking those outcomes would be your easiest way to find out what those outcomes actually are. I'm surprised to hear that information is not being kept now. If it isn't, it definitely should be.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Okay.

On a broader basis, going back to your first comments around principles and criteria by which refugees should be admitted to the country, I think we will all admit that what's happening in Syria is one of the largest refugee crises that we've seen in several generations. However, there are certainly other groups in different pockets around the world that have legitimate refugee claims.

The government has been very clear in saying that they are treating Syrian refugees differently. When a refugee crisis comes up in one region, how can we ensure that refugees from other areas aren't being marginalized or really bumped down the list? Rather than just saying, “Well, politically we're going to take this group, because there's a lot of attention on it”, what sorts of criteria could we use? Do you have any thoughts on that particular issue? Do you think it's right to say that we're treating this group differently?

[Chantal Desloges]

When a crisis blows up, I certainly think there's nothing wrong in saying that for a short period of time we're going to set things aside and look at this one group, but when you do it at the cost of everyone else, it becomes an issue. I have heard this many times before. I hear it from my own clients and I hear it from sponsorship groups as well.

People are feeling.... Everybody wants to help the Syrian refugees. I've not heard anyone say they don't. However, when they see that their people or their type of application is going further down the list on an indefinite basis, with no end in sight, it becomes very upsetting for people, and they feel they're not being treated equally. I would say that if it's going to be a very temporary situation, I don't have an issue with those groups being prioritized, but that can't be a long-term solution.

I'm actually rather discouraged that all of the media discourse is about Syria, Syria, Syria. There are so many deserving refugees in the world. It's not only a Syrian crisis. It's a Middle East crisis, in fact. It's a very volatile region altogether.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

I think we're seeing media reports of other refugee groups being bumped down the list right now and perhaps a lack of clarity around the intake on the PSR side, as you so eloquently stated. Do you have some recommendations for how the government could ensure that this situation as we see it happening today doesn't occur again?

[Chantal Desloges]

Well, I know that the government intends to put into place geographic regional quotas. That may not be the best way to approach the situation, especially if you're going to focus on private sponsorship of refugees.

Let people sponsor the people they want to sponsor. Let the public decide that. If there are groups that want to sponsor Eritreans, then let them sponsor Eritreans. Why should we tell them they can't? Especially if it goes towards private sponsorship, it's very easy to do.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

You have 20 seconds.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

What you're saying is have criteria that prioritize the most vulnerable, look at a PSR and GAR hybrid system, and then have more public input and eliminate the propensity for UNHCR classification.