Speaking notes for the Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P. Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism following a meeting with Bhutanese Refugees celebrating 30 years of CIC’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program and a presentation of Certificates of Recognition to six sponsorship agreement holders

Citizenship Court
Winnipeg, Manitoba
September 21, 2009

As delivered

* * * * *

Hi, folks. This is rather a grand venue for this small gathering. I just had a chance to meet some of our new arrivals here in Winnipeg for the Bhutanese Hindus in Nepal. It’s a real pleasure to meet you. One of the greatest joys of my job is welcoming new people to come to Canada, especially those who have gone through real challenges and are unable to return to their homes.

Canada is very proud of our tradition of welcoming and providing protection and opportunity, security and prosperity to people seeking refuge from around the world. You’re following in a long tradition in Canada. I think it’s very special that we’re having this little gathering in what we call our Citizenship Court.

This looks like a court of law. It is a kind of a court and maybe some day, a few years from now, you will come and sit in these chairs and take the oath of allegiance and become Canadian citizens. So, this is the beginning of your journey. That will be an important phase. We hope that you will stay and become citizens and that your children will grow up as proud Canadians.

Keep in mind coming back to this room a few years from now as aspiring Canadian citizens. We’re very pleased to welcome you here together with another 5,000 Bhutanese refugees that we’ll be receiving in the next couple of years, all across Canada. I think we’ll have 30 or so here in Winnipeg in the near future.

This is a long tradition, starting when Canada was a refuge for people coming from slavery in the southern United States in the 19th century.

People came up here on what we call the Underground Railroad to seek protection in Canada. It’s something that we’re very proud of. Today, we’re also celebrating in particular the 30th anniversary of an important part of our refugee program called our Private Sponsorship of Refugees program. We have two different programs for people who have faced persecution, violence and conflict. One is our Government-Assisted Refugee program, where we cooperate, as in your case, with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration.

The other program is the Private Sponsorship of Refugees program, where community-based organizations—often churches, parishes and local community groups—come together to raise funds and help to welcome and settle newcomers who are refugees from around the world.

This is something that was started in an organized way in 1979 when hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fleeing violence and brutal tyranny in their own country were lost in oceans of Southeast Asia with nowhere to go, and Canada—with the leadership of many churches and other organizations—opened up the door to receive tens of thousands of Vietnamese victims of persecution, as we did in 1979 and 1980, and have done so ever since.

I’m pretty sure that here in Winnipeg you must have received some of the Vietnamese from the Philippines who were in our special program. I’m not sure if our partners are fully aware of the fact that you carved out a special program last year to welcome about 186 Vietnamese Filipinos who got stuck in the Philippines for about the last 20 years.

They weren’t conventional refugees, but they were stateless and living in difficult circumstances in the Philippines.  So we’re very happy that they’re coming to completion of the story of the Vietnamese boat people from 30 years ago.

Winnipeg is a city that is really all about immigration. In fact, in this train station where we are, over decades, thousands and thousands of people arrived. They would often land in ships in Halifax on the Atlantic coast of Canada, take the train, or it might be Montréal, and then take the train all across here.

It would take them two or three days, maybe longer, to get to Winnipeg. They would come off the train at the train station here and they would either go out to the countryside and start farms or settle in small villages or help to build the city. We have a friend from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress as an example, one of the big founding communities of immigrants, many of whom were actually refugees from the political situation in Eastern Europe.

There are always many challenges for newcomers. Besides that first winter in Winnipeg, there are challenges with employment and with credentials and with everything else. But what I say to newcomers is if they work hard and they focus on developing their education and vocational abilities, anything is possible.

People have come here from around the world for decades with nothing, with no money, no worldly goods, with little or no education. Many of the people who come here, perhaps most of them historically were illiterate, didn’t read or write. Yet through hard work they succeeded and, in particular, their children have succeeded.

This is a great country and you’re going to have some challenges, for sure. We are here with our credential partners and our refugee settlement organizations and all of the local community groups to help you make your transition in Canada as fruitful as possible. But still it’s going to take a lot of initiative for you to succeed.

On behalf of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, I also want to welcome our Private Sponsorship Agreement Holders for their sensible participation in our resettlement program. Last year, Canada welcomed over 10,000 refugees from around the world, about three quarters of them government-assisted and the rest privately sponsored.

I would like to see us even increase, beyond where we are, the number of refugees resettled to Canada, provide those newcomers with more support than we currently do. We should, however, be proud of what we’ve achieved as a country. There are about 100,000 individuals who are resettled out of UN refugee camps in conflict zones. We accept 10 percent of those.

So Canada has a tiny fraction of the world’s population—0.5 percent of the world’s population—and yet we accept 10 percent of the world’s resettled refugees. That is a great credit to the generosity of the Canadian people, and it speaks to our best values. I, in particular, sponsor refugee programs. I think it provides a kind of grounding in community environment, a personal support network that is so helpful to achieving the integration of refugees, many of whom have lived through traumatic experiences.

It’s one of the reasons that we are steadily increasing our targets for resettlement, particularly through the Private Sponsorship of Refugees program. The vast majority are dislocated as a result of religious violence in their country, many of whom are Iraqi Christians whom I visited in Damascus in May of this year.

I visited a camp in Damascus, welcoming some of the Iraqi resettlement candidates in our mission, in our embassy in Damascus and listened to their stories about the kind of brutality and violence. I think of the persecution that community has to face in Iraq. It was a very difficult and emotional day.

I’m now pleased to see that this year, next year, and in 2012, we are targeting to receive 3,800 Middle Eastern privately sponsored refugees, most of whom we anticipate will be from Iraq. That means Canada will be doing more than any other country in the world in relative terms, second only to the United States in absolute terms, in resettling people out of that region.

We’re welcoming in the next three years over 11,000 Middle Eastern refugees, principally through the privately sponsored refugee program. I’m very hopeful that we’ll have additional resources to help in settling all these folks, to help make their future in Canada bright.

So, with that, I would like to present certificates of acknowledgment and appreciation for the longstanding partnership between the Government of Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, in particular, and the Private Sponsorship Agreement Holders.

These are organizations we enter into agreements with, who help us to identify people we want to welcome, refugees from abroad, who are able-bodied, law-abiding individuals.

Thank you very much.