'Generous' refugee system an embarrassment By Jim Creskey Published March 2, 2011

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The Government of Canada’s version of Expedia for refugees: Pay and wait…and wait...

Hardly anyone plans for a trip these days without first going online to check out the possibilities. Websites like Expedia and Travelocity make it easy to organize vacations.

The Department of Citizenship and Immigration also has a site like that, but instead of vacations, it estimates what it will cost a refugee to sponsor a family member's move to Canada.

But there's a big difference between the CIC's website and Expedia. On Expedia you punch in your credit card number and an electronic ticket is the immediate result.

On the CIC site, you pay to file an application, and then you wait...and wait. At various times during this wait, you will likely be told to send more money for other incidentals not mentioned in the original application. And then you wait some more...not weeks or months, but years, to find out if your application is accepted.

The application fees for sponsoring family members add up quickly and without warning. A mother separated from her children could pay thousands but still not see her children for years while the application slowly works its way through the bureaucratic process. And then there are the fees not mentioned on the site but looming large.

One Rwandan mother I met at Ottawa's Carty House for refugee women tried for more than two years to have her five children join her in Canada. She had fled for her life, expecting her husband to follow with their kids. But her husband wasn't able to escape and, in the knick of time, a neighbour spirited the children across the border to Uganda, saving their lives but leaving them in a precarious and still dangerous position.

It broke their mother's heart whenever she spoke to them on the phone, powerless to help them. She did everything she could to raise money for the family reunification process: applications, medical exams, DNA tests and other red tape. The DNA testing charge was one of the big ones. She had to fork out more than $1,700 for the tests. And still the process ground on interminably.

The five children, aged 12 to three, were on their own. Their mother, desperately doing everything she could to bring them to Canada, was working long hours to earn enough money to send to Uganda for the children's upkeep.

Meanwhile, even as the Canadian government fees were piling up, the response she was getting from the department's visa office in the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi was not encouraging.

At one point, the visa office misplaced her applications, telling the woman they had not received her letter in the first place. She knew this wasn't true because FedEx notified her when her applications had been signed for at the Canadian High Commission. But what could she do? It worried her profoundly that the government office was not being honest with her. Then, months later, out of the blue, she was told the visa office had found her letter.

Finally, as the third year of separation approached, a call came through: her children could immigrate to Canada. In a way she was one of the lucky ones. Many families have waited years longer. Many have suffered catastrophes during the long wait.

The International Organization for Migration negotiates one-way plane tickets for refugee families, often amounting to several thousand dollars. But the refugee has to borrow the money to pay for the ticket from the government of Canada. The government lends the money, expecting the borrower to begin paying the sum back after the first year to avoid interest charges.

If more Canadians really understood how their country's "generous" refugee family reunification program really works, they would be embarrassed by its inefficiency and callousness. They would also be surprised at the amount of money collected and kept from applicants that are rejected.

It's as if we offered to take in a mother whose car had crashed into a ditch during an ice storm, but refused to let her bring her children in with her. But the analogy is incomplete: We would then tell the mother that if she gave us money, quite a lot of money, she could apply to have her children brought to the safety of our home, eventually.

It's hard to imagine MPs and senior bureaucrats or ordinary Canadians separated from their families for years on end while they are forced to fork out large sums of money. But this is exactly what we do to new Canadians.

After stepping up to the plate and saving the life of a refugee, the government of Canada then turns its back on family reunification.

It needn't be that way. Working as an umbrella organization for a growing number of Canadian volunteer organizations from Halifax to the Yukon, the Canadian Council for Refugees has been campaigning for the past several years for its "Manifesto on Family Reunification."

They ask that the system simply be sped up and that the processing of refugee family members, especially separated children, be done in Canada. These are the kinds of reforms that would make most Canadians proud—if they really understood the harsh and destructive refugee family practices their government allows today.

jim@embassymag.ca