Thank you, Mr. Chair.
As this committee is aware, the Canada Border Services Agency has a dual mandate of facilitating movement across our borders while ensuring and protecting the safety and security of Canadians. Together with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the CBSA administers the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which governs both the admissibility of people into Canada and the identification, detention, and removal of those deemed to be inadmissible under the act.
The CBSA's role in refugee determination is to provide support to IRCC by ensuring that refugees are screened to minimize all risk to Canadians. The process is the same when there is a national effort to extend humanitarian support to a particular group of people, as we did for Syria, although as the committee can appreciate, it requires a great deal more coordination across government departments, given the scale of these undertakings.
The CBSA has a well-established and well-respected practice in the area of security screening. It works closely with the relevant departments and agencies as well as with international partners to ensure the integrity of the process.
The CBSA’s role during the Syrian refugee resettlement initiative demonstrated that our security screening process is robust and proven. It's designed to be responsive to changing environments, and we are able to apply it consistently.
The process involves comprehensive interviews, the collection of information and biometrics to assist with confirming identity, and checks across a range of databases. It also involves working closely with our federal government partners to seamlessly integrate security screening at key points in the process.
We have successfully refined the process, and the CBSA is ready to work with our partners once again to meet and support the Government of Canada's commitment to bringing Yazidi refugees to Canada.
The CBSA's security screening practices ensure that every refugee coming to Canada in the wake of the humanitarian crisis will have undergone a multi-layered screening process prior to their arrival, allowing them to fly to Canada. It also ensures that refugees arriving in Canada have the proper travel documents and that they can be welcomed and processed by our border services officers for admission into Canada on their arrival.
Through thorough and efficient security screening, refugees and their families are able to arrive in our country and move on to their important work of settling into their new communities and starting a new life.
That concludes my remarks, and I would be more than happy to answer the committee's questions.