Suspended twice in five years, the Quebec refugee sponsorship program will reopen on January 18. According to what has been observed The duty, organizations and immigration consultants have taken advantage of gray areas in the regulation of this humanitarian program in recent years.
As soon as elected in the fall of 2015, the new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau began to honor his promise to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees in a few months, and Quebec followed suit, saying it wanted to receive more than 7,000 of them. In the wake of these announcements, many organizations jumped on the bandwagon and started recruiting and sponsoring.
This is the case of the Montreal businessman of Syrian origin Bilal Hamideh, who created, at the same time, Parrainage Réfugiés du Grand Montréal (PRGM), a non-profit organization whose mission is to facilitate the entry of Syrian refugees into Quebec. In less than 12 months, the organization opened nearly 200 asylum applications and raised three million dollars to support refugees for their first year in the country, according to documents obtained by The duty. Not yet being authorized to sponsor families, PRGM had to turn to organizations such as churches and mosques which hold these authorizations.
In 2016, PRGM proposed to the parishes of Sainte-Adèle and Saint-Sauveur to welcome a hundred families. In return, “every refugee family admitted to Canada [ferait] a donation of $1,000 to the sponsoring organization”, one can read in the minutes of the meeting that The duty corroborated by numerous testimonies. However, they refused.
In another communication to the Diocese of Montreal, in 2018, the founder of PRGM, Bilal Hamideh, offered “at least $2,000 donation per family for each church that helps by sponsoring a refugee”.
Alessandra Santopadre, head of refugee sponsorship at the Diocese of Montreal, told the Duty refused the offer, because profiting from a sponsorship goes “against the ethics of the archdiocese and the values of the Catholic Church”, and he questioned the legality of this proposal.
“No one can profit”
Since January 2016, Quebec immigration regulations have been clear: “No one may benefit, in any form whatsoever” from a sponsorship. Only administration fees — which cannot exceed 1% of the amount required to meet their basic needs during the first year — can be levied. These fees are usually $200-300.
In interview at Duty, Bilal Hamideh argues that these emails were sent “without his knowledge”. Ensuring compliance with the regulations, he said that the sums collected for sponsorship – which could have reached 10 million between 2015 and 2020 according to documents consulted by The duty — are donations that do not come directly from refugees. “The money comes from donations from the population or donations from family or friends of refugees who wanted to be sponsored. »
Bilal Hamideh claims never to have made any profit whatsoever with refugee files. Similar story from Mand Patrice Blais, administrator of PRGM since its creation and president of the organization since February 2017. “Refugees are not solicited. We collect donations that go to support the families once they get here. When we met with the Department of Immigration [du Québec], it was clear that we could not ask refugee families for money. »
Mr. Hamideh also owns an immigration consulting firm, Go Canada, which shares its offices with PRGM in the borough of Saint-Laurent. The vast majority of refugees sponsored by PRGM have used the services of Go Canada for their applications, acknowledges Patrice Blais. Sources tell the Duty that these consulting services could amount to several thousand dollars.
Mr. Hamideh denies the allegations, saying he never made a profit from sponsorship with his company. As for Mr. Blais, he maintains that there was “a little cleaning to do”, without detailing more. ” When I arrived [comme président de PRGM en 2017], we had to separate that, because [la promiscuité] didn’t have any common sense. »
Patrice Blais refused to disclose the amounts in PRGM’s accounts. In an email sent in 2020 to organizations in Saskatchewan that The duty obtained, the organization indicated that it had been able to “collect approximately 10 million dollars in donations between the year 2015 and 2020.” Mand Blais disputes these figures and claims that these correspondences were sent by a volunteer without his approval.
Mand Blais further confirmed that “PRGM will not be submitting applications when the program reopens. [québécois de réfugiés] which will take place tomorrow January 18 because he is prevented from doing so by the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI). Following an investigation, a government decree this fall prohibited 18 organizations that presented “false and misleading information or documents” from submitting new requests. [Voir encadré] Mand Blais indicates that only one file would be problematic and that it is because the family “lied” to him.
What will happen to the sums collected by the organization to sponsor the PRGM refugees who will ultimately not be able to come to the country? Will they be reimbursed to families? “If it’s a specific donation for a family, we have a conversation with the donors. We are trying to see what we can do. It’s case by case. »
Client “
At the time of the massive reception of Syrians, anyone (or almost) could sponsor, remembers Paul Clarke, former director of Action Réfugiés Montréal, one of the largest sponsorship organizations in Quebec. “Sponsorship was allowed based on financial ability, but not on the experience of the organization. Organizations that had never done one could suddenly take on 200 files. That’s why we had so many problems,” he said.
The lack of supervision of the Quebec collective sponsorship program may have created certain gray areas and sometimes generated confusion. Refugees have been able to pay the price, noted The duty. Firas Ghunaim, a Syrian refugee who arrived in Quebec in 2019, considers himself the victim of a system in which he says he had to advance more than $20,000 to be able to immigrate to Canada. It was in Dubai — where he had taken refuge with his family to escape the conflict that was tearing his native Syria apart — that he first heard of the Quebec collective sponsorship program.
To access it, a recruiter demanded $2,000 in cash from him through an acquaintance in the Gulf countries to put him in touch with a consultant or a Quebec organization that would take care of his sponsorship. However, the law forbids it: if a person receives fees to put guarantors in contact with foreign nationals and that a sponsorship results from this process, “this person would find himself benefiting from it”, specified in Duty a spokesperson for the Department of Immigration.
For him and his wife, Firas Ghunaim then paid $8,000 to an immigration consultant from West Montreal, Fayza Rifai, so that she could process their file. Provided they are detailed in a contract, these fees, which the consultant sets at his discretion, can be cashed.
A final amount of $13,000 had to be disbursed upstream by Mr. Ghunaim and his wife, the sum to meet their needs during their first year of settlement required by the Quebec Immigration Department to prevent the family has recourse to social assistance. This “security deposit” must come not from the refugees themselves, but from the guarantor, which is the sponsoring organization or person (a close relative, friend or other). It must be repaid from the first year.
Two years after arriving in Quebec, Firas Ghunaim still feels bitterness. “Immigration consultants are like brokers,” he illustrates. According to him, they first find refugee “clients” and at the same time look for organizations or groups of individuals to sponsor them.
Although she says she has taken care of a few files for less well-off people, Ms.me Rifai admits that she favored certain applications from people who were financially comfortable for her consulting contracts, otherwise it was not profitable for her. For her, this kind of situation was inevitable and caused by the program itself. “Yes, it was a humanitarian program, and we wanted to bring in the least ‘capable’ people, but the system was not created to facilitate that,” she said.
An “open bar”
Several refugees approached refused to recount, even on condition of anonymity, their problems with this program in recent years. They said they feared reprisals from the people who brought them here or harmed this program, which finally allowed them to flee their country, even if it came at great cost. “Abuses, we accept them, but not war”, replied one of them to the Duty.
For anyone breaking the law and profiting from a sponsorship, the penalties include fines of up to $100,000. However, according to the Ministry of Immigration, no offense has been recorded for a guarantor since 2016.
This does not prevent the humanitarian aims of the program from being diverted to the benefit of some, firmly believes Stephan Reichhold, director of the Roundtable of organizations serving refugees and immigrants (TCRI). “It was a bit of an ‘open bar’,” he notes, referring to the period when Syrian refugees began arriving in droves more than five years ago. “There was really a business of buying sponsorship places that had been formed, the [ministère] had no tools to act. »