:
Once again, thank you. I'm very thankful for the opportunity to speak with you this morning.
After hearing from Basil Luksun and me, you will hear two separate but very related presentations: one from Diana Mumford, a school trustee in Burnaby, and the other from Karen Roth, a community health nurse with our regional health authority, who just stepped off the airplane. They will give you more specific information about the challenges they are facing in serving refugees and immigrants in the health and education fields.
In my remarks I'll set the stage for our collective presentations. By citing the Burnaby experience, I intend to reveal how suburban municipalities have been affected by rapid increases in refugee and immigrant populations. I will also discuss an example of how we have tried to respond to the increases. Specifically, I'll talk about our multiservice health facility, a community-driven proposal for coordinating and enhancing service delivery for refugees and immigrants in Burnaby and adjacent municipalities.
Before talking about the Burnaby situation, I would like to state the obvious. Canada is a land of immigrants. We are admired internationally for our multicultural policies and proactive approaches to welcoming immigrants and respecting individuals and cultural diversity.
Indeed, Basil and I have experienced first hand the welcoming and generosity of our new home country. We both came to Canada with basically a suitcase and a few dollars in our pockets. We know only too well the importance of having appropriate supports in place to help newcomers adapt and contribute to Canada and the communities in which they live.
Burnaby is part of the greater Vancouver area and is situated immediately east of and adjacent to Vancouver. It's the third-largest city in British Columbia, with a population of just over 200,000 people. In 2001, nearly half of Burnaby's population consisted of immigrants. This is in marked contrast to 1986, when only 25% of the population were immigrants. Further, in 2001, 28% of Burnaby residents spoke a language other than English at home. Also germane to this meeting, in recent years the city has been receiving over one-third of all government-assisted refugees arriving in B.C. The main source countries for these refugees include Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, and Indonesia. These refugees present many challenges to our city and to the overall service delivery system.
Some of the key challenges we have seen relate to these refugees' low incomes, limited English language and literacy skills, health concerns, and emotional and physical trauma. In short, these refugees face enormous obstacles as they try to adapt to their new surroundings. Without appropriate support and understanding, their chances of success are severely compromised. This results in hardships for the individuals, while also hindering our efforts to maintain a cohesive, harmonious community. We cannot let this happen.
We believe that every refugee and immigrant has the potential to thrive and contribute to the betterment of our community and our country. In Burnaby, we want to harness and develop that potential. While we have an excellent array of community service providers in the city, they are stretched extremely thin and lack the funding or resources to adequately respond to the increasing needs in the community. It's our firm belief that the provision of sufficient resources and support for our service delivery system would be a sound investment in our collective future.
In time, our citizens, our communities, and our nation would reap the benefit of such investments. We should also be able to avoid the socially and financially costly consequences of a segregated society, as evidenced in France last year.
With the foregoing as context, I will briefly describe our multiservice hub proposal, a community-driven model aimed at helping us to respond better to the needs of our increasing immigrant and refugee population.
I believe that the committee clerk has provided you with the copies of a council report entitled “Federal Funding Proposal for Multi-Service Hub Facility in Edmonds”. In the time available, I won't be able to speak at length about the proposal. I'll just touch on some key points.
The proposed facility is to be located in the Edmonds area, in the southeast part of Burnaby, which has a large concentration of immigrants and refugees.
The City of Burnaby is pursuing significant upgrades to civic infrastructure in the area. A new firehall was recently constructed, and a new library will be built next year. In addition, we are currently in the design stage for a new recreation centre complex. These are all within a short walk of the proposed multi-service hub facility.
In the midst of these initiatives, extensive consultation was conducted among community members and service providers in the area. They asked what else could be done, and the multi-service hub facility emerged. It represents a collective vision of how best to meet the needs of the refugees and the immigrant population while at the same time helping to build the community and the city.
The proposal involves the establishment of a 30,000-square-foot multi-service facility on city-owned land. It is adjacent to a community school and a city-owned building that accommodates a range of community agencies.
The concept is to provide a welcoming place in which immigrants and refugees can meet, obtain services, and participate in programs. In essence, it will be a one-stop resource, one that's based on a collaborate model and offers a rich and coordinated range of needed programs and services.
