I believe that the emergency response that Canada had with the Ukrainian crisis, which was made flexible and allowed a lot of people to enter the country with a lot of flexibility and then get settlement services, should be applied equitably to other crisis situations. In this case it should be applied to the Afghanistan situation and the LGBTQ people, those who are still inside Afghanistan but also those who have made it out, so that we can bring them to safety in Canada either through the PSR program or through an emergency program that allows them to come with flexibility and then deal with their applications and their processing more from the inside of Canada.
We believe that there is more that can be done. We believe that equity in crisis responses is paramount to this work and that we cannot be discriminating against LGBTQ people just by their geographic location.
We believe that the model that has been implemented through the response to the Ukrainian crisis can be amplified and brought to other crises and particularly to LGBTQI people who are in Afghanistan or outside of Afghanistan.