Kelowna group says not enough Syrian refugees are being approved for sponsorship program

KELOWNA – Years after leaving their home in Syria, a refugee family is now living in the Okanagan.

The Al-Shahoud family is getting settled here learning English, going to school and working. They are happy to be in a country where peace is the norm. However, the sponsorship program that brought the family to Canada is only available to a small number of Syrian refugees right now.

Mohammad Al-Shahoud, his wife Sara and five of their kids were sponsored to come to Canada by the Central Okanagan Refugee Committee. They arrived in the Okanagan in May this year. Now safely in Canada, they still find it hard to talk about the difficult decision to leave their home in Syria in 2012.

“We left Syria because we cannot live in peace and the condition became very dangerous,” says Mohammad Al-Shahoud.

To sponsor the Al-Shahoud family the committee went through what’s called the Blended Visa Office-Referred Program  and selected the family from a list of refugees. But other groups looking to sponsor Syrians through the same program now may find that more challenging.

“That’s the problem right now you get lists and there are no Syrians on it,” says the chair of the Central Okanagan Refugee Committee, Marilyn Perry.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of refugees fleeing violence in Syria. Perry is hopeful that public pressure will lead to change and her group will be able to sponsor another Syrian family through the same program.

“We heard Stephen Harper say he was going to try to speed things up and there is certainly a lot of pressure from organizations like ours to improve the speed at which the Syrians are being processed,” says Perry.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada acknowledges that all of the Syrians that are part of this program currently have already been matched with sponsors. That amounts to a total of 128 people out of millions of refugees that have left Syria. The Canadian government says the Blended Visa Office-Referred Program is new and larger numbers of refugees are coming through other established programs.