When a Toronto group eager to sponsor Syrian refugees learned that it had been matched with a family of four, government officials said the new arrivals could be in Canada within days.
Months have passed, and the Syrian couple with two young children are still in Jordan. The Tri-Church Syrian Refugee Sponsorship Committee now faces a difficult decision -- continue holding out hope that the family will eventually arrive in Toronto, or sponsor a different Syrian family instead.
“That’s the stumbling block for us,” Wes Denyer, the minister of the Rosedale Presbyterian Church, which is part of the committee, told CTVNews.ca.
A number of sponsorship groups are facing similar dilemmas, due to delays in the processing of Syrian refugees under the Blended Visa Office-Referred, or BVOR, program.
The program matches refugees identified by the United Nations Refugee Agency with private sponsors in Canada, who split the costs of supporting a family with the federal government.
Denyer said the Tri-Church committee applied to sponsor a Syrian refugee family late last year, and learned of a match in January. He said government officials initially told the group that the family -- a couple with a six-year-old son and four-year-old daughter -- could arrive in as little as 72 hours, “and no later than Feb. 29.”
But by August, the group was still waiting. Members had everything ready for the family’s arrival, including a resettlement and orientation plan, furniture and an apartment that they ended up offering to other refugees.
On Aug. 23, Denyer said the group received a letter from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, informing them that their family was still delayed in Jordan. The letter gave them the option of sponsoring a different refugee family, but that would mean giving up completely on the original family they were matched with.
Denyer said there’s a lot of unease within the group about making such a difficult decision. While some members feel that they should sponsor whoever needs help right away, others “very strongly feel that it would be wrong” to relinquish the family that has already been told about the waiting sponsors in Canada.
“I worry about what is the psychological impact on them,” Denyer said.
He said that members of the group have texted the Syrian family over the past few months, with someone on their end translating the messages from English.
Denyer said he doesn’t understand why CIC won’t give his group the option to take on a replacement family, and still sponsor the original family if they are ever cleared for immigration to Canada.
“I am hoping that he government will come to its senses on this and simply make what I think is a very easy decision,” he said.
In an email to CTVNews.ca, a Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokesperson said that sponsors are being offered replacement families in “a small number of cases.” There are currently more than 140 such cases involving about 30 sponsorship groups, Nancy Chan said.
“The processing of these cases is not a resource issue,” she said in the email. “The cases are in the midst of being processed, and are awaiting completion of all requirements. We need to ensure that individuals are admissible to Canada before their cases can be finalized.”
Claude Hould, chair of the Rosedale United Church Refugee Committee in Toronto, told CTV News Channel that two of 17 sponsorship groups working with the committee were recently offered replacement refugee families.
He said that in most cases, the sponsorship groups have had “limited contact” with the refugee families they were initially matched with.
“In some cases, they had made contact with them and they were aware of some of the personal situations. So emotionally, yes, there was some backlog on the feelings, but in general (the sponsors) are happy that they now have another family that they can support,” he said.
Chan said replacement families are being offered to sponsors under the BVOR program “with priority being given to the smaller number of refused/withdrawn cases, followed by those currently awaiting finalization.”
The process could take several months to complete, she said.
Syrian refugee families that end up losing sponsors through this process, but still fulfill all the admission requirements, will land in Canada as government-assisted refugees, Chan said.
A breakdown of Canada’s efforts to resettle Syrian refugees can be found on the government’s website.
‘Kind of a mess’
Advocacy group Canada4Refugees called the latest delays in refugee processing “very discouraging.”
“It indicates the unwillingness of the government to take the action needed to ensure that families are processed quickly, and that they arrive quickly, as well as an unwillingness to respond to the significant support from sponsorship groups across Canada to assist Syrian refugees,” the group said in a statement.
Canada4Refugees spokesperson Doug Earl told CTVNews.ca that he knows of one sponsorship group that is now being offered a refugee family from Burma instead of Syria.
“It’s kind of a mess,” he said, adding that many sponsors are getting discouraged from the entire process altogether due to ongoing delays and lack of information.
But Chan said immigration officials are not offering to replace sponsored Syrian families with those from other countries.
“What sponsors may be referring to is that we regularly share BVOR profiles for a variety of refugee populations...Refugees from Syria and 26 other nationalities have been sponsored through this program. This includes people from the Congo, Eritrea, Myanmar (Burma), Iran and Iraq,” she said, noting that those are not replacement cases.
Denyer said the prospect of choosing between two families in need has, indeed, been discouraging for the Tri-Church group and even caused friction between members.
“I feel like we’ve done everything right and we’ve done everything we can do,” he said, adding that the delays have been especially frustrating following the publicly celebrated arrivals of 25,000 government-sponsored Syrian refugees.
“I felt really good watching (Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau and (Ontario Premier) Kathleen Wynne handing out parkas to new families at the airport and now I’m feeling like, what happened after that?” he said. “Was that just ticking off an election promise?”
