To welcome refugees, community must come together

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Published on Tuesday, December 22, 2015

By Kira Paterson

Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

With the turmoil in Syria, the Canadian government is attempting to reduce the damage by bringing refugee families into Canada. However, the process isn’t as simple as it might sound. 

There is a lot to consider when relocating a family. They need transportation to get to their new location, they need a place to stay, at least one of the family members needs a job to support them and, of course, they need clothes for the cold Canadian winters, just to name a few items. All of this costs a lot of money, just for one family to move from a refugee camp in the Middle-East to a safer place. 

Don Walmsley, coordinator at the Neepawa Area Immigrant Settlement Services (NAISS), said that there are three categories of refugees being relocated to Canada. The biggest group the country will see will probably be Government Assisted Refugees (GARs). All refugees assisted by the government are chosen by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). “The destination for those refugees is determined by a matching centre found at the department of immigration,” said Walmsley. The government looks at the services that the refugees will need, such as health care, trauma support, proximity to places of worship for their religion and other factors, such as where family or others of their culture are centred. “Priority is given to find a community where refugees can receive those services,” explained Walmsley, “It also looks at the capacity of a community to provide resources. Does a community have those resources, or if they do, do they have room for more?” The government is responsible for finding them a home and getting them in touch with a resettlement assistance program that will help them get the services they need. The government will also provide them with financial support and immediate needs, such as the ones mentioned already. The government will continue to support the refugees for one year, or until they can support themselves.

The second category is privately sponsored refugees. “That would be a group or organization going through the process of actively sponsoring a refugee,” said Walmsley. They are required to provide the refugee family with common necessities for at least one year. Privately sponsored refugees are relocated to where the sponsorship is coming from, so the sponsors are expected to personally help the refugees with settling in. “Essentially, they’re going to be providing support all the way through.”

The final category is called Blended Visa Office-Referred (BVOR) refugees. These refugees are chosen for relocation by the UNHCR like the GARs. However, BVOR refugees are also supported privately. The refugees will go to where the private sponsors are and the sponsors are responsible for supporting them with services and orientation for a year. “The Government of Canada will provide six months of income support through their resettlement assistance program; the sponsors are expected to provide the remaining six months of the financial support, because there is some financial support expected to help them until they can get their own job,” Walmsley said. “The private sponsors also are responsible for at least a year for social and emotional support. So they continue with that, but some of the finance is supported by the government.”  Any private sponsor is eligible to sponsor a refugee under the BVOR program. Walmsley said that this will probably be the smallest group, “We’re not going to necessarily see a lot of those [BVOR refugees], it will be mostly the other two categories.”

As for what NAISS does in this process, “As a settlement service office, we don’t sponsor. We are not a sponsorship agency,” Walmsley explained, “We would provide settlement support for any refugee who came here.” NAISS will help the sponsors enroll refugees in their English as an additional language classes and pre-employment workshops. They will also help with orientation to get the refugees in touch with the services that they will need, such as banking or health care. 

More details about refugee sponsorship and sponsorship applications are available online at cic.gc.ca under the “immigration” tab. Walmsley encourages anyone who is considering sponsoring a refugee to visit the website. “I would recommend that people look at that application if they really are serious and then make some decisions accordingly.” People need to know whether or not they can provide everything that is required of them before they agree to sponsoring a refugee. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for people. But at the same time, there’s a lot of responsibility,” he noted. “But that shouldn’t thwart people.” 

Walmsley isn’t sure how many refugees might end up in Neepawa, if any. He said that there have been no applications for private sponsors from Neepawa yet, but if people do choose to sponsor families, they will come here. He added that he hasn’t heard anything from the government as of yet about GARs being located here; however, it is still early in the process, so there is still the possibility that the government could choose Neepawa to receive some families if they decide that the community could provide everything the refugees would need. 

Evan Asselstine, pastor at Neepawa’s Calvary Chapel, said that the ministerial in town has discussed options for sponsoring Syrian refugees. He said that if they were to sponsor a family, the whole community would have to get involved for it to work. “In the new year, I think the ministerial is hoping to put out feelers to find out where our community is in this,” Asselstine said. 

He emphasized that the community would have to make a conscious effort to make these refugees feel at home. “If they come, basically they need to be met with a warm blanket,” he said, “because they have a lot of stuff that they have to deal with and we have no idea.”

He said that because it is such a big responsibility and there is a lot of financial support expected, sponsorship would have to be something taken on by a group of churches, or the community itself. If the community isn’t going to take this on, he said that the Calvary Chapel has been talking to other churches in Winnipeg to see if they could partner with them. “Somebody has to reach out a hand and help them out,” he stressed, “but it’s not as easy as it’s been made out to be.”

“If this community is interested in bringing in a refugee family, then the community needs to come together,” he reiterated “because, I think only as a community are we going to have enough resources to meet the need of these families coming over.”