A few of the many programs and services that would be offered from the hub include language and literacy classes; settlement services; public health programs; family, sport, and counselling services; youth services; and community outreach.
In addition to serving immigrants and refugees, the hub would also be a welcome community resource for the broader community. The aim is to promote community cohesion and ensure that we don't further isolate our immigrant and refugee populations. We believe that this facility will be a model for communities facing similar challenges.
The city is proposing to contribute the land for the facility with an estimated value of $2 million. We would be looking to the senior governments to provide the capital funding for construction. We would also be looking to the senior governments and non-profit agencies to deliver the services and programs from the facility.
Burnaby city council endorsed the proposal this January. We approached the federal and provincial governments for support. While acknowledging the merits and innovation of the proposal, the message we received was consistent: no capital funding programs are available for development of the hub facility. Therefore, we are currently at an impasse. We have an abundance of goodwill, and the city has committed all that is within our means, but there are no serious prospects for funding. In the meantime, the challenges faced by our refugee and immigrant populations continue unabated.
To conclude, I would like to thank you once again for the opportunity to speak before you today. I would like to leave you with three messages. One, suburban municipalities face very real challenges in trying to accommodate and meet the needs of refugee and immigrant populations. Two, despite a limited social service mandate, Burnaby has come to the table with innovative, viable opinions and options to help meet the needs of our immigrant and refugee communities. Third, we can't do it alone.
On behalf of the City of Burnaby, I strongly urge you to recommend that the federal government establish a capital funding program that will support a creative partnership initiative such as our proposed multi-service hub facility. By so doing, the government would not only be helping our refugee and immigrant communities, it would also be helping the broader community, as well as facilitating the establishment of a stronger, more cohesive, and vibrant Canada.
We are a suburban municipality with half of our population comprised of immigrants. Further, over a third of the government-assisted refugees arriving in B.C. move to our city.
We welcome immigrants and refugees to our community. We believe these people have the potential to make a positive contribution both to Burnaby and Canada. However, they need help and support as they prepare to make their contributions. We ask for your leadership, collaboration, and resources as we collectively help these people on the road to full and prosperous lives as contributing members of society.
Thank you.
I am pleased to be able to address the committee on behalf of the Burnaby Board of School Trustees and to speak to you about some of the challenges we face in meeting the educational and social needs of our new student citizens.
The Burnaby School District has experienced many changes in the past two decades in direct relation to immigration patterns and trends. Approximately 20% of our student population currently receives English as a second language support and over 50% of our community has a first language other than English.
In the past few years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of refugee families arriving in our community. Currently, Burnaby receives 50% of all government-assisted refugees destined for B.C.
We believe school districts play a key role in helping immigrant and refugee students develop the fundamental skills and knowledge required to be successful in Canada. Although school districts are only funded to provide educational services to immigrant and refugee students, we are also involved in a wide range of settlement needs and issues for children and families for which there is no funding support.
As already indicated, the pattern of immigration to Bumaby has changed quite significantly. As mentioned by Councillor Dhaliwal, the mix and the countries of origin are now very different. According to a recent Immigrant Settlement Services report, 33% of the 2,444 refugees arriving in B.C. between January 2003 and December 2005 were school-aged, that is, between five and 19 years of age. In terms of place of origin, approximately 33% were from Afghanistan, 31% were from East Africa, and 20% were from the Middle East.
Currently, federal Immigration officials appear to focus almost exclusively on the head of the household in making immigration decisions. Little attention appears to be paid to the needs of the other family members until they arrive in Canada. Consequently, we are discovering a significant increase in the number of immigrant and refugee students with special education needs and frequently with a multiplicity of learning challenges.
Furthermore, a number of refugee students suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome. While the actual number of students affected by PTSS may be small, the effects of this disorder on sufferers, fellow students, teachers, and the school community can be significant.
We are also experiencing a growth in the number of students whose families are still in survival mode, and this is especially true for many refugee families. It's difficult to learn when one is struggling to survive.
