So they're not all with Action Réfugiés Montréal. There are a number of different organizations that are helping refugees.
One needs to keep in mind that prior to the whole refugee situation with Syria, about 40% of Syrians in Canada lived in Montreal. There are a number of churches in Montreal that are full of people who, when the Syrian crisis emerged, wanted to sponsor multiple family members. It is thus no surprise that the game was being played in Montreal in terms of private sponsorship.
One thing the committee hopefully is aware of as well concerns the notion of caps that was brought up between 11:00 and 12:00. Caps do not exist in Quebec. Because we have a different immigration stream, each group has an allocation of spots based on assets and not on the number of files that IRCC is ready to open. The numbers may seem extremely high because there's a different way of allocating the number of files.
As for success, there's the fact that we got so many people through fairly quickly. Certainly at Action Réfugiés the crisis did not start in 2015. It did not start on September 2 last year but in May of 2013, when we started being overwhelmed with Syrian families coming to us wanting to help. There were delays, obviously, through 2013 and 2014. The success story is that many people have come. Most of our cases are family-linked; that is, someone living in Montreal said I have a brother, a cousin, a mother-in-law I want to sponsor. Our clientele at Action Réfugiés is that: someone taking on the responsibility for their family.
There are other groups in Montreal. There's a group called Hay Doun. I don't know whether they're going to appear before the committee. They're more of a community-based group. As I said, there are also many churches. I think the success is the fact that the community mobilized, and certainly since September the number of Quebec residents or Montreal residents who want to help and who continue to call wanting to help is quite amazing.