- Reaction score
- 25
- Points
- 430
Why sure! Let's just add to the problem!
Wake up people.
Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.
More on LINK.
Sadly, I am now looking at this as "importing the poisonous barbarianism from that Region into our society" by bringing in unscreened individuals who most likely will not adopt our culture and its freedoms. People who potentially will turn on us. People who may not believe in our freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and equality of the sexes. Sadly, I believe the Church organizations and bureaucrats are all wrong.
Wake up people.
Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.
Why has Canada only taken in 200 Syrian refugees?
The Toronto Star
By: Peter Goodspeed Atkinson Fellow, Published on Fri Sep 19 2014
Canada has resettled 200 Syrian refugees while Sweden, which has only a quarter of Canada’s population, has taken in more than 30,000.
Martin Mark boils with frustration at the inertia he says has paralyzed Canada’s refugee system during Syria’s civil war.
“There is delay, delay, delay,” says the executive director of the Catholic Office of Refugees in the Archdiocese of Toronto (ORAT). “It is spoiling our international reputation.
“If I go to a church and tell them, ‘Please do the fundraising and prepare and the refugees will come,’ I have a good chance of getting a good response. But if I finish my speech by saying it will happen three years from today, they are going to say, ‘Get out, man. Are you serious?’
“Resettlement is done worldwide now,” Mark continues. “It’s not just the U.S. and Canada. If you see other countries, where the processing time is less than one year, you have to wonder. The U.K. Germany, Sweden, Norway . . . for God’s sake, I mean the maximum there is one year. The average is four to six months.
“So how come we became the worst ever resettlement processing country?”
Once a private sponsorhip — usually involving a church group — is approved, it can take two to five years to get a refugee to Canada, depending on the country where he or she is living.
Canada’s average processing time for privately sponsored refugee applications in Lebanon is two years. In Pakistan it is 5.4 years, in Egypt, 3.5 years and in South Africa, 4.7 years.
In the three and a half years war has raged in Syria, displacing 10 million people, Canada has struggled to resettle fewer than 200 Syrian refugees overseas and is still processing asylum applications from another 1,300 who made their way to Canada on their own.
In the same period, Germany resettled 6,000, welcomed another 11,800 Syrian asylum seekers and promised to offer protection — in the form of renewable, two-year residence visas — to another 20,000 of Syria’s most vulnerable victims trapped in the Middle East.
Sweden, a country with only about a quarter of Canada’s population, has given permanent resident status to more than 30,000 Syrians.
Two months after Canada announced, in July 2013, that it would accept 200 government-sponsored Syrian refugees by the end of this year, the Swedish government said all Syrians who made it to Sweden and passed normal security checks would be given permanent residence and allowed to bring their immediate family members to live with them.
While Canadian officials were still trying to process their first government-sponsored refugee, more than 5,000 Syrians arrived in Sweden in the first three months of Stockholm’s new policy.
Canada struggles to meet this year’s target of 200 government-sponsored refugees, while Sweden welcomes 600 Syrian refugees each week.
“Canada is just failing to respond,” says Mark. “It is very sad.”
The delays point to a refugee system riven by politics and struggling against bureaucratic lethargy.
Canada already has a backlog of 21,000 sponsored-refugee applications. Churches and community associations that sponsor refugees have, since 2011, been limited in the number of new applications they can submit each year, in order to give the government time to clear the backlogs.
It seems delays are built into the system that processes applications.
In 2012, Citizenship and Immigration Canada created a new Centralized Processing Office in Winnipeg to rapidly vet private sponsorship applications. The goal was to complete the initial application review in 30 days.
An operational evaluation of the new office at the end of its first year, obtained under the Access to Information Act, concludes: “The Centralized Processing Office . . . is currently experiencing critical processing and communications backlogs at a time when application volumes are expected to increase significantly.”
Instead of the benchmark 30-day processing time, “sponsors are not receiving a case decision for almost one year,” says the departmental assessment, dated November 2013.
“At current staffing and productivity levels, it is estimated that it will take (the office) over two years to clear the existing inventory of cases, in addition to almost two and a half years to process projected 2014 application submissions,” the report predicts.
There is a risk the new backlog, on top of existing waits in visa offices overseas, could jeopardize Canada’s privately sponsored refugee targets, the study concluded.
'Even the bureaucrats in Ottawa are unhappy'
“The Winnipeg office became a disaster,” says Mark. “And it’s not just the sponsors who are unhappy — even the bureaucrats in Ottawa are unhappy.
“Until 2011 we had a lot of Immigration Canada offices processing our cases and we had an excellent relationship with the people working there. They loved the program, they helped us and they would call us if there was anything they needed. But suddenly Ottawa decided, ‘No, this is not good. Let’s not communicate with the sponsors.’
“We have thousands of cases and we have had several where, because of the delays in Immigration Canada’s processing, refugees that were hoping to come to Canada have been selected by Australia or the United Kingdom or the United States, and they are processed and have already left before the Canadian approval comes through.”