To compound the challenges facing our school district, immigration and refugee students continue to arrive in reasonably large numbers throughout the school year and have to be accommodated immediately upon arrival. However, students arriving in B.C. after September 30 are not counted for funding purposes, so their needs must be met without additional budget resources.
Our concerns can be summarized under four areas. The first would be the past educational experience. An increasing number of students and families arriving in Canada are illiterate in their first language and have little or no formal education. Youths arriving in their later teen years with less than grade three entry-level English language skills are less likely to develop the language required to graduate prior to turning 19 years of age, or to be prepared for suitable entry-level employment. This lack of formal education often complicates and delays educational progress and can lead to increased chances that these young people may be unemployable or destined for a life of under-employment.
Second are the family dynamics. Immigrant and refugee children often have more English language proficiency than their parents. This can result in a shift of controls within the family unit toward the child. This realigned balance of power can create long-term negative changes in response to legitimate authority.
Third are the shifts within cultural communities. There are dozens of cultural communities in British Columbia. Some are long-established, while others are relatively recent. Some tend to be insular, while others embrace integration. Some are relatively small, while others have grown to dramatic proportions in recent years, thereby affecting the communities where they live in substantial ways. The resulting social displacement is not a well-understood concept in any sector of the larger community, making this phenomenon extremely difficult to address in our schools.
Fourth is skill development and youth employment. Because of their age on arrival, limited English language ability, and/or other needs, a growing number of immigrant and refugee students run the risk of leaving our schools with inadequate skills to cope with even entry-level work opportunities, and they are unable to pursue post-secondary training opportunities. The lack of adequate education can lead to an increase in the percentage of unemployed or underemployed youth who are then further marginalized in society.
In summary, Canada's economy and democratic future will depend in large part on all levels of government working together to support the education, settlement, and integration of our immigrant and refugee youth.
The Burnaby School District understands the critical role that the public education system plays in preparing youth to be productive members of the workforce and to participate fully and actively in a democratic society.
I wish to be very clear: B.C. school districts, such as Burnaby, are up to the challenge. However, from our perspective, all levels of government must clearly recognize the direct relationship between successful settlement and successful education, the potential impacts of current democratic changes on both settlement and education, the need to respond to these changes in a collective proactive manner, and the need for resources and a collaborative effort to support successful settlement and foster a smooth transition from secondary school to productive employment and active participation in the Canadian workforce.
The multi-service hub facility proposed by the City of Burnaby is a dynamic, forward-thinking proposal that warrants government support. As well, there needs to be a public recognition of the significant role that school districts play in providing front line settlement services that help our immigrant and refugee youth become productive participative citizens. One tangible way of recognizing that role would be to provide school districts that enrol a significant number of refugee students with targeted federal funding to help support the fundamental needs of these new Canadian citizens.
Thank you for your time.
:
Sorry. I'm trying to get in as much information in five minutes as I can.
The Bridge Clinic is a community health clinic that was established in September 1994 as a partnership between British Columbia Multicultural Health Services and the Immigration Settlement Services Society in the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. Its purpose is to address the primary health care needs of refugees with or without legal status.
Once the family leaves Welcome House and relocates into their new housing, there's insufficient support available to assist them to adapt and integrate to their new life. The members of many of the families I visited are often illiterate and innumerate in their own language, have no English skills, and suffer from the violence of war and traumas of many years of living in refugee camps.
It is usually overwhelming for them. Many need basic help dealing with modern life: toilets, electricity, shopping, money, parenting, and schooling. The list is endless. It is hard to know where to begin. I will limit my talk to specific challenges to refugees trying to access health services.
Since the IRPA, these primary health screens have detected an increase in refugees suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, HIV, and mental health conditions such as chronic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
At present, Fraser Health Authority is being faced with the challenge of providing primary care to this growing population. Many local physicians and walk-in clinics are unable to provide service to refugees with no English and complex medical and social conditions, resulting in the only access to primary care being the emergency department.
The situation for Burnaby is worsening, as the Bridge Clinic is no longer able to offer its service beyond the first three months of refugees' arrival, due to service demands and funding cuts. With the increasing complexity of medical conditions and necessity for multi-medical specialists to respond to these conditions, there is a resulting increase in the need for medical translators. Clients often fail to receive treatment for communicable diseases such as HIV, TB, malaria, and intestinal parasites, and children fail to receive services from outside agencies to diagnose and treat conditions.
