:
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is the Standing Committee....
Could we come to order?
You know, Mr. Kennedy, you asked me if you could sit here. You can sit here, and you can participate, but when I say “order,” that means that we have to stop talking, okay?
Thank you very much.
This is the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, meeting 41. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are here to study the immigration settlement and adaptation program.
We have four witnesses this morning from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration to help us with this subject. We have Dawn Edlund, associate assistant deputy minister of operations; Catrina Tapley, associate assistant deputy minister of strategic and program policy; Deborah Tunis, director general of integration; and Wally Boxhill, director of integration and resettlement program delivery.
Ladies, Mr. Boxhill, good morning to you. If you could give us a presentation of up to seven minutes, I know that members of the committee will then have some questions of you.
Ms. Edlund, the floor is yours. Thank you.
:
And I will try to be as quick as I can, Mr. Chairman.
[Translation]
As you said, my name is Catrina Tapley. I am the Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of Strategic and Program Policy at Citizenship and Immigration Canada. With me today is Dawn Edlund, the Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of Operations at Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Deborah Tunis, the Director General of Integration, and Wally Boxhill, the Director of Integration and Resettlement Program Delivery.
[English]
We're pleased to be here today to discuss settlement funding. Settlement funds are used for programs and services that help address newcomers' immediate settlement needs, that support their integration into Canadian society. These include language training, information and referrals, help finding employment that matches a newcomer's skills and education, and help establishing networks and contacts in their communities.
Our funding decisions are based on meeting immigrants' needs, responsible spending, and fairness. It's important to remember that since 2006 the government has more than tripled funding for settlement services across Canada. As the committee is aware, for 2011-12 the government made a decision to reduce settlement funding by about $53 million from the national allocations outside Quebec. Despite these reductions outside Quebec, the settlement sector remains well funded. The total funding envelope for 2011-12 is over $600 million. In Ontario alone, funding has increased from $111 million in 2005-06 to $346.5 million in 2011-12. As a result of this federal spending, there has been a tremendous expansion in the availability and range of settlement services in Ontario, as well as in Toronto.
Mr. Chair, CIC funds services for newcomers where there are demonstrated needs. The level of settlement funding allocation is based on where immigrants land, and reflects changes in immigrant settlement patterns. CIC strives to ensure that funding is allocated fairly to the provinces and territories where immigrants settle. After all, it is only fair and reasonable that newcomers have access to settlement services where they live.
Three provinces will see a reduction in settlement funding for this year, with the bulk of reductions being felt in Ontario. This is because we are moving to include Ontario in the national formula for settlement funding for the first time. This is an opportunity to move toward the principle of national fairness in funding.
[Translation]
In the past five years, Ontario has received 63% of the funding, even though it received only 55% of the immigrants arriving in Canada outside Quebec. If the situation were to remain the same, Ontario would have received $1,000 more per immigrant than the provinces and territories outside Quebec. For that reason, starting with this fiscal year, we are going to include Ontario in the per-immigrant formula that already applies to other provinces and territories outside Quebec.
[English]
In recent years, immigrant settlement patterns have shifted. While Ontario's share of immigrant intake has declined, other provinces have seen an increase in their share of immigrant intake. As a result, some provinces--namely, Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan--will have an increase in their settlement funding allocations.
We've also seen a shift in settlement patterns within provinces. For example, over the last five years, the number of immigrants arriving in Toronto has decreased by 30%. Immigrants arriving in Ontario are settling in smaller communities such as the York region. To reflect these changes, CIC is also shifting where it funds settlement services intra-provincially to better serve immigrants.
This means expanding services in regions where newcomers are settling, such as the 905 region in the greater Toronto area. For example, the York region has benefited from a tenfold increase since 2005-06. Between the current fiscal year and 2011-12, the coming fiscal year, there will be an increase of 43%. This is because statistics show that there has been an increasing number of newcomers settling in York. This also means that funding will be adjusted for services within the City of Toronto to reflect declining landings.
