The noose is tightening on refugee sponsorship organizations, who fear the end of the Quebec program and the abandonment of all their files currently being processed. After being warned of a new interpretation of a regulation that invalidated the way they had been operating for decades, they had until September 20 to respond to Quebec and plead to “save” their protégés.
“My personal opinion is that I have reached the political level,” says François Rheault, president of the Saint-Yves Refugee Reception Committee, which is part of the Notre-Dame-de-Foy parish in Quebec.
In an interview at Dutyhe says he is very worried about the forty people his organization sponsored in 2022. “I think that the MIFI [le ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration] will refuse all the files,” he says. He cannot stomach the ministry’s ways of doing things. “If we had been able to communicate with him by telephone, in a more direct manner, we would have achieved something. But we are faced with a very hermetic government, which communicates by letters in the Arrima platform.”
The Network of Refugee Sponsorship Organizations and Groups in Quebec (ROGPRAQ), of which Mr. Rheault’s reception committee is a member, is also requesting a meeting with the new Minister of Immigration, Jean-François Roberge, to explain to him the “critical effects” of the reinterpretation of the regulation.
Last May, when the 2024 application period opened, experienced organizations, some of which have nearly half a century of sponsorship experience, denounced at a press conference an “arbitrary” interpretation of the Quebec Immigration Regulations, which, according to them, excluded them from the new application period. A month later, some of these organizations received a letter of intent to refuse for each of their applications filed in 2022. They fear that the same thing will happen for their 2023 applications.
“We want suspended files to be accepted. It is unfair to retroactively apply a regulatory interpretation,” says Julia Tischer, sponsorship coordinator at the Round Table of Organizations Serving Refugees and Immigrants.
We let the world die! We talk about families in distress, children who don’t go to school… Where is humanity?
Not fraudsters
What is now bothering the ministry? That the organizations submit applications in their name on behalf of a co-guarantor (or a “co-sponsor”), who wishes, for example, to bring over members of his family. This co-guarantor nevertheless pays a sum which is placed in trust and entirely returned to the refugees upon their arrival. But in the eyes of the MIFI, this amounts to “profiting from sponsorship”, which is prohibited by law.
In 2020, the program was suspended while MIFI investigated allegations of fraud reported by media outlets, including The Duty. Ministry officials then decided to no longer tolerate the practice of experienced organisations that make sponsorships through a co-guarantor, even if they had been cleared in the investigation.
“It’s as if they were questioning our forty years of operation. In addition, there has not even been a change to the regulations, it is their interpretation that has changed and that means that our files [de 2022] “They have been rotting for two years, almost three,” laments François Rheault. “In the rest of Canada, co-guarantors are accepted, and asking for a security deposit is also permitted.”
Mr. Rheault says he did everything the government asked him to do. “We even paid to be audited at the request of MIFI. We don’t understand its attitude of treating us like potential fraudsters,” he says, angrily. “The government hasn’t been clear. Let it say so openly if it wants to end the program!”
The ministry confirmed to Duty that, for the 2021-2022 fiscal year, 114 applications were subject to an intention to reject, as provided for in section 57 of the Quebec Immigration Act, because the organizations provided false or misleading documents and that 6 were formally rejected.
Regarding the tightening of the regulation, the MIFI had already mentioned last May that it had been revised to strengthen “the integrity of the program.” According to it, an organization cannot submit a sponsorship application in its name using a co-guarantor who assumes financial responsibility, because the latter “escapes the examination of the conditions” provided for in the regulation, which requires verifying financial capacity and criminal background, among other things.
Hopes on hold
In the office of Alessandra Santopadre, head of sponsorship at the Diocese of Montreal, Michael Weldeendrias came to bring small dishes from his country to the woman who allowed him to settle in Quebec in 2018 as a refugee.
To “pay it forward,” the Eritrean father, now a Canadian citizen, asked the diocese to submit three applications for him in 2022 to sponsor his cousin and his extended family who have taken refuge in Israel. “They went from one war to another,” laments Mr. Weldeendrias. “My cousin calls me almost every day. He asks me: ‘Michael, what’s going on?’ I tell him we have to wait for the government.”
He cannot imagine that after having given his cousin and his family so much hope, their files, currently suspended, could finally be rejected. And without the help of the diocese, Michael Weldeendrias says he is unable to start all these complex procedures again alone in a language he does not speak. “It would not be possible to sponsor without Alessandra. It would be like working without light, as if I were blind.”
Alessandra Santopadre, who filed twenty applications representing around thirty people on behalf of the diocese in 2022, feels responsible for “these refugees who are asking to be saved.” “In public, [le gouvernement] speaks of a humanitarian program, but […] We let the world die! We talk about families in distress, children who don’t go to school… Where is humanity?
She is not giving up, but would like to see more consideration from MIFI. “It’s good to fight, to make demands, to hold press conferences… But is there anyone in the ministry who realizes that?”