Although Fraser Health has language services available to health care providers, most other community agencies do not have the funding available to pay for translators. Public health nurses are more and more having to take on the case management and coordination of care in the community for this burgeoning population. In the last seven months, Burnaby Preventive Health Services has spent $19,000 in translation costs for that area of health alone.
In British Columbia, unlike the rest of Canada, free ESL classes are provided to ELSA level three only, after which they must pay for further instruction. Level six is considered basic conversational English. The expectation on refugees is that after one year on the resettlement assistance program, they will then find employment and begin to pay back the government loan incurred to relocate. As research indicates, it takes five years of intensive immersion in ESL programs before conversational English is achieved. This will be a growing problem for Fraser Health for many years.
At present, most tertiary and specialist care centres are located in Vancouver, which poses the following problems:
Refugees unable to speak or read English cannot be informed of appointments without a translator, and then are challenged on how to reach them, as they are unable to use the transit system. There are no systems in place to facilitate this and no established communities with volunteers with linguistic skills.
Funding for travel to refugees is designed for one travel zone, when hospitals in Vancouver are three zones away. The cost of attending appointments to the economically disadvantaged family results in them missing appointments or not being able to afford food that week. Pre- and post-natal care for HIV-positive women is only available in Vancouver at the Oak Tree Clinic. If the woman has a primary physician, the medication could be couriered to the family physician. Once again, access to a primary physician for this population is severely limited. This leads to the families having to go to Vancouver to collect their medication.
Under existing legislation, disabled refugees are not able to apply for designation as disabled until one year after their arrival in Canada. At present, limbs and prostheses are available from a charitable institution in Vancouver that has no translators or means to assist these individuals with travel costs or physiotherapy.
Non-English-speaking refugees are unable to access birth control, due to their limited access to primary care physicians. Attempts to facilitate organizations such as OPTions for Sexual Health, formerly Planned Parenthood, were unsuccessful due to the lack of funding for translators. Finding pharmacists in Burnaby to participate in the interim federal health pharmacy benefit system is a challenge. Reasons for this include the extensive paperwork required to be submitted by them to obtain financial recompense and the delay of up to six weeks to receive payment. Consequently, there are times when the refugees living in Burnaby are unable to fill their prescriptions unless they travel to Vancouver.
An appropriate birth control option for non-literate refugees with psychosocial conditions who are unable to administer daily medication is the intra-uterine device, IUD, which is not covered by the interim federal health act. This means that the refugee must wait for 12 months until they are covered by welfare to obtain their IUD. This often results in unplanned pregnancies that place further financial demands on the economically disadvantaged families.
Vitamin D supplements for children are not covered, which is a particular problem for a group that has suffered years of malnutrition prior to coming into Canada.
The impact of the numbers of refugees arriving here who are HIV-positive is only just beginning to be felt, and will have an ongoing effect on the whole health care system.
Families with children with special needs are the most challenging and hardest to assist. Unable to read, write, or speak English, these families are expected to navigate, with no additional support, various government forms and applications for equipment and services for their children. Often these children do not receive treatment and are lost in the community until school entry.
At present, there are no special resources for adults, youth, or children who do not speak English and suffer from chronic depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. As a result, it is very difficult to develop strategies and provide services. The combination of medical and psychosocial issues and insufficiently supported translocation to Canada is resulting in increasing numbers of crises and suicide attempts.
Many of the refugees arrive in Canada after years of malnutrition that has long-term effects on their physical and dental health. As a result, adults and children often have abscesses, and have sustained facial and dental injuries from acts of violence, causing severe pain. It is not unheard of for these adults to extract their own teeth because they can find no source of help.
Frequently, refugees are unaware they have emergency dental coverage through the interim federal health program. Dental offices have expressed concern that they have provided emergency dental treatment and not been paid by the interim federal health act. The pre-authorization process for dental treatment under the interim federal health program can be cumbersome and unpredictable. There appear to be inconsistencies in what is approved and what is not.
