When I was appointed as Minister of Foreign Affairs in October 2021, I quickly adopted the objective of working with the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to find ways of bringing more Afghans to Canada.
However, because we do not have diplomatic representation in Afghanistan, and so we have no ambassador in Kabul, and because few of our allies still had representatives in Afghanistan, I wanted to work with other countries that were receiving Afghan refugees and potentially had ties with Canada. That is why we have worked with Pakistan. In the first weeks of my mandate, I spoke to representatives of Pakistan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to find ways of bringing Afghans to Canada and ultimately reaching the target of admitting 40,000 refugees that we, as the government, had set.
Our colleague, Mr. El‑Khoury, asked a very good question earlier. He asked what the difference was between Syria and Afghanistan. When we worked with Syria, we also worked with the UN, which had refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. The UN was able to select refugees and implement measures to ensure a proper security assessment for each of the refugees. We were not able to work that way in the case of the Afghans, because the refugee camps were organized differently. That is one of the logistical problems that my colleague Minister Fraser faced, as did I, in fact.
That is also why I have worked with the Americans, who had a number of Afghans on their various military bases, and this enabled us to bring some of them here. Every week, every month, we continue to receive Afghan refugees from various countries with which I have been in contact since I took office in 2021.