Citizenship and Immigration committee  The only thing I could add to what Abraham was building up to in the previous question is how critical we are in terms of the resettlement need. While it is not an international obligation, it is generosity on the part of the states. We're at a position right now where we're only

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We're not sure actually. We get our numbers from IOM. The numbers, we've been told by IOM, are in some preliminary information from Citizenship and Immigration. An official suggests that about 800 to 1,000 Iraqis came to Canada in 2007, but we don't know yet. You can keep in min

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm unsure of what our acceptance rate is right now in terms of countries. Certainly some of the countries don't necessarily accept every case that we refer to them for a variety of reasons, but I can't say at this point in time. I don't want to make an estimate one way or the ot

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We did refer 1,515 persons to Canada last year. Are you asking how many people have actually left among that 1,515?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  This is primarily an urban population, so many of them can travel to the Canadian embassy for the interviews that take place, and that's where a lot of that processing takes place.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The way the Iraqis are actually referred is that they first go to UNHCR and they're registered with UNHCR. During the registration period UNHCR would identify those refugees we think may be in need of resettlement; we do an intense registration and we try to identify who is most

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the clarification. UNHCR in Canada worked on what we call group processing of refugees, and that's what you're referring to. It was a process whereby we referred a large number in a particular refugee camp. In the case of Thailand, they were from Mae La Oon and Ma

Citizenship and Immigration committee  To resettlement countries. From countries in the region, Syria and Jordan, to resettlement countries. I am talking of all resettlement countries.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  May I add a small dimension? We are talking about UNHCR's referrals. Our challenge has been departures, so I think we're debating very much the front end of the referral process, very much the issue the high commissioner mentioned when he was in the Middle East in February. He wa

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Actually, you're correct, it's an element of both. It reflects both our capacity to identify, as in our statement.... We estimate, and estimated resettlement needs could be as high as 80,000 to 90,000. But we're referring 25,000 to various resettlement countries based on both our

Citizenship and Immigration committee  When we give these estimates, they're done annually. In fact, we're already trying to do our projections for 2009, so it might be a bit early. But our objective for this year is 25,000 referrals, which is in keeping with what we did last year, which was around 21,000. In resettle

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We're still....

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Exactly. I don't want to make any projections. It's not my place.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Just to clarify, 25,000 would be referred to 16 different countries that we're working with right now. If other countries wanted to assist, we would certainly welcome that as well.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can only speculate, unfortunately, but I think we're looking at probably less than 1%, given the reasons already cited. One, it's been very difficult for us to resettle people outside of Iraq, because many governments can't travel inside Iraq for safety reasons. Second, we've h