Research has shown that adults with decay transfer cavity-causing germs to their young children. By not treating the dental disease of the adults, we are ensuring that the next generation will be at high risk for tooth decay, and so the cycle continues. It is not uncommon for treatment costs for very young children to exceed $2,000, not including the $500 per hour for the general anesthetic that is required to provide treatment safely to already traumatized children.
After one year as permanent residents, the children may become eligible for the healthy kids program, which pays for some dental treatment and eyeglasses for children younger than 19. Unfortunately, their parents are not eligible for any free dental care, even during pregnancy, when dental bacteria may result in pre-term or low birth weight babies.
In conclusion, there needs to be an innovative, multi-service approach that helps immigrants and refugees while facilitating a stronger, more cohesive, and healthier community, and reducing the costs of translation services. The hub would provide such an answer.
:
Patrick is 10 and Angel is 14. They were removed from Canada by the Department of Citizenship and Immigration with their father, Mr. Jean Bosco Rwiyamirira, on October 3, 2006. After living eight years — most of their lives — in Canada, these children, like many young Canadians who were born elsewhere, embraced Canada as their country.
Mr. Rwiyamirira worked in the secretariat of the Rwandan embassy in Ottawa. Making an astonishing break from diplomatic protocol, he denounced the violation of human rights during the Rwandan genocide. This action put his family at risk, and so Mr. Rwiyamirira — as any father would — put their security first: he claimed asylum as a refugee in Canada.
Mr. Rwiyamirira wasted no time in making an exemplary contribution to Quebec society. In 2005, Premier Jean Charest awarded him an honour in recognition of his contribution to the common good.
Canada, as you know, has a moratorium on deportation to Rwanda — for good reason. Nevertheless, one official in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration — not a judge, not a court of law — had the authority to order this family's removal without any possibility of appeal. And the Department did this in violation of Canada's obligations under article 3 of the International Convention Against Torture. Unfortunately, the circumstances of Mr. Rwiyamirira and his family, along with many similar cases, suggests that in practice, Canada does not always respect its international treaty obligations.
Today, my diocese has lost direct contact with Mr. Rwiyamirira. We know he is in prison in Kigali on a charge of desertion. This is an alarming state of affairs, because it shows the consequences of Canada's violation of the strict obligation not to practice refoulement in international law. We have intermittent communication with his children: they are in the care of distant relatives, and have left behind every semblance of their lives in Canada.
Your committee, Mr. Chairman, may not be the place to review specific outrages like this. We recognize that you are not the de facto appeals court provided by Parliament in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. However, the situation faced by this family is a powerful illustration of the core message in our pastoral letter “We are aliens and transients before the Lord our God”.
The core message is this: human dignity is neither theoretical nor abstract. When it is wounded, you know it. The wound can last for the rest of your life. This is especially so in the case of a family.
We recognize the positive elements of the Canadian refugee system. However, serious reform is essential so that human dignity can take precedence over all other considerations. We do not make this assertion out of episcopal idealism. Every day, in the pastoral life of our dioceses across Canada, we witness the struggle of people seeking asylum in Canada, and especially the injustices that persist in view of the government's failure to implement a transparent and effective appeal system, as required by the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
We witness the ordeal caused by inordinate delays and fees which prevent family reunification. We witness the very real suffering of people whose status is under a moratorium, and specifically the youth who see their lives destroyed by delays that can last many years. We witness the impoverishment of agricultural workers, immigrants and refugees who, due to the lack of adequate support services and the persistent failure to recognize foreign accreditation, suffer higher rates of unemployment and lower earnings.
We witness the very real vulnerability of women in what the Vatican describes as the “feminization of migration” and the absence of resources to shield them from economic exploitation and men's violence against them.
We witness the abomination of human trafficking as women and children are reduced to sex slaves.
We congratulate the minister for announcing in May that Immigration officers will now have the power to issue temporary residence permits for up to 120 days to the victims of human trafficking, for exempting them from processing fees, and allowing access to benefits under the interim Federal Health Program.
At the same time, if the CBC is correct, they continue to face serious barriers to immigration. There still does not seem to be an integrated, proactive strategy to eradicate human trafficking from Canada.
