Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Edmonton Strathcona.
Let me begin by acknowledging that the House formally acknowledged the genocide against the Yazidis in October of 2016. The Yazidis are an ethnic group of over 700,000 people, mostly in northern Iraq, who were targeted and persecuted by ISIS for their beliefs and practices, displacing more than 200,000 people from their homes, both in Iraq and to other places around the region.
I want to acknowledge that one of the reasons we know of the horrors of the treatment of the Yazidi people was the work of the 2018 Nobel prize winner, Nadia Murad. Nadia Murad used her own ordeal as a survivor of sexual slavery as, what she called, her best weapon to make the world aware of the plight of Yazidi women and children. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to her, appropriately, on the 10th anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1820, which condemned the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and stipulated that rape and other forms of sexual violence constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity and may even constitute acts of genocide.
Nadia Murad's tireless advocacy, along with that of former Conservative leader, Rona Ambrose, the MP for Calgary Nose Hill, the MP for Vancouver East and others in the House, did finally move Canada to act in October of 2016, to announce that we would resettle the most vulnerable and take in more than 1,000 Yazidis, who now reside in Canada. Though slow to act and slow to deliver on our promise, we did do the right thing when it came to the most vulnerable of the Yazidis.
The report we are dealing with today deals with pretty much what the title says: “Road to Recovery: Resettlement Issues of Yazidi Women and Children in Canada”.
Before addressing the report directly, I want to stop for a moment and address some of the most popular and stubborn misconceptions about refugees. The first of those is that refugees are somehow a burden to Canada. I will acknowledge that government-sponsored refugees in their first year require and receive government assistance, and no, it is not more than Canadian seniors receive in government assistance. However, an even larger group of refugees in their first year are privately sponsored refugees, and they are just that, privately sponsored.
Rather than being a burden on Canada, ordinary Canadians come together to support those refugee individuals and families in their first year. I want to cite an example from my riding, the Gorge Tillicum Refugee Sponsorship Group. This is a group of a dozen plus families and individuals who simply call themselves friends and neighbours. They have set themselves a goal of raising $91,000, which will be required to sponsor a Somali refugee family of eight who have been stuck in a refugee camp in Kenya for 28 years as a result of civil war in Somalia. This family from Somalia cannot be identified for security reasons, but they do have two adult children who came to Canada as refugees and now reside in Victoria. With private sponsorship and with two family members already in Victoria, this family has an enormously high chance of success in resettlement and reintegration in Canada. What they have now in the refugee camp in Kenya is no prospect. They will not be a burden to Canada.
In fact, when we look at refugees who come to Canada and compare their economic performance with the rest of Canadians, looking at immigration and tax records, studies have found that after 25 years, refugees have incomes more than 12% higher than other Canadians. Why is that the case? Why would refugees be more successful than other Canadians? One of those things is that we have effective settlement programs, which give them the assistance they need to integrate in Canada. Often, it is the case that those who are able to escape violence and persecution at home and access the Canadian refugee system are those who already have skills and resources. The poorest of the poor are often trapped in those civil wars and in those cases of violent persecution and are not able to access refugee systems abroad.
The most important thing about the refugees I have known, and I have been a friend of refugees in my community for the past 40 years, is the drive to succeed so they can help their family, because not all family members get to Canada at the same time.
Therefore, most refugee families spend a lot of what they achieve in Canada supporting their families back home.
The second myth I want to address is the concern about “hundreds of thousands of refugees” streaming into Canada. I received correspondence in my office just this week referring to hundreds of thousands of refugees and being concerned about the burden that I just talked about. The number of refugees arriving in Canada is somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 or about 12% of total newcomers to Canada in any given year. Therefore, those who talk about hundreds of thousands of refugees are confusing refugees and other immigrants to Canada, those who choose to immigrate to Canada. When we talk about the effort we are making for Yazidis, only 1,000 Yazidis came to Canada through the refugee system, so we can certainly afford to offer government assistance, as we are doing for most of those Yazidi refugees.
The third myth is that somehow refugees skip the queue, displacing skilled immigrants and family reunification programs in our immigration system. These are completely separate programs. Refugees do not displace those who are waiting to have their applications for family reunification or economic immigration adjudicated. The delays for those people are not from refugees getting ahead of them. The delays are caused by the underfunding of our immigration system. It began with cuts by the Conservatives in 2012 and I am sad to say that adequate funding to deal with immigration has never been restored by the Liberals in their three years in power.
The fourth myth is that making a refugee claim in Canada is sometimes illegal. Under both Canadian and international law, that is never the case. Even those crossing the border irregularly from the United States—and the accurate term is “irregular” rather than “illegal” crossings—are not making an illegal claim here. I will admit that there is a chance that the underfunding of our refugee system, which causes delays in adjudication of those claims, could seem to be a draw for irregular crossers of our border, but it is important to remember that of those irregular border crossers whose claims have been heard, nearly 60% have been found to be legitimate refugees, meaning that if they had stayed in the United States, they faced being sent back to certain persecution and, in many cases, certain death back in their home countries.
Coming back to the report and its recommendations, which I am happy to support tonight, Yazidi refugees, we have to remember, were selected on a criteria of being the most vulnerable and that means that making their success at resettlement in Canada is perhaps more challenging than that of refugees in general. That is what this report of the immigration committee looked at.
When Canada was bringing Yazidis to Canada, the cases were prioritized on the basis of the following: first, women and girls at risk; second, accompanied children and dependants; third, LGBTI individuals, single women, single parents, the elderly, and persons with disabilities and medical needs; and finally, cases with family in Canada.
This report comes with 12 recommendations. I know my time is short tonight, but let me see how far I can get with these. Recommendation one, increasing our refugee targets, is obviously something that I support. As I mentioned earlier, they are a small portion of our total immigration system. Recommendation two asks Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada to work to facilitate private sponsorships. That is why I talked about the example in my riding. I believe that Canadians are prepared to step up, sponsor refugees and help them resettle in Canada. It is a very important recommendation that we encourage Canadians to do.
Recommendation eight is to improve mental health supports for all refugees. Refugees who escaped the Yazidi genocide include many women and children who were survivors of sexual violence. This gives them mental health challenges and needs that are very specific. I believe once again the recommendation about improving those supports will get a response from Canadians. I am going to give another example from my riding.
There is a group of trauma-trained counsellors in greater Victoria who came together about four years ago to offer volunteer services to refugees who had been subject to sexual violence and to children who had witnessed horrific violence. They have now come together and formed a society, and even they admit its name is a mouthful, the Vancouver Island Counselling Centre for Immigrants and Refugees. I want to salute them for the work they are doing.
In conclusion, I am happy to rise to support this report and all the work that is being done, not just by the government but by private citizens in Canada, to help support the Yazidi women and children who have been resettled in Canada.
