Citizenship and Immigration Committee on June 2nd, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

You have 15 seconds left.

[Shahen Mirakian]

We were so fortunate that our ambition was shared by the Canadian government, and particularly IRCC staff. With their guidance, assistance, and support, we were able to reach our goals.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Mirakian.

Now we have Mr. Calla for seven minutes, please.

[Mario Calla, Executive Director, COSTI Immigrant Services]

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, everyone. My apologies for not being able to join you today in person.

My name is Mario Calla. I'm the executive director of COSTI Immigrant Services.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you about what has been a historic and ambitious initiative by the federal government to accept 25,000 refugees in a short period of time.

COSTI Immigrant Services is a charitable organization providing settlement and integration services to immigrants in the greater Toronto area for the past 64 years. It serves about 39,000 immigrants per year. COSTI operates out of 17 locations in the greater Toronto area, providing English language training, employment counselling, accommodation for refugees, family and mental health counselling, and settlement counselling programs, to name a few. COSTI is the federal government's service delivery agent in Toronto for the resettlement of government-assisted Syrian refugees. We have resettled more than 1,800 Syrian refugees since last December. The last family of this cohort of refugees moved out of temporary accommodations just two weeks ago.

We learned many things through this intense initiative, but I would like to take this opportunity to briefly highlight three things that stood out for us and that have policy implications for the federal government.

First, the most challenging part of this initiative was finding affordable housing for the newcomers. It took an average of five and a half weeks to move the newcomers from temporary accommodations into their own homes. More significantly, the rental costs are in excess of 50% of their income. It is generally accepted that for housing to be affordable, it should consume less than 30% of a person's income. It is clear from COSTI's broader housing services that the availability of affordable housing is a challenge for all Canadians of limited economic means. The Syrian refugee project has focused the lens on how serious a problem this is. We urge the Canadian government to develop a national housing strategy that can begin to address the unavailability of affordable housing in major centres in Canada.

Second, the Syrian refugee project has unleashed in Canadians a level of generosity and volunteerism that has rarely been seen.

COSTI worked with 13 mosques, two churches, and three community groups that befriended 150 Syrian families and helped them with household start-up kits and ongoing support.

Another 30 community organizations organized children's programs in the five hotels. Donations of clothing and toys were managed by another organization, which was formed spontaneously by a group of volunteers. Additionally, more than 300 volunteers provided interpretation in escorting people to medical appointments and housing searches. COSTI could not have effectively succeeded in resettling these 1,800 newcomers without this level of support from the community.

It is clear that a community that collectively cares for its vulnerable is a healthier and more cohesive community. The government should take care to promote through its policies the involvement and participation of civil society. The challenge going forward is in sustaining this level of community participation, both with government-assisted and privately sponsored refugees. We urge the government to support resettlement initiatives that directly involve civil society, and therefore we recommend the expeditious processing of private sponsorship applications to further promote the involvement of private sponsors.

Finally, we commend the government for eliminating the transportation loan for this group of refugees. Historically these loans have had a crushing impact on the ability of refugees to make ends meet from month to month. The loan amounts can run up to $10,000. Canada's refugee program is based on and driven by humanitarian principles, and burdening refugees with a debt load is incompatible with these principles. We urge the government to extend the waiver of the loan program to all refugees.

Again, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon. I look forward to our discussion on the resettlement of Syrian refugees.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Calla.

Now I understand that Ms. Bonner and Ms. Sladojevic will be sharing three and a half minutes and Ms. Shortt will have three and a half minutes.

Go ahead, Ms. Bonner.

[Gini Bonner, Executive Director, Mount Pleasant Family Centre Society]

Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Mount Pleasant Family Centre Society is a provincially certified family resource program and early learning family support and parenting centre. We've served families in Vancouver for over 40 years, and since 2008 have delivered a specialized early years refugee program called Circles of Care and Connection. This program straddles the line between settlement and early childhood development and provides specialized support to young refugee children, their older siblings, and their parents.

Our services include activities that focus on information and orientation; community connections; and assessment and referrals related to family preservation, parenting, and child development. Our services play a critical role during the initial stages of settlement and have a positive impact on the newcomer child's early experience, recovery from trauma, and preparation for school.

The goals of our program include ensuring that newcomer families are not isolated in our community and that they feel welcomed and supported. We shorten the pathway and time between arrival and integration into our community. Our goals include a successful transition to mainstream early childhood education supports, and we ensure that refugee children achieve expected developmental milestones or receive appropriate referrals through other community organizations.

Challenges that face all refugee families and that are exacerbated by the Syrian refugee crisis will be covered by Sanja.

