QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship
Humanitarian Program for Afghan Nationals
June 14, 2022
Thank you, minister, for being here.
Minister, tomorrow will mark 10 months since Kabul fell to the Taliban. It’s a terrible stain on our country that Afghans who risked their lives alongside Canadian soldiers and diplomats who are now seeking safety in Canada have not yet received a response from your department almost a year later. On May 12, you told a committee of the other place that everyone would get a response from your department in a matter of weeks to let them know if they will be brought into the special resettlement program or not. You said they would “. . . have an answer in a very short period of time . . . .”
That has not happened, minister. Your office told The Globe and Mail on Monday that more clarity would be provided in the coming weeks. Your government left these Afghans behind to focus on an election no one wanted, and you still can’t help them. How much longer do you expect Afghans living in constant fear of the Taliban to wait?
First, thank you very much for the question. I really do appreciate when people draw into focus the importance of helping those who have helped Canada in our time of need.
As I mentioned in response to the previous answer, a significant number of people have been arriving in Canada from Afghanistan as part of our special program. We are currently in excess of 15,500. There is another charter scheduled to arrive this Thursday with more than 300 people on board.
Despite some of the challenges and the very serious uptick in the pace of arrivals that we’ve seen since the end of March and the beginning of April, there remain certain challenges. Some of those have to do with safe passage on the ground. We also have an extraordinary number of people — in excess of 1 million — who have reached out to the department I’m responsible for in the hopes that they can be a part of the program.
We’re going to continue to move forward until we achieve our goal of 40,000, but, with respect to your particular question, for those who are not yet enrolled in the program who have made an actual application or submitted some sort of expression of interest that we have a touch point with, we will be letting them know very soon — I don’t have a specific date for you, but I expect it will be in a very short period of time — that those who qualify for the program will be certain. Also, those who, unfortunately, won’t be part of the program will be made aware.
