(Ottawa) Canada's cap of 1,000 temporary Gaza refugees is too low and the program should be expanded to allow West Bank Palestinians to escape violence, a Liberal MP argues.
Posted at 3:48 p.m.
A few days before the special program came into force, on January 9, elected official Salma Zahid wrote to Federal Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Marc Miller and suggested some adjustments.
PHOTO SPENCER COLBY, CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVE
Liberal MP Salma Zahid
“We are concerned that the level of the program is insufficient in relation to the number of people with close ties to Canada who could find temporary refuge here,” the MP said in her letter on Friday.
She also argues that the West Bank, where extremist Israeli settlers commit violence against Palestinians condemned by Canada, should be included in the special migration policy.
Before the MP, the organization Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East also called for the 1,000 application limit to be abandoned. This threshold is “completely arbitrary and unjustifiable” and must be abolished, it said on Thursday.
At the same time, the group lamented the asymmetry between the program and the emergency travel measures to accommodate Ukrainians – almost 940,000 applications had been approved as of November 28, 2023.
“Forcing Canadians and their families in Gaza to compete for a small number of visas based on an arbitrary shortage shows a real lack of humanity,” said Michael Bueckert, vice president of the organization.
The two programs must take into account completely different realities. At the moment it is virtually impossible to go out in Gaza. This does not hinder freedom of movement on the Ukrainian side.
The eligibility criteria are also not the same: the Ukrainian program is not limited to family members of Canadians, as is the case with the Gaza plan.
A boundary that is not fixed
When he presented these measures on December 21, Minister Miller stressed that further development was expected.
The limit of 1,000 people stated in the decree published on December 29th is therefore not necessarily set in stone, as the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (IRCC) also suggested.
« Entry limits […] are a common practice in public policy. IRCC will need to monitor and review the volume of applications received once the application portal opens on January 9,” wrote spokesman Matthew Krupovich.
“We need to see what interest there is, how many permits there are and whether we are able to help eligible family members leave Gaza and get to a safe third country,” he added, arguing that we are tempted have to resist comparing programs with each other.