Citizenship and Immigration committee  Hello, everybody. My name is Martin Mark Ill, and this is my colleague, Carolyn Vanderlip. We are two of the representatives elected by 89 sponsorship agreement holder organizations, or SAHs, from across Canada to represent them on the NGO-Government Committee on Private Sponsor

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Very briefly, to address this issue about the visa post approach, without evaluating data, Iraqi refugees are going mostly to countries covered by the Canadian visa post in Damascus, and the other visa post is in Ankara. The acceptance rate in Ankara is around 70%, wh

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I believe that if we had open communication with CIC to make sure we assess the cases in the same way—or the case management, case review—we'd be ready to take into consideration the submitted information and go through cases, at least on par. We could have a fair procedure at ev

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's right. I think the status determination of the refugees and those who need an assessment for resettlement has a lot of subjective elements. So it's definitely very difficult to assess in the same way in different visa posts. In big numbers, however, we must say that ther

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think that would be an excellent approach. The last NGO-government committee even started to talk about how the NGOs could share information about country of origin and its human rights and refugee situations with CIC and then we would be on the same page. I definitely believe

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, we are on the NGO-government committee on refugee sponsorship.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The last conference call was a week ago.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, thank you. Generally, when a sponsor wants to submit an undertaking, then we must meet the criteria. One of the criteria is that we show that we have all the funds available, that we can take financial responsibility at least for one year, and in some special cases for two o

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's an extra, so we don't even calculate the time and all of that. Well, I'm a paid person and a lucky person because I'm paid for what I love to do, but everybody else in our archdiocese in Toronto is a volunteer. They are doing these things free of charge, which are not counte

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Definitely.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much. I worked with Diane Dicks from Vision Canada on the Iraqi refugee-related issues for quite a time. The Iraqi community is very active in trying to see possibilities to sponsor. Unfortunately, until last week there was no receptive approach from the governm

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Once you submit a sponsorship undertaking it goes to the local CIC office, which approves it in 30 to 60 days and then sends it to the visa post. From the visa post, they send out a form, the IMM 6000 package, which the refugee has to fill out and send back. When it arrives at th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The longest is African visa posts, the Canadian visa posts in Africa. Pretoria has a 46-month average processing time and Abidjan is the worst, with a 49-month average processing time. And that's only part of the process, from the point at which the visa post receives the forms f

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's an excellent question, because this is actually one of the issues. There are no real remedies in the program. In the inland protection, with refugee status determination in Canada by the refugee board, at least with IRPA you have the appeal division, and there are different

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Generally, I think in Canada at the refugee board there are some very important or crucial safeguards implemented. In Canada you can have counsel help the refugee. In the international protection, the law doesn't provide this to the refugee, and this is an issue to address. The