We witness the vivisection of human dignity in slow motion, and it is clear in the work of this committee that you have witnessed this also—in the testimony you have received, and in your visits to detention centres. You have seen how measures that are intended to keep Canadians secure against terrorism in fact flout deep democratic values like respect for human rights, the rule of law, and the intrinsic worth of each person.
The courts have seen this, the Arar Commission has seen this, and you have seen this too. However, Canadians often fail to see that human dignity also requires that no woman, man or child be forced to migrate or seek asylum.
It is therefore vital that the Government of Canada redoubles its efforts to counter the environmental destruction, famine and disease that come with global warming by taking meaningful action to implement Kyoto further to the report of Sir Nicolas Stern; to stop the trampling of human rights and civic freedoms under the heels of despots by building international support for the just application of the responsibility to protect; and to reverse the engineered impoverishment of vast populations by delivering on the promise of integral human development.
The message to take up in your report to the House of Commons and in your discussions in your respective caucuses is that: it is within our power as a country to solve these problems. It is within our power as a country to build a refugee and immigrant system in Canada that places human dignity, first. Such a system would treat the two children of my diocese—Patrick and Angel—with the care and attention they deserve as children with an eternal destiny, and never dehumanize them as administrative burdens. It is within our power as a country to answer a global culture of fear of strangers, a culture of suspicion and deeply rooted terror, and to replace it with a culture of peace, a culture of unequivocal and authentic hospitality.
Thank you.
:
If I might, first of all, I also want to say how pleased I am to be invited to speak before this standing committee.
As Archbishop Ébacher mentioned, each year in the Roman Catholic Church we have World Day for Migrants and Refugees. It's celebrated in the middle of January. In 2006, on that occasion, this document “We are aliens and transients before the Lord our God”, Pastoral Letter on Immigration and the Protection of Refugees, was published, which was distributed throughout the country and is available on our website. So in my remarks I want to bring out a few of the ideas and a few of the concerns that are mentioned in this document.
In the Hebrew Scriptures or the Old Testament, King David proclaimed to his people, “We are aliens and transients before the Lord our God, as were all our ancestors”. I think this awareness of our precariousness reinforces the importance of welcoming the stranger. This is why hospitality is, you might say, the ancient name for justice.
Our Lord holds in judgment people who, out of hypocrisy or callousness, fail to welcome the stranger. The sin is an offence against the beatitudes, and it is one that can be committed both in our personal failures and collectively.
We might ask, why should hospitality matter? Well, it matters because human beings are created to live in communion with each other, and to deny this, to exclude, to shun, to render, or refouler is to dehumanize profoundly a person. So in ancient times and in many parts of the world today, the refusal of hospitality ends up being a death sentence.
If I might suggest, Mr. Chairman, a core question for your report to the House of Commons could be how does Canada's refugee and migrant system meet the test of hospitality as justice?
I would propose four elements of an answer, drawing, as I said, three of them from our pastoral letter, and the last from recent developments in the Vatican's international examination of counter-terrorism.
Let me begin with the first. In entering into the safe third country agreement with the United States, Canada has left in the hands of a foreign government the determination of the final disposition of people to whom we deny refugee status. This places us, then, at risk of violating our international obligations under the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, to respect the principle of non-refoulement.
The safe third country agreement allows Canada illicitly to wash its hands of these obligations, leaving it for U.S. officials to render, refouler, or hold in detention people who could otherwise have had a viable refugee claim, and there is no appeal and every likelihood that the safe third country agreement violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Furthermore, the safe third country agreement is problematic in the context of recent developments in U.S. counter-terrorism legislation. The passage in September of the Military Commissions Act further embeds the category of material support of terrorism.
This was first introduced in the U.S.A. Patriot Act. This category is used routinely to deny asylum to refugees fleeing from religious persecution, terrorist cabals, rape gangs, and despotic regimes. It is used to return them, then, to the hands of their oppressors.
So when Canada shuts the door on people who might but for this safe third country agreement have bona fide refugee claims, we become complicit in a bureaucratized evil that is correctly denounced by a growing number of inter-religious consensus in the United States.
