Good morning, and I thank you as well for allowing us to be here.
I want to give you a little picture of what life is like for us in Saskatoon. I work very closely with the Iraqi Christian community. We are between 800 and 1,000 people now, and almost all of those folks have come either as refugees or as family class.
In these last couple of years, we have been inundated by phone calls from family members of those who are in Saskatoon, neighbours of those who are in Saskatoon or former neighbours, people calling from Syria, Jordan, and Turkey, people calling from Windsor, from Toronto. They know we do sponsorships, successful sponsorships, and they're pleading with us to help them get to a place where they can live in safety and peace and begin to build a new life. So we are under tremendous pressure.
Our community, in addition to sponsoring as quickly as we can, is also sending lots and lots of money overseas to support cousins and aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers and grandparents, both in Iraq and in neighbouring countries. I would guess that the amount of money that goes out of Saskatoon in a given year is several hundred thousand dollars. All of the families are feeling extreme pressure and extreme anxiety because the other part of the picture is that our families are also impacted by the people who are abducted and by the people who are killed.
Just this week we had a funeral for a 16-year-old boy who was shot with a gun through his mouth by one of the insurgent groups in Iraq. His uncle and cousins are in one of the refugee families in Saskatoon. The father of that boy is missing.
So a part of our reality is just to really feel the pressure, and we're working as fast as we can to sponsor refugees, to bring refugees, and to help them integrate into the community.
That's a little bit about our current context. Just a few days ago we did a news release. Just to give you a taste of some of the things we have been trying to do in Saskatoon to garner more support for the refugees of Iraq, we chose to do a news release around the time of the abduction and killing of the Archbishop of Mosul. This is the second time in a year that we've come together for prayers and to invite the media on the occasion of the killing of a Christian clergy person.
On that occasion too, after telling the story of the archbishop—which has made it to some of the major media in Canada—about his abduction and his killing and the killing of the people who were with him, we then moved on to talk about what's happening around the fifth anniversary.
On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, three agencies chose to issue new reports. You may or may not be familiar with these reports. The International Committee of the Red Cross published a report highlighting Iraq as one of the most critical situations in the world. Amnesty International published a report called Carnage and Despair, which I think speaks for itself in terms of the title, but it was also saying that Iraq is one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The UNHCR is talking about the number of displaced people, which has not decreased by much, even though we're hearing stories that things are supposed to be safer in Iraq. The UNHCR also talked in York about the increased numbers of asylum seekers.
We have a desperate picture, and I think as Canadians we really need to reach out and help and to do some things more effectively than we have been doing. Some of the suggestions or some of the critique, I guess, is that from our perspective Canada's response to the situation in Iraq is totally inadequate.
The amount of money Canada has given to the United Nations to help care for people in Syria and Jordan is way too little in relation to the problem. The small piece the minister has decided about family reunification is window dressing. As you may know, in November the minister made a new announcement about expediting the reunification of parents and grandparents so people here could sponsor them and bring them to Canada, and it would go faster than the usual four years. That was for parents or grandparents in Syria. We're trying to make that program work for the few people here who have the means by which to do family-class sponsorship. But we have to remember that when we're talking about Iraqis, we're talking about a relatively new refugee community, and people don't have the means yet and are not well enough established yet to have the kind of income needed to do family-class sponsorship. It may work for a few people, but it will work for very few.
I think it's in response to a critique of the work we've done, in that many of the people whom we have brought as refugees are relatives. But to us, I guess, if you're a refugee, you're a refugee, and whether you're a relative or not isn't what matters. Some may see this as a big step in terms of expediting family reunification, but I don't think it's a big step at all. It's a very small step that may help a few people.
We have many, many refugees who've had their interviews in Syria and have been waiting for months. They're also calling and saying they've been told they were accepted, but they have to wait for their security clearance and medical. But nothing's coming and nothing's happening, and months after they've had their interview, people aren't getting here.
So the fact that security clearance by Canadians is taking so long is also a problem. We're continuing to have to support families overseas, and they're not getting to places of safety and places where they could get good medical care and education. They're sitting waiting for Canadians to complete the security clearances.
Some people have made the comparison to Kosovo. In 1999, Canada responded with open arms to people from Kosovo, particularly when Macedonia was overloaded with people crossing the border. It behooves us to know why our response to Iraq is so limited when under other circumstances we have moved so quickly and with great compassion to support people.
I'll stop there.