Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Absolutely. Next would be some kind of program to help people who are still inside their country facing persecution.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  My position is this. Forget about Africa for a minute. Take any visa post in the world. I do not think that locally engaged officers should even be touching refugee applications. The information is so private and so sensitive that I think only Canadians should be handling those files at all.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Right. My issue is not with pre-screening; my issue is with locally engaged officers.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. If you're a privately sponsored refugee, you will wait 50 months just to get your visa for Canada, and that's not counting the amount of time at the office inside Canada, where the sponsors have to apply to be qualified as sponsors. So that adds another--I don't know--maybe two to three months.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Right. You'll be waiting over four years, period.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'm not aware of any studies like that. I could definitely do some research and remit it to the committee, if that would be helpful. Just from my own perception in doing a lot of this work, at least when it comes to privately sponsored refugees and self-supporting refugees, there's probably an unlimited capacity for absorption, because these people are not taking any resources.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  One positive thing it did for inland refugees was give them a right of appeal. That's something all the refugee advocates are very happy about. There are other aspects of the bill that weren't so well received--for example, forcing a person to have their complete story and case ready to go within a very short period of time.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  On the way it is set up, it's actually a good system. Most of it--the regulations and the act--works, but it's just so slow and cumbersome. It's really just a resource issue. If there were a little more training, a little more money pumped in, and a few more people doing this kind of work, it would really expedite things.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It's not unprecedented, but it's fairly rare. I do remember that a few years back--well, not a few, maybe ten--there used to be an organization that did a lot of the refugee pre-selection for refugees in Turkey. I believe it was a Catholic organization called Caritas. Usually CIC would enter into agreements with organizations that have a very established track record and a high degree of credibility dealing with refugees.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  If the willpower is there, there's no reason it couldn't be done in less than a year. For example, once the selection of the person is made, once we put the label on you—yes, you're a refugee—the requirements after that are security and medical tests. We want to make sure you don't have tuberculosis that you're going to spread.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you. I'll just add the comment that there is that category of self-supporting refugees. If some of them do have significant financial means, it's possible for them to apply independently without necessarily being sponsored.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes, and you can't be a refugee if you're still inside your country anyway, so they would be in a position of having to leave.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes, absolutely. That could be done in a couple of ways. One way would be to create a one-time project. It doesn't operate with any sort of regulatory amendment or anything like that; it's a special project where national headquarters would say, for example, that they want to get 200 cases, or something like that, out of Uganda within a specific timeframe.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I have from time to time been asked for feedback on refugee matters. For example, I was part of a lobby group a couple of years ago on behalf of the Iraqi community--religious minorities in Iraq--that did a significant amount of lobbying. I wrote a report at that time about the problems they were having, and some recommendations.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The example I alluded to earlier is a good one. There was a religious minority group from Myanmar, or Burma, called the Karen refugees. They were a religious minority who had escaped over the border into Thailand and they were sitting in camps at that time. This was just a few years ago.