The Centre for Immigrant and Community Services, CICS, is an organization that has been serving newcomers and immigrants in the GTA for the past 48 years. Our engagement in the Syrian refugee efforts includes airport reception services, where we coordinate with IRCC staff, airport personnel, and the umbrella organization for Ontario, OCASI, to deliver services to newcomers at reception.
I won't go into the details of the services, but they go from facilitating communication to giving them guidance for the first few days in Canada, or even for the first few hours in Canada, because it is a traumatic experience. Even though they're now in the safety of Canada, many refugees haven't really gotten rid of the psychological trauma they've brought with them.
We have a special program in Toronto. It's not unique to Toronto. In Ontario, we have the settlement workers in schools program, SWIS. CICS is one of the five organizations in Toronto that provide that service. We help newcomer children and their parents.
In terms of the Syrian refugees, we are all aware that the families are large, with anywhere from six to eight children. We help them settle in schools. We also help the school administration cope with the newcomers. There are cultural sensitivity and language issues, along with the routine of schools and conduct expected from children, which are not necessarily understood by newcomers or are new to the newcomers. We help them get familiarized with the routine.
We also help the parents. Actually, we serve just as many adults in the schools as youths, if not more, in giving them information. It is the most natural gateway to getting in touch with newcomers who otherwise would not be able to navigate the geography to find the settlement agencies. That's why this program was created about 17 years ago.
We help them find employment and refer them to colleges or universities, where they can have a good career transition. We provide cultural sensitivity sessions to the school administration. We assist the Syrian refugees in understanding the importance of certain documents, especially their PR card or any landing documents, because a lot of them haven't brought a whole lot of documentation with them. We also inform them about basic budgeting, banking, and even avoidance of fraud, because we have heard that several refugees, at least, have been defrauded by scammers. We heard about that in Alberta. I'm sure it happens in other provinces.
We also provide settlement services in-house in our locations. One of them is the Markham South welcome centre. Again, the welcome centre system is quite unique in York region. I think there are only two in Ontario, if not in all of Canada, one in York region and the other one in Durham.
We're very proud to run one of the welcome centres in York region. Each refugee receives a settlement plan. We have a case management system and a database that is all coordinated among the welcome centre systems. We also have many volunteers coming to us to assist in interpretation and befriending the newcomers.
We realize that for some of the refugees, because of the trauma they have experienced, it takes a really experienced caseworker to be able to tell what the underlying issues are. They may come with presenting issues, but they may not be aware of the other deeper issues they have. They don't necessarily know where to seek help, so it takes an experienced worker to help them unpack their issues and to know when to bring up traumatic incidents. One area that I'll touch on afterwards is emotional and mental health needs.
One of the major issues is language training. As we all know, immigrants come with much higher levels of official language capacity, whereas refugees don't necessarily come with any language ability, because they were not prepared. The majority of refugees, especially the government-sponsored ones, do not have any capacity in either official language. Many of them are actually on wait-lists for language classes funded by the federal government in a program called LINC. LINC classes are great, in that they also come with child care or childminding in the same space so that people can concentrate on studying.
There is a preference for a lot of the Syrian newcomers to walk to their classes rather than take transit. Even if a transit subsidy is available, we find there is a phenomenon. Some classes will be fairly empty. They won't come because it takes transportation. It could be left over from.... We don't know all the reasons but they don't always go to classes that require transportation. We would recommend some workplace classes or classes that are focused on work-related vocabulary or learning. We understand that many of them are trained. When they were in Syria they were in construction, agriculture, or the food industry. Many have been hired by the food industry. They are not necessarily book smart. They learn much better in the work setting. They say that they are work smart but not book smart. If possible, we'd like to see more innovative classes in that area.
Regarding questions about integration challenges facing these refugees, many of them don't have any family in Canada. Some find people from their own community and they support each other. Some are fearful of liaising with people from their—