Living in hope, isn’t this the leitmotif of thousands of aspiring refugees hoping to find a home in Quebec and leave the misery and insecurity of their homeland? With the reopening this week of the collective refugee sponsorship program, suspended twice by Quebec in the past five years for suspicion of fraud, we must take a leap of faith and hope, like future applicants, that this essential program functions, in its new version, with humanity, efficiency and righteousness.
The new rules of the game unveiled this week by the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI) provide for several changes that bode well: the addition of places — 825 applications for commitment will be accepted by Quebec, compared to 750 in the past —; the banning of 18 organizations banned from sponsoring for one year because of the transmission of misleading or false information; and the selection of applications by lot, to avoid the mess of recent years. Thanks to all this, it is possible to look to the future with optimism, but it is by passing the test of reality that the responsible authorities will be able to fully convince.
If there is still a cover of distrust, it is because the past is not light in the crucial file of the reception of refugees in Quebec. The opening of the floodgates in 2015 by the newly elected government of Justin Trudeau, which aimed to promote the reception of Syrian refugees, and Quebec’s decision to follow in the footsteps of this humanitarian political decision finally gave rise to a fraudulent market where groups have sniffed out in an operation intended to get people out of human misery the perfect context to “make the piasse”. Wealthy Syrians would thus have suddenly slipped into the priority applications, in exchange for a tidy sum paid to greedy consultants.
A survey of colleagues from Duty points to one of the groups that the MIFI has placed on its blacklist and allows us to conclude that there is a real misappropriation of the humanitarian program. Literally jumping on the manna, Parrainage Réfugiés du Grand Montréal (PRGM) would have multiplied the opening of files for asylum seekers, demanding sums well in excess of the approximately $200 to $300 normally authorized to ensure compliance with the regulations governing the process (“no one may profit, in any form whatsoever, from a commitment entered into in favor of a foreign national and the members of his family accompanying him, in particular by collecting interest on an investment , the collection of fees or the acceptance of a donation”, Regulation respecting immigration to Québec, section 95). Nearly twenty organizations in total are in the crosshairs of Quebec, but some vociferate and dispute the fact of being associated with bad players who do not respect the ethics and morality of the program. PRGM, for its part, denies having been malicious in this affair.
Malevolence will always try to make its way where it is given space to unfold. How else to explain that in Quebec, the market for refugees, temporary foreign workers and foreign students has become the kingdom of profiteers? In the gray areas associated with regulations and laws, we have seen the development of a parallel market dictated by a certain profit to be made on the backs of foreigners and the less well-off — oh paradox — all of this is often marked by huge hitches to any sense of humanity. The absence of adequate regulatory and oversight mechanisms has left this unhealthy quilt covering large swathes of our immigrant reception programs. There is nothing to be proud of here.
There are countless horror stories where temporary foreign workers have seen their rights violated, forced to live in indecent housing conditions or in a work safety context that thwarts laws and regulations. The last few years have also revealed questionable practices with regard to the recruitment of foreign students, particularly from India: colleges and recruitment agencies have fought over candidates who have paid a fortune for a sometimes shaky training. As for the requests for sponsorship, they have made more people dissatisfied than happy over time, but that there was associated any fraudulent scheme leaving the destitute on the floor is strictly unacceptable.
The first test of reality will be through the draw, a method chosen by Quebec this year to recruit elected officials. This way of doing things had been abandoned in favor of a first-come, first-served system, which gave rise to a fiasco, it will be remembered: after a disastrous year that featured applicants spending hours outside, we had imagined the compulsory use of couriers, to experience a new failure. It looks like the draw will ensure some form of fairness while avoiding chaotic scenes. At least that is what we can hope for from this new start.