Given this shift in where newcomers are settling, realigning funding across the country is the responsible thing to do, and it will allow us to achieve fairness across Canada. In recent years, CIC has moved towards using a call for proposals process for funding decisions of this nature.
Last spring, CIC issued a call for proposals process across Ontario to establish settlement service delivery for the 2011-12 fiscal year under the framework of our new approach to the delivery of our settlement program. What this means is that any settlement service provider organization in Ontario had the opportunity to submit proposals. This is a merit-based, competitive process, and all proposals were assessed in a fair and consistent manner.
[Translation]
CIC employees organized information and dissemination sessions for service providers. These sessions covered both the new method of implementing our settlement program and the call for proposals process. The topic was also explained in detail on the settlement website, where the process was explained, and the deadline for submitting applications was given, as were the eligibility criteria and the activity components that could be funded.
[English]
In evaluating the proposals received, our criteria included whether an organization demonstrated that it addresses service needs and programming priorities, that it has strong governance and financial management practices, and that it offers value for money. In addition, we took into account an organization's capacity to meet the terms of the contribution agreement, including appropriate financial accountability.
Funding proposals were approved only after a thorough analysis to ensure the best value for our dollar could be obtained. In early December 2010, the department communicated with all organizations that submitted proposals to provide them with formal notice of whether their proposal was successful or not.
For organizations that we are currently funding but were unsuccessful in the call for proposals process, we provided them with about four months' notice that CIC's funding would come to a conclusion on March 31, 2011. This provided them with time to work with CIC in order to wind down their operations.
Eighty per cent of organizations that are currently funded in Ontario will have a new agreement in place so they can continue to provide services in 2011-12. Regrettably, for a small percentage of organizations, the department will not be providing settlement funding for the upcoming fiscal year.
The call for proposals is a merit-based process, and while some organizations may have received funding from CIC over a significant period of time, this does not mean that new funding is automatically granted and will continue indefinitely. This is a message that departmental officials have been sending to the settlement sector for over two years.
[Translation]
This means that, through the call for proposals process, and as of April 2011, new agencies will offer settlement services funded by CIC, while agencies that have been providing services for years will no longer receive funding.
[English]
To minimize transition burdens on service provider organizations and newcomers, CIC has worked and will continue to work closely with the organizations that were unsuccessful in the call for proposals process. Our goal is to ensure that services are wound down in an appropriate fashion and that the impact on newcomers' needs is minimized.
As for the organizations that were successful, CIC is currently negotiating contribution agreements. These organizations submitted strong proposals that address service needs and programming priorities, have strong governance and financial management practices, and demonstrate value for money.
In negotiating and managing all contribution agreements, CIC will continue to ensure that public funding is spent appropriately and efficiently, that there is value for the money we spend, that there are strong accountability and performance oversights in place, and that we deliver high-quality services to newcomers efficiently.
[Translation]
We are now open to answering all the questions of the honourable members of the committee.
I would like to thank the witnesses for being here today.
I see that the overall budget has been decreased. We could discuss that, but it is a political issue. You are not the ones who determine it.
I would like to bring up a second problem, the one that immigrant support agencies face. Funds are shifted to respond to a new reality, in other words, to places where immigrants are landing. That's how I understand it. Although, in principle, I find it commendable and understandable, I'm a little stunned by the brutality of the measure, partly because I am familiar with these types of agency. We all have them in our constituencies, especially in the urban ones. These are human beings who are working for these agencies, and we should not move them from one city to another as if they were a troupe. They have lives. They are settled in. As you said, a number of these agencies have been around for a long time. Some newcomers depend on them. And to use the example you gave us, all of a sudden, we are told that the need is now in York and we have to find a way to move everything there in a year.
So, I'm wondering something. Could you do the same thing if it involved public servants? Could you decide that, out of 60 CIC employees working in Toronto, 32 would be sent to York, 22 to Alberta, 3 to Manitoba and so on? Can you imagine such a brutal and quick transition in the public service, or is this process only possible because these agencies respond to calls for offers and decisions to fund them are made from year to year?