In other instances, files have sat in Winnipeg for months before being suddenly returned with a note complaining of an inconsistency in the spelling of a foreign name, a missing address or email or a garbled telephone number, Mark says.
“They find a reason to refuse to process and after one year or one and a half years you are still at Step One. It is really upsetting for the relatives, for the churches, for the refugees and for the visa offices.”
Two-thirds of Canada’s privately sponsored refugees — there were 6,623 of them in 2013 — come to the country through groups like Mark’s. There are 85 “sponsorship agreement holders,” mostly churches and some ethnic organizations, that can submit sponsorship applications for their own and other groups.
Sponsors agree to provide emotional and financial support to refugees, including housing, clothing and food, for at least a year. It costs sponsors $12,600 a year to support a single refugee and around $26,000 for a family of four.
A recent survey of Canada’s faith-based refugee sponsorship groups by Citizens for Public Justice, an Ottawa-based Christian public policy organization, found that all church-connected sponsorship groups are concerned “about the long waiting period and processing time required after a sponsorship application is submitted.”
And 92 per cent of the church refugee groups complained about the government’s lack of consultation with them.
A number of the groups indicated they are frustrated not with civil servants but with the immigration minister’s office, the report said.
This year, it took the government nearly nine months to disclose its annual quotas to private refugee sponsors, a delay that virtually paralyzed them.
Normally, the quotas are announced well ahead of time so private sponsors know how many spots they have to fill and how they will be split among Canadian visa posts around the world. That gives them time to trade applications with each other to make sure that all the refugee allocations are filled up each year. This year, however, the sponsorship agreement holders didn’t get their 2014 quotas until late August. No public explanation was given.
“This year, the shift was moving from a sort of balanced global approach towards Syria,” Immigration Minister Chris Alexander told the Star. “And as the Syrian crisis and the UN appeals have come forward, we’ve tried to shift our planning in response.”
Alexander has hinted at plans to launch a large-scale operation to assist Syrian refugees, but Canada has yet to respond to an eight-month-old UNHCR request to have resettlement countries rescue 100,000 Syrians over the next two years.
“Generally, when the UNHCR puts out an appeal, Canada looks at the number and commits to about 10 per cent,” Brian Dyck, chairman of the Sponsorship Agreement Holders Association of Canada and refugee program co-ordinator for Manitoba’s Mennonite Central Committee, wrote recently. “To date, the Canadian government has said they will take part but has not set a number. For Canada to resettle 10,000 Syrians in the next two years could be a huge undertaking, however, with proper planning and support it can be done.”
If private refugee sponsors are going to be asked to pick up a large portion of the Syrian refugees, they don’t want it to be at the expense of their existing resettlement programs.
'The Syrian situation really needs our attention'
“Sponsoring groups have focused on resettlement of other refugees around the world, and we would not want to take away from that,” Dyck wrote in a blog posted on the Mennonite Central Committee’s website. “However, the Syrian situation really needs our attention. We need groups to add Syria to their list of places that we sponsor from. That is beginning to happen, but the take-up is slow.”
“I can’t tell you the amount of anxiety and stress that Syrians are going through,” says Faisal Alazem, spokesman for the Syrian Canadian Council. “Many members of the Syrian Canadian community are concerned that there is no priority processing or family reunification programs in place to assist their families.”
In 2007, as the United States struggled to develop a military exit strategy in Iraq amid targeted attacks on the country’s Christians, Canada said it would fast-track family-class visa applications for Iraqis with close family in Canada.
In 2010, following a major earthquake in Haiti, Canada announced a special Haitian family reunification program that fast-tracked 2,200 family-class sponsorships involving more than 3,300 people.
Within 24 hours of Typhoon Haiyan hitting the Philippines in 2013, the government promised to fast-track visa applications from Filipinos “significantly and personally affected” by the catastrophe and said Filipinos already in Canada who wanted to remain would be assessed in a “compassionate and flexible manner.”
By April 2014, 1,097 Filipinos were allowed to enter Canada; 245 of them were given temporary residence permits and 852 were granted permanent residence.
No similar programs have been introduced for Syrians.
“There is no political will to be either fast or flexible,” says Naomi Alboim, chair of Queen’s University’s Policy Forum and a former deputy-minister of citizenship in Ontario. “There is nothing to prevent them from having a huge (resettlement) response. There would not need to be any major legislative or policy reform if they wanted to respond quickly to major international situations.
“They could increase their quotas tomorrow,” she insists. “There is nothing to prevent them from doing that except political will and money.”
More on LINK.
Sadly, I am now looking at this as "importing the poisonous barbarianism from that Region into our society" by bringing in unscreened individuals who most likely will not adopt our culture and its freedoms. People who potentially will turn on us. People who may not believe in our freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and equality of the sexes. Sadly, I believe the Church organizations and bureaucrats are all wrong.