So we make our own the words of these Jewish and Christian and Muslim leaders who insist that refugees cannot become the unintended victims of the war against terror.
This situation shows that there is a painful Canadian reality in the Holy See's response to the report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, where it says:
A certain deterioration of the legal concept of asylum appears to be taking place as some states give preference to national legislation or bilateral agreements over international refugee law.
We recommend, therefore, that Canada abrogate the safe third country agreement. Preparatory to this, we urge the committee to recommend a comprehensive, objective, and high-level review of what has become of the people who were turned away thus far through the application of this agreement.
Though we speak at considerable removal from the world of the House of Commons, the second point I want to make is that it is hard for us to understand how governments can fail to implement the appeal provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and not face some form of meaningful censure. It was on the promise of a fair and timely appeal system that the legislation carried. The executive branch's failure to fulfill this promise is a sign of obdurate defiance of democratic authority.
In the absence of an effective right to appeal, many parishes and denominational congregations are placed in the position of having to make agonizing decisions of whether or not to grant sanctuary. As other witnesses I'm sure have testified to you, it is very rare that churches choose to grant sanctuary, notwithstanding the many requests they receive. They do so only after close examinations of the facts before them, through an extensive process of communal deliberation. Granting sanctuary, then, for these churches is an exercise of their informed conscience that must take into account the prospect of breaking the law, risking fines and imprisonment, or violating conscience and the imperative of hospitality.
When all other recourse has failed, I think granting sanctuary is a way to call the government's attention to an exceptional injustice and a way to denounce a specific and unacceptable failure of the immigration system in faithfulness to the Lord's own call to hospitality as justice. We recommend, therefore, that the committee unanimously call upon the government to implement a rigorous, transparent, and timely appeal system, as required in the act.
The third point would be that there seems to be a lack of political will to make private or collective sponsorships work. One of the most arduous burdens a family can bear is to be separated and uprooted for a prolonged period of time. For example, according to the department's own figures, 50% of the cases in Africa and the Middle East have delays of 22 months, with 70% to 80% of cases taking 29 to 34 months. From this, it seems that the delays are in fact a form of systematic discrimination, a head tax exacted in time, not in money. We also note, by the department's own numbers, that 70% or 80% of cases reuniting refugee women and men with their children take up to 16 to 21 months.
We recommend to the committee that it call upon the government to eliminate obstacles that impede the speedy reunification of families and reduce the waiting time for collective sponsorships. For our part, we stand ready to collaborate with the government to make this system work.
Finally, on October 5, 2005, the Holy See intervened at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to denounce the mushrooming of detention centres for asylum seekers and a generalized policy of detention that is more a rule, prompted by national order and security, than an exception. This is a product of a culture of fear, a culture that cannot be reconciled with democratic values. It feeds, in the words of this intervention, racist and xenophobic behaviour.
We recommend that the committee call upon the government to guard against a generalized policy of detention, ensuring that our system is in accord with the values of a free and democratic society.
It is for this committee to continue the work of reasserting the primacy of human dignity, human rights, and respect for the rule of law as core democratic values that make demands on Canada's refugee and migrant system. It's good to remember that the Roman Catholic Church is comprised of people from every part of the world. You can see this in any church or cathedral in the country. Moreover, the country has grown stronger through its capacity to embrace religious pluralism, to authentically reflect the face of the human family.
You do not therefore work alone, but instead have a vast constituency of Canadians, ourselves included, who continue to believe that Canada's vocation is to be a sign and safeguard of a new global culture of peace and hospitality. This culture of peace and hospitality comes first of all from our affirmation, in the face of terrorism, nihilism, fanatical fundamentalism, and militarism, that every woman, man, and child is of equal human dignity and we share a common transcendent destiny.
We have every confidence that the imperative of hospitality asserted in your work as legislators and in our work as pastors will preserve democracy and allow it to flourish because it has allowed faith, solidarity, and communion to flourish.
Thank you.
