Citizenship and Immigration committee  Absolutely, that's a better approach we have seen with the immigrants, and not just Syrians, but the other immigrants also. As long as they interact with the diverse population of Canada, the diversity we have in Canada, and as long as we are in that setting, it's good. It's very

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We do. We do that, but we leave it to the volunteers who are working with us to ensure that they get good jobs and that they are paid well. We make sure they don't go into odd jobs. We also ensure they go into the same job they had been doing previously. If someone is a baker, w

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We have different concerned groups working with us—for example, in Milton there is a gentleman called Jim Estill. They have jobs already there for the families coming in. These are not just odd jobs, but ones based on their qualifications. The project managers from each of the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question. Basically what had happened in the three-month period when we sponsored 8,500 people was that before that there were no allocations for Syria and Iraq. The SAHs, the sponsorship agreement holders, could apply for as many as we could, and we did that

Citizenship and Immigration committee  All of these teams that we have are varied, with different skill sets. There are project managers. There are officials working in each of those groups. They manage their own teams, actually, and the work, so they take care of this. They have one year. The refugee families have b

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, we do not have access to government funding that I have seen, but we are requesting it. For all resources, actually, there is an element of settlement activity we do on a daily basis. We have families coming into our organization every day. We need funding for additional staf

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Simultaneously with the ESL classes, we have activities for the youth and the children at IFT every weekend. It's not specific to the Syrian kids; they sit with the other kids, who are from different backgrounds, different ethnicities. The diversity of Canada is represented in ea

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would like to thank you for inviting us to this session. The Islamic Foundation of Toronto has been in existence as a SAH, a sponsorship agreement holder, for the past 15 years, but we have aggressively worked on the private sponsorship of Syrian refugees and the BVOR categori