Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the one thing that could happen is, as you said, Global Affairs could create a stream of funding for international human rights organizations. In a lot of cases in countries where being LGBT is criminalized, often LGBT organizations are very much underground. What does exist often is small to medium-sized human rights organizations that don't exclusively do LGBT work, but they are there on the ground.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  While we're addressing refugee protection here, we have worked with cases where people leaving their home countries will actually increase their vulnerability. What we are recommending is a pathway whereby LGBTI people can use the existing private sponsorship pathway with Rainbow Refugee and other groups across the country to apply on humanitarian and compassionate grounds for protection by the Canadian government.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much to the committee for the invitation. I'm honoured to share this place with Rainbow Refugee. My name is Dylan Mazur, and I am the executive director at the Vancouver Association for Survivors of Torture, otherwise known as VAST. For the past 30 years, VAST has been providing trauma-focused psychological counselling for refugees who arrive in British Columbia with psychological trauma as a result of torture, political violence, and other forms of persecution, including that inflicted on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.