At a Multicultural Roundtable that took place today, Minister of Immigration, Citizenship and Refugees John McCallum meet members of the media to discuss his portfolio and recent announcements. Some of the topics he spoke about were on Syrian refugees, issues pertaining to family visa, citizenship and more.
Some of the crucial points he made were:
ON SYRIAN REFUGEES
We want to equip the refugees for success. Three main challenges there are is housing, language and jobs. Housing, we have made progress. About 52 percent have found permanent housing, now that number is up to 72 percent.
To speed up progress we are reaching out to the private sector for money to help subsidize rent. We got 5 million dollars from CN and we have collected over 30 million in total and it was announced that Vancouver has been awarded 500 thousand dollars which will b money used to subsidize rent and do other things to help refugees
On language, it is crucial. There is lots to do there but progress is being mad. Finally on jobs, I met 20 or more employers from BC from different industries. All of them came to employ refugees. Jobs tend to come after the basic housing and language training, but we are making progress. We have also restored refugee healthcare which the previous government had taken away.
ON CITIZENSHIP
We have a new legislation that says its one class of Canadian and not 2 class. We will not revoke citizenship of dual citizens committing crimes; we will put them in prison for their crime. The Citizens Act also reduces barriers to citizenship in terms of language test how many years you have to be here in order to become a citizen.
ON INTERNATIONAL STUDENT AND PERMANENT RESIDENT STATUS
There is not a group other than international students we should welcome more as PR and international students. We are in competition especially with the aging population with US, Australia and UK for those immigrants that we want. We are giving them the 50 percent time back, also making it easier for students to come to Canada.
ON FAMILY VISA
The number we have decided to admit is 300 thousand and we have broken it down according to economic immigrants, refugees and family class. 300 thousand is the biggest number we can bring in 2016. It is bigger than it’s been since 1913. More importantly it’s the biggest the department can do. We had made certain commitments on refugees, so there is a big increase on the refugees from the previous year.
We have a huge issue with waiting times for family. Probably my main propriety is to get that done, especially for spouses where it typically takes two years to be reunited. We believe families should stay together, so we have allowed more spouse in the country in 2016. For economic immigrants, the number is still lower than last year, but it’s still a high number.
We will b entering into consultations with provincial governments on levels for 2017, 2018 and 2019. For the first time, we are going to do levels announced for three years. So it’s a big deal.
I am hoping that we will be able to increase the capacity of the department being 300 hundred thousand by making ourselves way more efficient in the way we process. We learned during the refugees situation how to process fast in an expert way in the sense we fully treated concerns of health and security.
We got 25,000 refugees in four months because my department learned how to do only the necessary things and get things done as quickly as possible. We can transfer what they learned on the refugees into doing it faster for families.