[Sanja Sladojevic, Early Years Refugee Program Manager, Mount Pleasant Family Centre Society]

What has happened in the meantime, actually, which I think was mentioned before, is that our agency lost quite a lot of funding, so now, at a time when there is more need than ever to help refugee families, our program has been reduced. We had another funder, but then they decided to change priorities, so we lost altogether somewhere around 30% of our funding.

Our big challenge is that now more families than ever are arriving. They need more support than ever, but we have had to reduce our staff, so we don't really have that much capacity to maintain the quality of our program.

We do home visits. We meet families when they come to Welcome House and we work with the children over there, but we also continue with the home visits just to ensure that all families are connected with services in the neighbourhood and that they are not feeling isolated. As we have heard quite a few times today, there are issues with housing. Some of our families have already said that they're in permanent housing, but they know they will have to move again by the end of the year. It's actually extremely stressful and traumatizing for families to have to move again and again.

Another thing we noticed was that it is a challenge to take English language lessons, especially for women, because of the issue of child care. It's almost impossible to find any spaces for moms.

Health care is also an issue because of reduced hours for interpretation. Food security and transportation are issues, and there's a need for community orientation as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you.

Ms. Shortt, you have three and a half minutes.

[Karen Shortt, President, Vancouver Community College Faculty Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name is Karen Shortt, and I represent the 650 faculty who teach at Vancouver Community College. Our student population is approximately 17,000.

Our faculty do the front-line English language teaching that is a direct result of this Parliament. Canada has well-intentioned policies and programs to assist refugees and immigrants. We do not want that intent to fail in the last stages after giving people so much hope and promise. Unfortunately, though, we're not doing as well as we should be.

Vancouver Community College provides assistance to new immigrants in three areas: English language training, credential recognition, and Canadian work experience. Our faculty have a deep understanding of the unique nature of an immigrant's needs. We create pathways that lead to meaningful employment and credential recognition.

Vancouver Community College has an infrastructure in place that will help refugees transition into employment. We will be there for the long term, as their needs change and their children come through the K-to-12 sector. We have counsellors on site to meet with students in crisis and on an ongoing basis. We have well-equipped labs. We have learning centres with tutors, a library, and student associations. As well, each program has a program advisory committee.

The level of industry engagement is critical to our students' success. The added value is direct feedback from employers on how our graduates' customer service and interpersonal skills are transferring in the Canadian workplace.

Our class size is small, usually 20 per class, and this allows the instructors to have one-on-one interaction with the students. We offer a variety of programs that combine classroom instruction, hands-on training, and internships in industry. We have many heartwarming stories that are vitally important to our ESL programs and to our communities. We have people who come into our programs, take ESL, and go out and become nurses, dental hygienists, hospitality managers, and culinary arts chefs. They are involved in the automotive trades in apprenticeships.

I'd like to tell you just one VCC success story. We had a group of immigrants, all engineers, go through our ESL pathways program for engineers. After completing the program with a curriculum specific to engineering, they then went into our seven-month drafting program. After completing this, they all gained employment, because they were able to transfer the skills of being an engineer into a seven-month drafting program and go out and get a job rather quickly. We think this is something that is very important for new people to Canada: that they start working and are able to contribute back. In fact, 93% of our graduates are working in their field.

However, we are not fulfilling our promise to immigrants and refugees. We currently have over 800 students on the wait-list for English language courses. Because of funding cuts this year to our LINC program, we had to cancel classes for 220 ESL students who would have started in April of 2016.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

You have five seconds, please.

[Karen Shortt]

I understand that the government is working on this, but I leave you with this request: please restore funding to the level it was, and then add some more.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Ms. Shortt.

Mr. Ehsassi, you have seven minutes, please.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First of all, I want to thank every witness for being here and providing us with insights on the best pathways forward.

I'd like to start with you, Mr. Mirakian. I know full well, having visited your centre and having read various newspaper accounts, that your organization has been doing truly monumental and inspiring work. On behalf of myself and I'm sure many other Canadians, I want to thank you for all the incredible work you've done. It certainly is a whole lot more than what you refer to as the “fair share” for your community organization. On top of that, I should add that the nature of your collaboration with IRCC and with other settlement groups such as COSTI, as you pointed out, has been truly inspiring.

My first question is about the processes you have encountered.

As I understand it, your organization has really been at the forefront for about four or five years now. Can you give us a sense of the numbers you have been helping with over the course of the past four or five years? I understand that previously the focus was on people coming from Iraq. I understand that in the old days the numbers weren't very high and I presume that you were encountering huge challenges, but now, looking at everything over the past six months, the numbers have risen quite a bit. Perhaps you could provide us with a sense of those.

