Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here and speak with you today. My name is Oliver Thorne. I currently serve as executive director of the Veterans Transition Network, a registered Canadian charity headquartered here in Vancouver. It operates counselling programs for Canadian Forces veterans across the country. We have been pursuing that mission for 10 years.
In July and August of 2021, we were approached by a group of veterans who are assisting Afghan interpreters in their attempts to come to Canada with the impending fall of the Afghan government and takeover by the Taliban. For the past year, we have been assisting with those efforts, directly providing financial supports, safe housing supports and evacuations for applicants to the special immigration measures program. My comments today around the immigration backlog will specifically focus on those Afghan applicants to the special immigration measures program.
My points today are really centred around the idea that there is a real and significant cost to the backlog and processing times for applications within IRCC. We have seen the direct cost at three levels—to future Afghan Canadians, to Canadian veterans and to the charitable organizations that support both of those groups.
First, application backlogs are traumatizing future Canadians and ensuring that their transition into Canadian life is more difficult. To give a sense of why this is the case, we know from working with Canadian veterans for over 20 years that navigating a significant life transition is very difficult in the face of trauma and uncertainty. For Afghans who have applied to the special immigration measures program, they are living with trauma and uncertainty on a daily basis. Many of these individuals served with the Canadian Forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
In August of last year, many of them moved from Kandahar to Kabul in an attempt to get on evacuation flights out of the country. In order to do that, many of them left behind their jobs. They left their homes and their support networks. They moved from Kandahar to Kabul, and in doing so, they sent a very clear message to these small and tight-knit communities they left behind about the fact that they worked with the Canadian Forces. Because of that, many of them are now regularly moving locations in an attempt to stay undetected. They are unable to engage with the community and with opportunities around them for fear of reprisals by the Taliban.
For many of them, their children are not in school. They are unable to work. They are unable to access what limited services the Government of Afghanistan may have to offer them. Things like the justice system, medical care and other services they cannot access for fear of their detection by the Taliban. This means that every day is stressful, traumatic and uncertain for them.
These are future Canadians who will be coming to Canada. Those impacts will be felt by our systems once they arrive here. Our medical system will have to deal with chronic, untreated physical injuries and post-traumatic psychological injuries. Our education system will have to help thousands of Afghan children who have been out of education for a year to catch up on their schooling. Our social services will be strained by the effects of family trauma that could span across multiple generations. For each day that these folks stay in Afghanistan, uncertain about their future, this problem compounds and compounds. It will be felt once they arrive here in Canada. Their transition to being Canadian citizens will be much more difficult as a result.
First and foremost, it is the morally right thing to do to expedite the applications of these Afghans who supported our Canadian Forces during our mission there from 2001 to 2014. Failing that, it is the sensible thing to do for our government to expedite these applications.
I'll move on to my second point. The application backlog is also damaging to the mental health of Canadian veterans. Throughout our programs last year and in 2020, we have seen the impact of the fall of Afghanistan on the mental health and well-being of Canada's veterans, to the point that our clinical network has held special consultations to prepare to deal with this issue. We've notified our peer support network across Canada that this issue may arise in veterans' communities. We've sent many, many messages to veterans in our network across multiple platforms, letting them know that help is available if they are dealing with challenging feelings and emotions as a result of the fall of Afghanistan.
Beyond that, for the past year, many veterans have been the primary advocate and support for their Afghan interpreter colleagues whom they worked with overseas. They have been providing emotional support, and paperwork and administrative support. In many cases, they have been providing financial support. This is coming at a—