Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak in front of the committee.
One thing you should know is that our group is a SAH and a constituency group based in Antigonish, a small group of 12 volunteers. We've brought in 23 Syrian families or assisted in their settlement, and continue to do that. We've also assisted in starting the Afghan process as well.
What we're finding with regard to the application processing—and we would like to table a recommendation for dealing with the backlog of application processing—is that there is a huge problem with consistency. We've had issues in the recent past where it's taken five months to simply achieve a G number, which is the starting process for a refugee to be put into the system and be worked upon. This happened just last week, and we put in the application successfully in May. This is something that we really see needs to have focus; it needs to have more people to process, and more funding in the actual processing of the paperwork.
The second recommendation—I think we've heard it already—is communication. The policy, processes and standards that we see need to be focused on, need to be enhanced. We see that there's a huge amount of anxiety that gets built up with refugee families, with family reunification, with the SAHs and support groups that are trying to bring people into Canada. The families and the refugees are in untenable circumstances. We have the same issues. We find that we go to ROC-O, and we get some information—we may or may not. It may be value-added, or it may not be. We are asked to reach out to embassies, which more often than not do not respond, or when they do, it's a canned response.
Then it leaves us going to the member of Parliament. In our case, we're lucky it's the minister's office, and we work through that process to try to expedite some of these communication issues. It's ongoing. We've had a situation where a family had a house rented for them for at least 10 months—everything was in order, we were told—and we had to give up the house because of the huge cost of donated dollars to maintain this house. The family just came in last year, and it was two years ago that we had to give up that house.
The final recommendation that we look at is to try to look at a rural resettlement model. We are the only rural SAH in Nova Scotia, and we continue down the road of challenging aspects of resettlement in Nova Scotia. We see that the funding is metro-centric—or I should say it's based upon the urban centres—and we really struggle with that form of funding. ISANS, the Nova Scotia immigration services, is 75% federally funded, and we've tried to have people come to Antigonish to support our region, but it's not happening. We've developed a rural model that we've presented to the minister, as well as to the local MLA and municipal folks, to try to look at the situation so that we can be less reactive—which is what we are all the time, it seems, now—and more proactive in supporting English language, medical, employment and settlement.
These are the recommendations that we would like to put forward. Thank you for taking the opportunity to listen today to SAFE.