Bringing 'unlimited' Ukrainians to Canada won't stall Afghan resettlement, minister vows
'We can do more than one thing at a time,' says Immigration Minister Sean Fraser
Immigration Minister Sean Fraser says the federal government can make good on its promise to bring an "unlimited" number Ukrainians to Canada while still processing tens of thousands of Afghan refugee applications.
On Thursday, Fraser announced that Canada is waiving most of the typical visa requirements for Ukrainians seeking temporary safe haven during the Russian invasion and creating an "expedited path" to permanent residency for Ukrainians with family in Canada.
The news comes as Canada works to fulfil its promise to resettle 40,000 Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban takeover of their country — a process the government says could take two years.
More than 874,000 people have fled Ukraine in search of safety in neighbouring countries, a UN refugee agency spokesperson told CBC News Network on Wednesday.
Here is part of Fraser's conversation with As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.
What signal are you sending by opening the door for Ukrainians to make Canada their permanent home?
We're sending the signal that Canada wants to do its part to contribute to the effort that Ukrainians are making as they fight the oppressive and tyrannical war of aggression by [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.
You have said that there is no limit to the number of … Ukrainians Canada will take, at least in the short term for, say, two years or possibly more. Does your department have the resources both here and on the ground in Europe to turn this particular offer into reality for people who need it now?
We do. And we've had to innovate to create that capacity, and we had to prepare in advance.
Thankfully, we started preparing for this set of circumstances, which we hoped would never come to pass, on January 19. What we saw since that time was the ability to move biometric kits [to collect digital photographs and fingerprints from applicants] to the area in Warsaw and Vienna and Bucharest and 30 other locations throughout Europe where they already existed. This is going to give us the capacity to process people quickly on the ground.
Our internal capacity was something that I was concerned about. But what we've done was we modified, essentially, the system that we used to bring tourists to Canada, because that's one of the systems that has the most horsepower across our department because it's accustomed to processing two million people a year.
By leveraging this system, but peeling off the administrative barriers that are the most likely things to lead to a refusal to entry for people who are seeking to come to Canada, we're going to simplify the process and be able to have one of our most powerful instruments to process as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
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You're promising to create an expedited visa process, but you are stopping short of the [NDP and] Conservatives' call for you to waive the visa requirements entirely for Ukrainians. Why is that?
When I dug into that issue, I realized it was going to require changes to regulations and updates to our IT system across three different government departments and potentially with private airlines as well. And the estimated timeline to issue a visa waiver would have been 12 to 14 weeks.
We're going to be able to stand up this new system in a two-week period and expedite applications that are in the system in the meantime.
In addition, there are concerns because there have been pro-Russian forces fighting Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine in the Donbas over the past eight years. And we want to make sure if we're willing to take whoever is willing to apply, that there's some rigour applied to the process, so we don't create security risks, which we can avoid by having biometric assessments in place.
Your government has been struggling to deliver on your existing refugee promises. Are tens of thousands of Afghans going to be put on hold as Ukraine becomes Canada's new priority?
No, and let me say that we can do more than one thing at a time, and our commitment to resettle 40,000 Afghan refugees has not wavered one bit. In fact, we've now got more than 8,500 Afghan refugees. There were 335, I believe, landed in Calgary last week. There will be more flights arriving each week.
One of the strengths to the approach that I've identified earlier was that we use a system that's based on the model we used to process tourists and people who come on a temporary basis. This is a separate system and process that's used to process our refugee applications for people who are coming through.
The challenges that we're facing in Afghanistan have very little to do with our processing capacity. They have a lot to do with the situation on the ground. Because we made commitments to specific people who worked alongside Canada that are still in Afghanistan, and the Taliban have seized control of the territory, and they're a terrorist entity under Canadian law, and they are not letting people leave.
I'm just wondering what you say to Afghan listeners who wonder why the Taliban's victims don't deserve a similar unlimited welcome?
One of the things that we learned when we spoke with leaders from the Ukrainian Canadian community is that many of the people, most of the people, who might want to come did not want to come on a permanent basis. We have the ability to offer people a temporary stay in the short term in a much different way than we can use for traditional refugee resettlement.
Because Afghanistan is a protracted conflict, because people who are coming here are going to want to stay because their home country is no longer a welcoming place for them, we have to use a completely different process and leverage different programs and resources.
So the circumstances on the ground were what's causing difficulties — but it's not going to impact our commitment one bit. And we still do have flights arriving, bringing Afghan refugees every week to Canada. And that will remain the case until we reach our target of resettling 40,000 on a permanent basis here in our country.
Written by Sheena Goodyear with files from CBC News. Interview produced by Kevin Robertson. Q&A will be edited for length and clarity.