I would like to see your formula placed before us, because by my calculation, in Ontario the drop in terms of immigrants landed between 2008 and 2009, which is the figure we have—the current data—is 4,000 fewer landed immigrants, from 110,000 to 106,000.
In British Columbia, the drop from 43,992 to 41,438 is a drop of 2,560. That's a 5.8% drop. That drop is much higher than the Ontario drop, which is 3.6%.
So Ontario had a drop within one year of 3.6%, and B.C. had 5.8%. If your cut is $53 million—pure math, pure formula—it's 81% of the cut, of which 43% is directed to Ontario. How would you justify that math? That's why I want to see the formula. That's question number one.
My second question is about the number of immigrants who are being served by all the agencies in the greater Toronto area. You have a list--we all have a list--of all the agencies that lost their funding. I'm wondering if you can provide me with the exact number of clients who will not be served because of the cuts and the number of staff that would be lost because of the cuts. Those are the two figures I'm looking for.
Three, given whatever that number is...and it could be 5,000, I don't know; I'm just pulling that out of the air. It could be 10,000. If that is the number of clients who will be impacted, do you in fact have a plan in place now so that when the people who are being laid off now—March 31 is coming—these 10,000 clients will be able to be absorbed by other agencies? If so, could you provide us with this plan?
Those are my three questions. I may have others.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I see two parts to this question. The first was asking what was the genesis of the $53-million cut at CIC.
This was part of the strategic review process. Citizenship and Immigration Canada was under strategic review two years ago, in 2009. As a result, the budget of the department was reduced by about $67 million, or 4.3% of its current operating budget--so reallocated to other priorities. Its current budget is about $1.5 million.
So the bulk of those cuts, about $59 million, will come from settlement programming. There are other things around administrative savings, and there are things that affect the Metropolis project. But the bulk of them come from those savings.
The second part of your question, if I understood well, was on how this affects Ontario. I want to come back to two things that are at play. The first is the $53-million cut to settlement services, and that's applied nationally. The second part that affects Ontario is that under the previous agreement between Canada and Ontario, Ontario had a separate formula for funding that was outside the national formula we use for other provinces and territories outside of Quebec.
This year, with the end of the current agreement, we have seen this as an opportunity to more fairly allocate funds outside of Quebec. So we've used this opportunity to start to transition Ontario into a national funding formula, or bring Ontario into that formula. Those are the two things at play with Ontario this year.
:
I'm going to go back to the transition. I am quite concerned about how quickly it happens.
I am very familiar the agencies that work with immigrants. The people who work there are passionate people who do an incredible job, let's admit, often for laughable wages and in extremely risky conditions. If we want to continue to attract people to these areas, they must not get the impression that they are cheap labour or expendable, only to be tossed away once they are no longer needed, people whom we tell that their funding has ended, perhaps for good reason because needs have shifted elsewhere. In some cases, this results in the agency shutting down and everyone losing their jobs. So, new people need to be trained and encouraged to go where the needs are and start the cycle over again.
In my opinion, this constant turnover within the agencies is very costly for the community. And it's the same thing for all our agencies, whether they operate for the immigrants or for the rest of society.
The public service often uses ways to try to absorb these changes. We use attrition and limit the creation of new programs in some places until a balance is attained. However, these types of measures do not seem to be in place here.
But in your document, you say that, to minimize the burden associated with the transition imposed on agencies providing services to newcomers, Citizenship and Immigration Canada will continue to work closely with the agencies that were not retained.
What does that mean? What does "work closely with" mean? Will they be given interim funds?
First of all, I want to say it's an honour and privilege to be here today. I really want to thank Guelph's Liberal MP Frank Valeriote for putting my name forward to this committee.
I have a prepared submission, but I'd like to speak more spontaneously, because I think I do that better. Also, what I've heard this morning has been very interesting to me, and I think I can respond to it.
At Naylor-McLeod we are a small school in a small city. In some ways I've felt that what government representatives have been saying here is that we ought to be favoured in terms of their policy of shifting funding, as I understand it. We also have an incredible amount of experience. We've been doing LINC training for more than 18 years, as long as LINC has been in existence. We've always been congratulated on our efforts and we've always been very responsible in our submission of all the required paperwork to the best of my knowledge.
