Suspending Private Refugee Sponsorship Will Trap Refugees In War Zones And Keep Families Apart

(MENAFN- The Conversation) As Canada heads toward an election this year, immigration and refugee resettlement are key themes.

Amid growing skepticism about immigration , it remains critical to remember one thing: private refugee sponsorship is a modest immigration stream that works, bringing people at risk to safety and allowing them to make new lives in Canada.

With Political support historically from all parties and civil society - including faith organizations and community groups - private sponsorship is an affordable, sustainable and effective way to protect and support people whose lives are at risk.

For 45 years , Canada's Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) program has provided safety to refugees from around the world, bringing together Canadian individuals and communities who volunteer their time and raise funds to support refugee newcomers to Canada.

Everyday Canadians have stepped up to provide funds for newcomers' basic expenses, to help find housing and to connect people to health, education and language services. More than 327,000 refugees have come to Canada through the program, supported by citizen action from coast to coast.

In November 2024, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada announced a pause on new applications from certain cohorts - groups of five (G5) and community sponsors (CS) - under the program.

The pause, in place until Dec. 31, 2025, was cited as“preventing further growth of the application inventory” that far exceeds the current spaces allotted for privately sponsored refugees in the 2025-2027 Immigration Levels Plan, which is 23,000 for 2025 .

This pause does not apply to all sponsorship applications, like those submitted by sponsorship agreement holders, the Blended Visa Office-Referred Program or the one-year window provision. However, data from 2022 indicate that the G5 and CS groups represented 60 per cent of private refugee sponsorships, meaning these streams are significant contributors to the program.

The inevitable result of this action will be longer wait times for applicants at risk, and longer periods of separation for refugees who have landed as permanent residents and urgently want to bring family or community members who remain in danger to safety - and have no other pathway to do so.

As a group of researchers with experience in sponsorship, we join other advocates, such as the Private Refugee Sponsor Network and Canadian Council for Refugees , in expressing our concerns about the moratorium's impact on sponsorship.

Between 2017 and 2020, our research team (led by geography professor Jennifer Hyndman) interviewed more than 100 people in five provinces across Canada, with participants from both urban and rural settings. Our focus was on long-term sponsors - people who had participated in sponsorship programs several times over a minimum of five years, often decades. Many of these had been part of the G5 group, which allows private citizens to collectively resettle refugees from abroad.

Our findings revealed that many G5 sponsors are driven by deep commitment to global solidarity with refugees. G5 sponsors are often in diaspora communities and former refugees themselves who want to help family members or close kin in dangerous circumstances to safety.

The program's ability to facilitate these connections and the protection they afford is vital, driving the sustainability of private refugee sponsorship. The suspension of new applications for G5 will not only prolong family separation but also extend the wait times for refugees trapped in war zones .

Our research shows that a large proportion of former refugees and sponsors knew specific individuals still at risk whom they wished to sponsor. This process of“naming,” which allows sponsors to nominate individuals for resettlement, is a unique and integral feature of the PSR program.

As government-led initiatives provide only limited resettlement pathways, civil society has relied on the full range of sponsorship categories, including private sponsorship by G5, to ensure equitable refugee protection.

The pause on G5 and CS streams narrow the possibilities for pathways to protection, which in turn threatens to make refugee protection more inequitable. This is especially the case for refugees displaced by conflicts that have historically not aligned with Canadian government priorities but still drive high numbers of displacement, including those in Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea .

In the United Nations Global Refugee Compact , released in 2018, Canadian sponsorship was cited as a promising practice for expanding refugee protection across the world.

A recent Senate report, Ripped From Home: The Global Crisis of Forced Displacement , praises the PSR program for providing individuals and organizations with the opportunity to sponsor refugees. It also recommends the federal government increase private sponsorship.

The recent announcement to cut this program is at odds with these recommendations and undercuts Canada's reputation as a leader in the protection of refugees internationally.

The pause on new intake of G5 and CS applications for sponsorship disrupts a system that has successfully empowered communities in Canada and across the world to come together and save lives.

Since its inception in the 1970s, Canada used this system during the first large-scale sponsorship and resettlement of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees in 1979 .

We urge the government to reconsider its decision and explore alternative solutions, such as allocating additional resources to clear backlogs, rather than halting applications.

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