Conservatives stonewalled proposal to allow more refugees into Canada
OTTAWA — Canada’s former Conservative government twice rejected a proposal last year to make it easier for Canadians to sponsor Syrians fleeing civil war, newly disclosed documents show.
Twice in 2015 — in March and July — bureaucrats proposed exempting Syrians and Iraqis from a rule requiring them to have official UN refugee status in order to be sponsored by small groups of people.
On both occasions, the recommendation was rejected by then-immigration minister Chris Alexander.
The Conservatives eventually agreed to the change, but not until September, when the original policy became linked to the story of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy whose drowning galvanized global sympathy.
A memo was first sent to Alexander on March 17, 2015.
The issue was a 2012 rule change put in place by the Conservatives that made it nearly impossible for informal groups without sponsorship agreements with the government to bring refugees to Canada. As a result, such so-called “groups of five” could only sponsor people who carried an official refugee designation from the United Nations or the host country. Applications from non-registered refugees were harder to vet and took longer, gumming up the system, according to government materials published at the time, which is partly why the change was made.
But the Tories also didn’t like that the program had become a means of family reunification and feared those applications were pushing out people in more dire need of resettlement, said a source close to the decision process at the time.
The result was a steep drop in the number of applications that had previously brought upwards of 2,000 people to Canada each year.