We are a small school, as I said. We serve approximately 90 people in Guelph. That's 80 in LINC and 10 in ELT, which is a fairly recent program and very successful. I'll talk about ELT in a minute, because that's important to what's happening here.
But even though it seems like a small number, in fact that represents about half the number of immigrants being served in Guelph by only two schools. So when we are closed, there will be only one school left, no choice for immigrants in Guelph as to what kind of school they go to.
The other school in Guelph is run by the school board. It's quite different from ours, because they are able to combine, in single classes, students from their ESL program, which is run by the school board, and LINC students. So they end up with much larger classes than we have.
We feel that our classes have a pretty much perfect teacher-to-student ratio, about 15 people per class, roughly. I can say, because I've been teaching in LINC and ESL in private language schools for 13 years in Toronto and Guelph, that this is the most successful program I've ever been involved with. We have genuinely happy people.
I'd like to say that there are real advantages in small schools like ours, because we really can honestly say we are like a family. I would like to address this issue of the impact that these cuts have on immigrants, because I can speak to you about my friends in this case, my friends in our school. I can say they are absolutely traumatized by these cuts.
We, being as responsible as possible, cannot give them a clear answer as to what their future holds. We have a pretty fairly established idea that the other school in Guelph does not have the physical capacity or seat allotment to handle their needs--at least not for a full year when the next call for proposals process goes forward, because it's already past, of course. But I won't speak to what they can do, because I don't represent that school.
What I would like to say is that coming from a small school in a small city, we have learned a lot from our immigrants. We have faced all of the usual questions about why, for example, skilled immigrants frequently give up the process of trying to settle in Canada and return to their home countries in frustration--people like doctors and nurses and other skilled professionals.
We have had cases like that in Guelph, but we've also had quite a number of success stories of people who've found meaningful employment. It's partly because we can help them more individually as a small school. We can understand their needs. We can even adjust how we teach them, because we have that flexibility. We pay attention to what they need. With our having recently gotten the contract to do the ELT program, we can do that even better by training concentrated groups of nurses, doctors, and customer service people, again with great success with a job shadow program in that case.
I want to speak about the process in Guelph as it's been playing out lately. My understanding of what's happening is that CIC has cut funding to our LINC program but has decided that ELT could continue. What they haven't understood, and what's now becoming clear, is that the ELT program will have to also stop, because it cannot be sustained without the LINC program. We simply can't run our school to service only 10 individuals.
Well, I wanted to say, again, that we have some idea of what the impact of these cuts means to our people. But even when we're shutting down, we have hope. We have hope that perhaps this decision might even be reversed. Maybe that's a faint hope, because it doesn't seem to make any sense at all. It doesn't make any sense for Guelph. It doesn't make any sense for our people.
Of course, I've heard things from government representatives here about statistics for Ontario, but our students, our friends, are not statistics, and they don't understand that argument, which we duly presented to them, as we should. They haven't ceased to exist. They're still here. They're people with needs, and they are very important, as we always tell them.
When we teach LINC, we don't just teach English language. We teach about building a country. We teach about the history of Canada as a nation of immigrants. We teach them the value that they have for us as a country. And we feel like we're betraying them, in this case. They feel betrayed, and they have a right to feel betrayed.
I know that many of them are going home, because many of them feel that in the year to come, they'll have nothing in this whole adjustment process, if it can even be achieved at all.
It's very sad that this should happen. I don't want to be confrontational here, but I feel very strongly about this. I haven't mentioned, of course, the impact it has on teachers in this situation with the cutbacks all over Ontario. We have people who have been living in the province all their lives who have really been themselves traumatized about trying to find work where the job situation is pretty perilous now for LINC teachers--not to mention the coordinators.
This has an impact on a lot of people, and it will certainly have an impact on the city of Guelph. Guelph is well known, I think, in general as one of the five or six best cities to live in in Canada. It's been advertised that way, and it's true. But I can say now that with this loss of services to immigrants, it must be one of the worst places for immigrants to settle in, because--
:
Thank you for this opportunity to make the presentation today.
