Citizenship and Immigration committee  The UNHCR applications are processed differently in both those ways. First of all, the UNHCR submits the profile to CIC to see whether they are interested in this type of refugee, and second, the average processing time in that case is about 12 months. You can predict in 12 mont

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It is because of the processing.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No. What I'm saying is that Canada, as part of the international community, is obligated to make refugee status determinations in Canada. What we are doing now is an additional humanitarian commitment, because once you go outside your country and still give protection, that is so

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Actually, as a member of the NGO-government committee on refugee sponsorship, I have quite a good overview of several sponsors who submitted their applications to Ottawa, to the case review of CIC. They send the files from the visa post, and finally the case management here does

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

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question. Actually, in IRPA there is this excellent category called the source country class, which means that Canada recognizes that in some countries, the refugees, even within their own country, qualify as refugees as internally displaced persons. Unfortunat

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

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