By Mata Press Service

Pinku is a teenage boy who last saw his father in 2017, and his mother in early 2018. When his parents were forced, one after the other, to flee their home in India.

Pinku was left in the care of elderly relatives. His older brother, Sanju, is studying in another city.

Pinku’s parents have been accepted as Convention refugees in Canada.

They both suffered violent attacks after Pinku’s father refused attempts from the local ruling political party to extort political contributions.

Unfortunately in the absence of the parents, the party men quickly located and retrained their targets on their children, Sanju and Pinku.

They have been stalked and threatened. In one violent encounter, they chased Sanju, threw him off his motorbike and severely beat him.

“He has nowhere to go. He has no money or means to escape,” said Pinku’s father.

Eleven-year-old Benjamin and his sisters Beth,13 and Ally, 17, are waiting in Nigeria to be reunited with their parents in Canada. At the time of escaping Nigeria, their parents could not obtain visas for the children so they had to leave them with a friend in a rural location.

“Nowhere in the whole world should parents and children be separated for such a long time. The children I carried are not with me,” said his mother.

“What I feel inside me every day, the emotional pain prevents me from being the person I can be. My children are at risk and I live in fear and desperation.”

These are just two examples of many tragic stories of children separated from their parents who are already in Canada, said the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR), a national non-profit umbrella organization committed to the rights and protection of refugees.

The group has called on the federal government to establish a standard of 6 months to reunite separated children with a parent in Canada.

“Currently, many children wait years to be reunited with one or both parents in Canada, while the government processes the immigration application,” said CCR in a statement.

The long wait is particularly unacceptable for children who are separated from both parents. In some cases, both parents have been forced to flee as refugees, leaving their children temporarily with a grandparent, another family member or even a neighbour. In other cases, one parent has died or is otherwise not available to care for the child, and the parent in Canada struggles to look after their child at a distance, said CCR.

“Every minute that a parent and child are separated is time that is lost forever – it is a suffering that harms the spirit, it is an impossible wound to heal,” said Dorota Blumczynska, CCR President.

“We cannot allow our bureaucracy and long processing times to force children to wait indefinitely to be reunited with their loved ones.”

CCR said Canada is legally obliged under the Convention on the Rights of the Child to deal with family reunification applications “in a positive, humane and expeditious manner”.

In the case of people who made a refugee claim in Canada and who were accepted, they must seek family reunification by applying for permanent residence for themselves and for their family members, whether in Canada or abroad, said CCR.

According to current processing times, the parents in Canada can expect to wait 23 months for their permanent residence – only after that will their family members overseas be able to finalize processing and travel to Canada. The government does not disclose the processing times for family members overseas.

In the case of resettled refugees, family members from whom they have been separated can be processed through a One Year Window application. The government similarly does not disclose these processing times.

At the best of refugees face travel restrictions and difficulties obtaining documents including evidence of a familial relationship.

Responding to the calls by CCR, an Immigration Canada spokesperson said the government has

since the onset of the pandemic, prioritized processing of vulnerable persons, family members and those in essential services.

“We’re prioritizing applications from refugees sponsoring their dependants … and are also assessing the results of two pilot programs to improve processing for protected persons with dependants abroad.”

Canada had planned to resettle around 30,000 refugees in 2020. By the end of last September, just under 6,000 had arrived,

The target for resettlement in 2021 is 35,000, but how realistic that goal is considering the unknowns around the end of the pandemic is unclear.

Canada has welcomed 1,088,015 refugees since 1980. This number includes those who were recognized as refugees in Canada or who were resettled from overseas, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Earlier this month, Ottawa said it is adopting a new policy to help more Yazidis and other survivors of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant reunite with their families in Canada,

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said the new policy will allow more Yazidi refugees to join extended family members, including siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles.

The Yazidis and other groups who survived abuse, torture and even genocide at the hands of ISIL are among the most vulnerable refugees in the world, he said.

The Immigration Department said the new policy will help Yazidis and members of other communities in Northern Iraq to start new lives in Canada.

Canada has welcomed more than 1,400 survivors of ISIL from Northern Iraq since 2017.

This includes 1,356 government-assisted refugees and 94 privately sponsored ones. Women and girls comprise the vast majority.

The Yazidi newcomers have been primarily resettled to Toronto, London, Ont., Winnipeg and Calgary where Yazidi communities existed and adequate support, including medical, social and interpretation services, was in place.