Community Action Resource Centre is a grassroots community-based organization in the west end of Toronto.
We were informed through a form letter just before Christmas that our federal settlement funding would end 100% on March 31. This brief was prepared with input from several other organizations, all of whom received the same form letter. These organizations include the Afghan Association of Ontario, the African Training and Employment Centre, the Bloor Information and Life Skills Centre, the Eritrean Canadian Community Centre, the Ethiopian Association, and the South Asian Women's Centre.
I would like to first say that it's disappointing that so many ethno-specific agencies who serve diverse cultures, and who have been severely impacted by this unfair decision, have not been given the opportunity to speak to the standing committee this week. They feel that their voices have been silenced. Nonetheless, we collectively appreciate this opportunity to tell you what is happening to us and its impact on our communities.
This decision by CIC will impact ethno-specific agencies particularly hard. It is inherently unfair for an immigration ministry to have systemic practices that destroy the newcomer communities that they are supposedly welcoming into our country.
A prime example is that of the Afghan Association. The federal government recently brought to the safety of Canada 1,500 Afghan immigrants who had acted as interpreters in Kandahar. Now the same ministry is de-funding the agency that is providing socio-cultural adjustments and other supports to these newcomers. This agency will also be left with several years of leased premises that must be paid, a debt of more than $300,000. This community can never recover from this level of debt. It is inconceivable that our government can think that this is justifiable.
According to Statistics Canada, there is still an increase in the number of immigrants who choose to call Ontario home, about a 23% increase. Our settlement staff help newcomers apply for health cards, PR cards, or other government documents. They help them get their children into school. They help them find housing, English classes, and trauma counselling. They help them get their documents translated. They help with issues of discrimination or around employment matters.
For some newcomers, the staff are the closest they have to a family member or a friend in their new country, reducing isolation and reducing the reliance on expensive health and mental health services. Our staff are not sitting around doing nothing, as if all of the issues for newcomers in Toronto are taken care of or are improving. In fact, we all know that is not the case.
The January 2011 update of the Toronto immigrant data employment initiative reports that, overall, immigrants lost 300 jobs, while Canadian-born gained 90,400 jobs. There were large job losses, 62,700 job losses, for immigrants in professional, scientific, and technical services; health care and social assistance; and the public administration sector.
From some of the statistics being used in the media, it would appear that temporary farm worker landings are included, which shifts the percentages. This class has almost doubled since 2003. The majority of these are in Alberta. There are many documented instances of abuse in the creation of a subclass of immigrant worker; on the one hand is the substantial loss in the number of immigrants gaining professional jobs, and on the other is the creation of this temporary subclass. Another type of immigrant, in the economic or provincial nominee program, does not require the same level and type of settlement services as the newcomer who comes from an area of conflict, war, or deep poverty.
There are so many issues at play. It is a complex set of circumstances. One would think that all of these factors and facets, and more, would be carefully considered before randomly implementing massive cuts such as these.
These are people's lives. We can't just play around with statistics. People are not numbers.
We, as agencies on the ground, know what we are seeing and dealing with every day, and we're saying that CIC is wrong in this case. The impacts of this decision, if allowed to stand, will be too great on Ontario, and in particular on Toronto.
Thank you.
:
I would like to thank the committee for giving us this opportunity to present today.
I'd like to talk about the decision to de-fund. Since the notices to agencies were given in December, CIC has offered a variety of explanations for their decisions: Ontario immigration numbers are dropping substantially, therefore we should have less funding for newcomer services; this is not a cut, but a redistribution to other provinces where immigration is increasing; agencies have to be demonstrating a high level of performance and accountability in order to receive funding, implying that our agencies have been deficient in meeting our targets.
The ethno-specific agencies were severely cut. They also talked about how ethno-specific agencies were only serving their communities alone, which is total misinformation.