[Shahen Mirakian]

In late 2009 we applied to CIC, as it was then, and became a sponsorship agreement holder. We were accepted in 2010, and we began to accept our first privately sponsored refugees in 2010. At this time it was part of a government program to expedite a privately sponsored refugee process for Iraqi Christians, and we were working with a number of other organizations who were fundamental in that effort.

Beginning in late 2010, when our first family arrived, all the way to late 2014, the full number was just over 200 people. In late 2014 to mid-2015, again before the efforts started most recently, our numbers were about another 180 families, bringing us to a number of about 370. I know this number fairly precisely because we sent out invitations for a free Thanksgiving Day dinner and we had to send out 370-something invitations. Pardon me; there were a certain number of invitations, but we were keeping track of how many people had to be seated, so the invitations were sent by family, but we knew there were about 370.

By the way, the very first family that was greeted by the Prime Minister in the airport was one of our privately sponsored families, and the very last family that arrived on February 29 was one of our families as well, so we bookended the process. We're still accepting families now, but as part of the major process.

The precise number is difficult to get. We've tried our best to put our finger precisely on the number, but I believe the total number now would be somewhere around 2,300.

I can say that in the month of February we were very precise, because we had every plane charted, whether it was commercial or whether it was part of the government effort. We had a total of 670 people arrive in the month of February. That was a large number. The period between December 10 and December 31 was another large period. I can't say the precise number there, but I would say it was roughly 500.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

That's incredible.

Thank you for that. I've actually visited ACC, and it was really was a beehive of activity, given all the logistical challenges.

[Shahen Mirakian]

Those were busy days in December, so thank you very much.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

It was incredible to watch, and very inspiring.

The second question I have is with respect to the provision of schooling. Do you have any special programs in place for the children that you're accommodating?

[Shahen Mirakian]

There are two separate streams for this. When they originally arrived, our goal was that they would come to our private school. The Armenian Community Centre is affiliated with the A.R.S Armenian School, which is a private school providing instruction following the Ontario curriculum in English, French, and Armenian. We accommodated a substantial number of students of the initial cohort. We did it for free, by the way. There's tuition to be paid for that school, but they weren't charged at all. We had to fundraise internally to do it. That was the first stream.

As the numbers became larger and we realized that our school was physically and educationally not capable of accommodating this number of new arrivals, we began to work with both the Toronto District School Board and the Toronto Catholic District School Board. We have had some feelers out to surrounding areas of the GTA as well, where some of our families are settled, but mainly we've worked with those two school boards.

We've actually found quite receptive boards who have worked with us very closely. We work also with our Catholic church to integrate people into the Catholic school board, which seems to be the more popular of the two options among some of these families. One of the things is that people find that it's cheaper to buy a child two uniforms than to buy a wardrobe that meets the minimum standard for being cool in Canada, I guess is the way I would put it. A lot of them gravitate toward the Catholic school board, so we've worked with the Armenian Catholic Church and their social services arm to help with that as well.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

What are the classes that your school offers?

[Shahen Mirakian]

We offer English as a second language, French as a second language, and classes to integrate, but most of the refugees who've arrived through the Syrian program have spent some time wanting to come to Canada. Obviously their parents haven't spent long enough to pick up the language, but I think for biological reasons or whatever, the skill of children in picking up a language is a little better than that of the parents.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

You have 10 seconds.

[Shahen Mirakian]

Therefore we haven't had the need for ESL that I thought we would have originally, but all the parents certainly do need it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you.

Mr. Saroya, you have seven minutes.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses in Vancouver as well as everybody here. We're listening to what you're teaching us and guiding us on what to do next. Thank you.

First, let me say thank you to Shahen and Aris, the previous Armenian witnesses, for taking 3,000 people in the last couple of months, which is approximately one-eighth of the total Syrian refugees who have arrived here. Thank you for doing a good job.

My first question is to the Mount Pleasant Family Centre Society. The organization received a notice on February 24 that the federal funding would be cut for the fiscal year starting April 1. Can you explain why this cut took place? How has this cut affected your ability to meet the needs of the refugee communities? What programs or services have you had to cut as a result? Have you had to make any cuts to staffing or anything else?

[Gini Bonner]

Definitely, the funding cut of 6% from the federal government has had an impact on our capacity to maintain the level of employment. We've reduced our full-time employees. We've laid off staff. We've reduced the number of hours we can provide for interpretation. We've reduced program hours. In fact, we've cut our program hours in half, not totally as a result of that 6%, but as a compounded result of the loss of funding.

We've really reduced our capacity to respond to the clients' crises. Regarding clients who are high risk and who are in crisis, we've reduced the clinical supervision and case management capacity of our organization and compromised some of the safety practices and protocols that we have had in place over the past years to support the staff doing this very difficult work.