“Selling” Canada’s private refugee sponsorship program

Bill Janzen, director of MCC Canada’s Ottawa Office, received an unexpected invitation in early April. A Canadian Immigration official asked him to travel to Brussels, Belgium where European churches were planning a conference to consider increased involvement in refugee resettlement work. The official wanted Janzen to speak about Canada’s private refugee sponsorship program in the hope that the Europeans might become interested in using this as a model. She noted that Canadian Mennonite churches had done an exceptional amount of private refugee sponsorship work over the years and that Janzen had been instrumental in negotiating the first Master Agreement for this work, back in 1979.

Janzen found a mixture of interest and caution among the Europeans. They kept referring to the “anti-refugee” mood in the European public and to the financial costs but they also recognized that increasing their refugee resettlement work was imperative.

At present only about 100,000 refugees are resettled every year, with the largest numbers going to the US, Canada and Australia. Even if that number were doubled or tripled, it would still be small relative to the world’s 20 million refugees and an equal number of internally displaced people. Still, some officials in Canada and elsewhere hope that if western countries would significantly increase the number they take in, they would be better positioned to talk with the governments in Africa and Asia, where massive refugee camps have become virtually permanent, about supporting local and regional solutions for the rest.

—MCCC Ottawa