In our case, in March 2010, CIC provided renovations and moneys to purchase new equipment and furniture for a new location dedicated to settlement services. We signed a five-year lease. Four years will remain after March 31, for which we must pay. CIC is leaving us with a debt of over $160,000. As a board member, that concerns me greatly. CIC is indicating that they expect the return of any equipment purchased with CIC funding.
In a few short weeks from now, thousands of newcomer clients will be left without any sort of settlement program or workers to assist them. Our agency has already given termination notices to six workers, and our board is considering what the impact will be across the rest of the organization in order to manage the debt we will be left with after March 31.
It is estimated that almost 1,000 workers across Ontario are facing termination from their employment in less than two months from now. If it were a large corporation laying off so many workers, there would be legal obligations to have severance packages and an employee assistance plan. This is a huge financial toll, and there will be a drain on the charitable resources after March 31. CIC has provided no transitional plan to agencies like ours.
I'd like to conclude by summarizing this; I've cut a lot out, because we were restricted in our time.
Information on the decisions re the cut from CIC over the last few months has been vague and very generic. The non-profit charitable sector, in particular in Toronto, is being gutted by CIC.
CIC is leaving a legacy that they're actually bankrupting some of our communities. There was no consultation, no thought, no plan, no appeal--no care for the mayhem left behind.
We have a few recommendations, if I have time, Mr. Chair.
:
Thank you. And thank you again for accommodating me up here in the north when I wasn't able to appear before you.
We are the only settlement agency, actually a one-stop shop, for everyone who settles in northwestern Ontario. That's Sault Ste. Marie to the Manitoba border, approximately 1,500 kilometres and about 500,000 kilometres square. So anyone who is landing in that area is, really, our client.
We have had to take the approach of a one-stop shop, which works very well, in order to give and offer service to new Canadians in the northwest Ontario region. No one agency could take on one program at a time; the administration burden of that would just be too huge.
So we have four CIC programs running in our office for people spread across all of northwestern Ontario. We have a LINC language school. We have an assessment centre. We have settlement services, as well as what was formerly called the host program, which now has been changed to community connections.
Those programs working together really serve the newcomers who arrive in Thunder Bay and in the region through the access to each of them in one stop, which I think is probably one of the best approaches to newcomer settlement.
Our school serves about 70 students each term. We also hold a summer school class for those who can't be there during the regular year, and an evening class for those who are working during the day.
The northern region is also served through access via teleconference or video conference, like this, to place students into what is called the LINC home study, where folks can study online or by correspondence through a connection with us here in Thunder Bay. So we're the hub of the north.
We also provide interpretation and translation services through a provincial program as well as several other newcomer services—anti-racism, anti-oppression work, different things that we do through our association. We work very closely with our community and with all of the northern communities on settling new Canadians into our region.
We've had somewhat of a boom with mining in the north and we've had the promise of the “Ring of Fire” and of things that are going to be moving forward in northwestern Ontario. So we anticipate an increase in newcomers arriving in Thunder Bay.
We find that those who come, stay. We have an influx of folks from other communities who do come to Thunder Bay. Secondary migration to our region is fairly high, and we have not a lot of movement.
We also have a community of 300 Karen-speaking Burmese refugees in Thunder Bay, with seven more arriving tomorrow. So we have a mix of independents, professionals, and refugees arriving, most of whom apply for citizenship within the three-year period. Once their three years in Canada comes, they are, most often, applying for citizenship, which is really interesting.
There are no ethnic enclaves that newcomers can move into, so learning the language is key. Becoming a part of the community is critical. And that's what our services aim to help them do: learn the language, adjust, integrate, and settle successfully in all of our northern communities. We have a satellite office in Kenora that provides service to Dryden and Kenora, as well.
So why Thunder Bay? I think it's the smaller city, the safety, the available services—we have no wait lists in any of our programs—and available housing at good cost. We have people arriving in Thunder Bay on a weekly basis—newcomers.
There's so much more to settling newcomers than just finding a job. The family settlement and integration is what is key, and a holistic integration of newcomer families into our region. Our whole community is involved in this.
