Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship tables the “Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration” on or before November 1 of each year, or, if a house of Parliament is not then sitting, within the next 30 days on which that house is sitting after that date. The 2016 immigration levels plan, which was recently tabled alongside the annual report, includes admission ranges for resettled refugees by stream--government-assisted refugees, privately sponsored refugees, and blended visa office-referred refugees.
The 2016 plan sets a target of 44,800 resettled refugees--government-assisted refugees, blended visa office-referred refugees, and privately sponsored refugees--within a range of 41,000 to 46,000. This level of admissions is more than triple the admissions in 2015 and is sufficient space to allow the resettlement of 25,000 government-supported refugees from Syria, and also to meet ongoing multi-year resettlement commitments, outlined below.
More specifically, the levels plan establishes the following admissions targets for resettled refugees: 24,600 government-assisted refugees, within a range of 24,000 to 25,000; 2,400 blended visa office-referred refugees, within a range of 2,000 to 3,000; and 17,800 privately-sponsored refugees, within a range of 15,000 to 18,000.
For the government-assisted refugee stream, each year, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, IRCC, allocates admissions in the levels plan to various vulnerable populations to support the department’s multi-year resettlement commitments. Canada’s ongoing multi-year commitments are as follows: Eritreans, 4,000 persons by end of 2018; Congolese, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2,500 persons by end of 2017; Colombians, 900 persons by end of 2016; and mixed populations out of Turkey, e.g., Iranians, Iraqis and Syrians, 5,000 persons by end of 2017.
Accordingly, government-assisted refugees resettled in 2016 will include individuals from the countries of origin listed above. Resettled refugee admissions not allocated to a multi-year commitment are used for individual protection needs, and new refugee situations, as they emerge. Refugees resettled under the blended visa office-referred stream are selected from the same pool as government-assisted refugees referred by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees according to the above criteria. And, blended visa office-referred refugees will, correspondingly, be from similar countries of origin.
Admissions in the privately sponsored refugee stream are not determined in advance in the same way admissions for government-assisted refugees are guided by multi-year commitments. Private sponsors name the refugee(s) they wish to sponsor, and thus the number of sponsored refugees from different countries of origin fluctuates from year to year based on sponsorship. In 2014, for example, the top nine countries of origin of privately sponsored refugees were Eritrea, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Congo, Pakistan, and Sudan.