Thank you.
Thank you for inviting me to speak today. I am a member of a private sponsorship group, the Or Shalom Syrian Refugee Initiative. Our sponsorship agreement holder is the United Church of Canada. We have raised $158,000, and the contributions have come from 185 donor households. We have also received significant donations in kind, to the extent that we will be able to fully equip four apartments. We have more than 100 volunteers committed to the resettlement of the families we are sponsoring.
As Canadians, some of whom immigrated to Canada under difficult circumstances, we feel that private sponsorship is a meaningful way of giving back and a very Canadian thing to do. In the past, our synagogue and community have also sponsored Bosnian refugees and are currently involved in the sponsorship of Tibetan refugees.
At the invitation of the government, in the fall of 2015 we embarked on the sponsorship of four families. None of our sponsored families has yet arrived in Canada. We are sponsoring a family of four, a family of five, and a family of six. They are Syrian Kurdish families, two of whom are living in a refugee camp in northern Iraq in the Erbil area. The family of six lives in a refugee camp in Turkey. The families were selected because they are connected to our region—that's British Columbia—as they have family members already settled in the Vancouver area. We are also sponsoring an Iraqi LGBT couple currently living in Beirut under immediate threat of persecution.
We are linked to eight other private sponsorship groups in B.C. who are sponsoring over 100 Syrian Kurdish refugee families who have been approved to come to Canada but cannot proceed with final processing because they are living in northern Iraq. These families are waiting for security checks, interviews, and medical examinations.
We are all ready to receive these refugee families; everything is in place. We have made donations in good faith, believing that the donations would help to resettle refugees soon, and now the money is sitting idle. We have also been receiving conflicting information from our inquiries about the status of our families, including information that despite these people having been born in Syria, for all intents and purposes the immigration department is now considering them to be Iraqi refugees. This has left us very confused.
We appreciate the government's recent decision to send additional staff to the Middle East to speed up the processing of private sponsorship applications. The government has also indicated that these officers will be sent to northern Iraq in the fall to conduct interviews.
While we are relieved to hear this, we are very concerned about the delay, as our families are experiencing extreme hardship. As in all such issues, the children suffer the most, with lost schooling, poor nutrition, and health and growth issues, which will lead to lifelong consequences and more challenges with settlement and integration. We therefore ask the government to expedite their applications by sending personnel into the area now or authorizing representatives from the International Organization for Migration or the UNHCR, which are already in the area, to conduct the interviews.
We have worked closely with MOSAIC, an immigrant settlement agency in Vancouver, to select the families through family reunification and to provide assistance with the application process and with education and support around settlement. Having this resource available to us has been very important, and we hope that organizations like MOSAIC will receive ongoing funding to continue this support. Privately sponsored refugees have a huge advantage over government-sponsored refugees, as we have many people committed to supporting their settlement and integration and are not reliant on settlement services alone.
The families will also have the support of their family members already living in the area. Research has shown that families with these connections have an easier time integrating into the community.
Nevertheless, we are facing a number of challenges with regard to settlement. One is access to affordable housing in the Lower Mainland. The amount that the government has recommended for rent is too low, and we have had to raise additional dollars to be able to rent apartments. Government-sponsored refugees cannot find affordable housing, and that is why many of them remain in hotels.
For the language instruction for newcomers to Canada program, the LINC program, access is very limited at the lower levels, in particular those that include child care. This is a huge barrier to settlement and integration. While additional funds will help address the long wait-lists, supplementary options need to be developed to enable refugees to begin learning English in the interim.
As well, we believe it is unfair to expect refugees who have experienced so much hardship and loss to start out their new lives with a debt to repay, which in some cases can be as high as $10,000. The loan repayment program creates stress and hinders refugees' ability to pay for basic necessities, such as food, clothing, and housing.
We are also deeply concerned about the inequity of airfare being covered for some refugees but not for others—