We were not seriously affected when the large influx of money came into the province with the COIA agreement. We really were given what we considered the funds needed for operating costs, true costs, at that time. So it wasn't a huge influx that's now gone, although now, with the cuts, our region has seriously been cut for service delivery and positions that will be lost.
Serving a huge region and a huge territory involves a lot of administrative costs. Being able to balance all that while providing front-line services as our main priority is really going to be difficult for us. We've had a fairly sizable percentage cut to our budget, and the northern region budget was cut quite severely.
We've been part of a small centre strategy, and I think that's critical. Small centres across Canada are a group that got together to try to look at how to create welcoming communities in small centres and how to increase and encourage immigration to the small centres. Communities in Newfoundland, and Moose Jaw, Thunder Bay, and Victoria got together and talked about settling newcomers in our regions and the support needed to do that and move out of the larger centres. I'd be happy to discuss that more later.
We felt we were partners in providing service with Citizenship and Immigration Canada. We're the on-the-ground front-line service that provides what newcomers need to the point of becoming citizens. We feel like that partnership is not there any longer. It's a funding relationship now. It's a little different. We used to be able to provide the service and do that in a good clear partnership.
I think our region faces larger challenges. Occupancy costs are difficult, just from the point of heating and keeping one office open. To be able to do that, we have to have all the programs running in one place and combine all the occupancy and accommodation costs. It makes it difficult when you have to cut. Where do you cut? How do you do that without cutting staff? How do you provide the best front-line service? How do you still stay afloat? It's been difficult.
We would love to see something in RAP for the north for smaller communities, where we could support government-assisted refugees and joint assistance sponsorship refugees to come to our region where they can settle quite quickly and the community is very accepting and the service is available here. I think looking at how the refugee assistance programs could be expanded to some smaller centres would be beneficial and would provide some of the support we need.
:
Thanks, Mr. Chair. I'll share my time with Mr. Wrzesnewskyj.
First of all, thank you all for coming and for what you're doing. I'm embarrassed that you have to be here. I've looked at these cuts since they came out in December, and there is no rationale that makes sense here. The minister didn't grace us with his presence, but these look very political in nature.
However, we would like to bring a light onto them. We'd like people to take this seriously.
I appreciate, Mr. Gomez, that you really do feel for the people who are being taught and will be taught no more in your community.
I mean, I think it's amazing that we don't look at that as some kind of tragedy, because somebody is learning, is going to go to work and support themselves, and in 60 days we're going to pull the plug on that. It makes no sense whatsoever. You know, this place is a bit of a bubble, but you want to believe that some of that can get outside of the bubble.
I guess what I want to put to you is that we've done some research, and it might not surprise you that some of this looks quite partisan-inspired in terms of fingerprints.
Ms. Newrick, I want to ask you about the Toronto experience. You've been working with a number of agencies in Toronto. How many of those agencies do you think feel comfortable, the ones that are...?
I want to make a point, too, that the ministry didn't make.
I wonder, Mr. Chair, if I could have one minute to ask you, is it possible, through you, to get a list of the allocations that have been made? The ministry didn't supply us with that information. We've been able to find out that the agencies that have been cut are very concentrated.
Ms. Newrick, can you tell us if any of the agencies you're working with believe there is some place for their clients to go?
Listen, all I want to do is make it clear that there's an attempt here to politicize this, and I don't think that's helpful to your organizations, I don't think it's helpful to this process, I don't think it's helpful to the settlement program across the country.
Nobody sitting on this side of the committee table and on the side of government wants to see agencies hurt, but there is an overall responsibility to try to deliver services as best and as well as the ministry can to as many organizations and thereby to as many individuals as possible.
I just wanted to make the point that I know the three of you are here, and it's difficult to sit here and talk about the future of your organizations, but we do have a responsibility from an overall perspective to implement the plan, and this is the way the ministry has recommended we move forward.
I do want to ask a bit of a detailed question. We all have offices that we rent and lease agreements that we sign. All of them indicate that we can be terminated upon not winning an election; therefore, they get paid their 90 days or 60 days, but that would be it. Are you telling me that you actually receive permanent funding from the ministry, and now you're applying for...what you applied for was yearly funding?