I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to you today from Windsor.
I support what I understand to be a proposal to restore the source country class, which was eliminated under the previous government. I do not bring to this subject any specific expertise with respect to Yazidis, and I'd like to be very clear on that at the outset.
There are, in my view, two issues with respect to how one might consider restoring a source country class.
One is the perennial challenge, which perhaps played a role in its elimination, of meeting the logistical and political challenges of attempting to resettle people who are still in their country of origin. These are people who meet the definition of a refugee recognized under law, but for the fact that they're not outside their country of origin. It may seem that this distinction shouldn't count for very much, and, in principle, it doesn't—that is to say, we understand them to be people at risk of persecution on a convention ground—but practically and politically, it imposes significant challenges.
Why? It's because while they're in their country of nationality, the government from which they might well fear persecution or the government that is unable to protect them from persecution is still in sovereign control of that territory, so no government, including the Canadian government, can access it and resettle people from there without the consent and co-operation of the government of nationality. The problem is that if it's the government that is engaging in the persecution, it's going to be very difficult. Even if the government isn't, but isn't in full control of its territory, it's still going to be very difficult.
Sometimes the Canadian government relies for resettling refugees on the assistance of the UNHCR and similar organizations that operate in countries of asylum to help them identify and select people for resettlement. That's also not as available in a country-of-origin situation, because UNHCR will likely not be present there. Sometimes they will be with respect to internally displaced peoples, but not necessarily, and presumably the people whom one might be concerned about won't all be internally displaced. Civil society in those countries could identify people who are at risk, but that's a very risky activity for them to be engaged in.
All in all, I think the challenge here is that the principle of identifying a source country class and being able to resettle people from countries of origin is laudable, but it's important for the government not to make promises that it can't keep, to raise the expectation that people will be able to be resettled and then confront the logistical challenges that impede that.
One thought among many is to focus attention in source country classes on private sponsorship of refugees in circumstances where the Government of Canada is otherwise able to operate its immigration system—that is to say, in a country where people are otherwise able to leave, whether for family reunification or as economic immigrants. That would suggest that the government is, in a sense, able to conduct what it needs to do, such as carry out the various kinds of clearances and so on, for immigration purposes, and could do it with people being resettled from that country. Relying on private mechanisms more than government assistance for refugees removes the burden on the government of finding a way to identify refugees in a proactive way in circumstances where the local government may not be receptive and, indeed, may be antagonistic to that enterprise. That's one thought.
A second challenge regarding the source country class concerns the idea of naming particular subgroups, whether by ethnicity, religion, or otherwise, rather than relying simply on the refugee definition as such. I would say that here the history of the development of the international refugee regime has reflected a move away from ad hoc identification of particular groups that will be considered refugees by virtue of naming them as a group and toward developing a generic definition into which any individual might fit. That's what we now have with the definition of “refugee status”: it doesn't name particular groups, but instead names grounds of persecution into which specific groups might fit.
Here I just point out that it's not necessary to name a group by its ethnicity or religion or race or something else in order to include members of that group in the refugee definition for purposes of refugee protection and resettlement; however, if you do proceed by a system of naming specific groups, that approach can have the effect of excluding other people who aren't in that group. Clearly, on the one hand, there's no loss to inclusion by just using the refugee definition, but there is a loss by way of exclusion if you turn to a system that specifically names groups instead.
Subject to any questions you might have, those are my submissions. Thank you.