By Michael Swan • Catholic News Service • Posted June 22, 2017

TORONTO (CNS) — Canada welcomed World Refugee Day June 20 with at least 45,000 already-sponsored refugees scattered across the globe, stuck waiting as long as four years while their ready-and-willing sponsors marvel at the willingness of the Canadian government bureaucracy to squander their dedication, faith and goodwill.

“Canada tries to claim a leadership role in terms of refugee issues and they aren’t playing that role,” John Sewell, former Toronto mayor and coordinator of Canada4Refugees, told The Catholic Register, a Canadian Catholic weekly.

With backing from Bishop Douglas Crosby of Hamilton, Ontario, president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, refugee advocates such as Mary Jo Leddy, co-founder of Romero House, which serves refugees, Canada4Refugees and the Archdiocese of Toronto’s Office for Refugees have teamed up to demand Ottawa clear a backlog of 45,000 to 55,000 refugees by June 30, 2018.

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Thousands of privately sponsored refugees have completed the application process, including medical and security checks. They merely await final, formal approval and a plane ticket. At the other end, parishes and families anxiously wait to welcome refugees they committed to guide and support two, three or four years ago.

Ahmed Hussen, Canada’s minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, has promised to clear the backlog over three years, but the sponsoring groups disapprove of the way he’s doing it.

After taking in more than 46,000 refugees in 2016 — a 136 percent increase over 2015 — Hussen is trying to bring down the number of refugees left in bureaucratic limbo by severely limiting the number of new sponsorships. Instead of processing more refugees faster, the government plans to turn off the tap at the source while the pipeline gradually drains over three years.

Martin Mark, director of the Toronto Archdiocese’s refugee office, has heard this plan before, starting with a meeting between sponsorship agreement holders and the government 10 years ago in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The plan has never worked.

“That was the first time they said they would have to introduce limits in order to eliminate the backlog and reduce the processing time. At that time, we had a backlog of nearly 20,000 refugees,” Martin said.

Canada’s processing times for refugees are among the longest in the world. Among the 18 major refugee resettlement nations, only the United States, with processing times anywhere between two and 10 years, is as bad, according to Msgr. Robert Vitillo, secretary general of the International Catholic Migration Commission.

If Canada wants to reduce its processing times, the Geneva-based Catholic non-governmental organization is willing to help.

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“They might want to engage an NGO like ICMC to help with processing applications, as the USA does with its Resettlement Support Centers,” Msgr. Vitillo wrote in an email to The Catholic Register. The ICMC manages the program for the U.S. in Istanbul and Beirut.

Limiting new applications only transfers the backlog from the government’s books to sponsoring agencies, Mark said. The archdiocese’s refugee office went from a quota of nearly 1,000 new applications in 2016 to a limit well below 400. The lower quota does not mean that either the refugees or the families and parishes trying to sponsor them go away, but only that they do not appear as unprocessed, pending cases.

“To have less than 400 is something which really shocked the whole community — both the sponsors and refugees and ethnic communities who have relatives in refugee camps,” Mark said. “Practically speaking, 300 refugees is nothing for the Archdiocese of Toronto.”

The restrictions on new applications is not the only way the government is restricting the addition of new refugees. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship also has restricted the number of refugee visas that may be issued by embassy staff in various regions. In West Africa, the cap has been set at 40 new visas in 2017.

“I mean, 40 spots for the whole of West Africa? It would be more honest to say, ‘You know what? We close the program,'” Mark said. “That is really very sad.”

Canada could solve its backlog problem simply by processing more cases faster, said Sewell of Canada4Refugees. In 1956 and 1957, Canada settled 40,000 refugees from Hungary. Between 1978 and 1980, Canada took in 62,000 Vietnamese refugees and more than half of them were privately sponsored. A special “backlog clearance program” launched in 1989 resettled 59,000 refugees over three years with 35,000 arriving in 1991 alone.

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Swan is associate editor of The Catholic Register, Toronto-based Canadian Catholic weekly.