Welcome to the committee. It is refreshing to hear what you have to say. We need this kind of support. Since 2002, the Bloc Québécois has often insisted on the fact that refugees must be treated more fairly and equitably. The Appeal Division is something we hold very dear to our hearts. A private member's bill was tabled and will be debated in the House of Commons in the not too distant future. Mr. Telegdi said that this issue should become a little more political and should become more important to Canadians. Everyone, everywhere, keeps on repeating this. However, we don't feel that the subject is getting the attention it deserves.
Over the years, immigrants' rights have been eroded. This is worrying. Your letter accurately reflects the situation. You of course have a great deal of experience in this field. Furthermore, I am pleased at the greater role Mr. Raymond Gravel will play. I had the opportunity to work with him on several immigration and refugee cases over the past few years. We need more people like him. We must also pass legislation.
Unfortunately, some provisions do not go far enough compared to what was originally called for, including how to deal with people who do not go back to their countries of origin because they are on the list of countries affected by the moratorium. The case of Mr. Jean Bosco, a Rwandan national, quickly illustrated the limits of the immigration system. It also became clear that the people who believe in our system were powerless. In fact, we have only just touched the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, several hundred nationals from Congo are currently in the same situation as the Rwandan national in question.
The immigration community is not as strong as it used to be, but government officials do not seem to grasp the reality of the situation. In your letter, which is fairly complete, you may have forgotten to mention some situations. I would like to draw a few of them to your attention. Mr. Khan and Mr. Falcón Ríos, whose claims were upheld by the Committee against Torture, now find themselves in a legal vacuum in Canada. There are also people whose geographic situation has changed and who have become stateless. All these people are here, on Canadian territory.
Furthermore, there is the issue of religious asylum. As far as I know, the claim to religious asylum has been rejected in the case of Mr. Cherfi. However, the United States granted him refugee status. Quebec has already agreed that Mr. Cherfi can stay, but there has been no movement at the federal level and, in fact, there have been delays.
Further, the court challenges program was abolished by the Conservative government. The most vulnerable persons — who include immigrants or stateless persons — could turn to this program to defend themselves before the courts. Who will challenge the Safe Third Country Agreement if access to justice has been denied?
Do you find it normal that refugees who have been granted protection should have to wait such a long time to be reunited with their families? I believe that in answering the question, one begins to understand the reality of immigrants to Canada.
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Thank you very much. I just have a few questions.
There's no doubt that there are a great number of refugees in the world, into the millions. The question is how many you can absorb, and it becomes a numbers thing, in that sense. I know that proportionately, among other countries in the world, Canada ranks quite well in terms of the numbers we take in. I'm sure we can do better, and perhaps more, and that is something we need to look at in terms of numbers and perhaps of the effect of the safe third country agreement.
Many people have felt that in terms of general outcomes, the United States and Canada are comparable. In terms of how the process goes through it's different, but the total numbers at the end of the road are what count. In the first year's report with respect to the safe third country agreement, some of the comments made were that the objectives of the agreement are “to enhance the orderly handling of refugee claims, strengthen public confidence in the integrity of our respective refugee systems, help reduce abuse of both countries' asylum programs, and share the responsibility of providing protection to those in need”.
So there is the public interest component as well. The two have to be balanced somehow. And of course, if it were in numbers of refugees you're going to take in, there are a number abroad and a number who would make applications through the United States, and part of the reasoning behind the safe third country agreement was to deal with the public interest in the absence...or to try to do away with some of the abuse.
Of course, I realize your concern was with the issue surrounding material support and how it might have an effect on that issue alone. I wondered whether there were any other issues.
Then, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees also had input to the review and said that essentially—as far as I know, it's the UNHRC's overall assessment—“...the Agreement has generally been implemented by the Parties according to its terms and, with regard to those terms, international refugee law. Individuals who request protection are generally given an adequate opportunity to lodge refugee claims at the ports of entry and eligibility determination decisions under the Agreement have generally been made correctly.” And then the Government of Canada noted in that review that it accepted in whole or in part 13 of 15 new or outstanding UNHRC recommendations in its monitoring report.
Would you agree with me that there are two sides to that coin? There's an issue of the integrity of the system—a public interest dealing with any abuses that may take place—and then, that the two countries do have reasonably good refugee systems compared with what's happening in other parts of the world?