New documents reveal Ottawa’s election scramble to respond to Afghanistan crisis
Global News
An emergency loan program for stranded Afghan nationals and a dedicated hotline were among the measures the Trudeau government were urged to adopt during the election.
In the midst of last summer’s federal election campaign, Canada fired up an unusual emergency loan program for Afghan nationals who had fled Afghanistan but found themselves short on funds in a third country while waiting to come to Canada.
The establishment of the emergency loan program was one of at least four key initiatives taken by federal immigration officials in the midst of the general election campaign in response to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan that took many Western nations, including Canada, by surprise.
Documents describing these initiatives were recently released to Global News as a result of multiple requests under the federal Access to Information Act.
But those urgent measures appeared to have little effect. Advocates say the election itself caused disruptions at the government department charged with rescuing refugees from the Taliban.
“Their cases are stuck in the system somewhere. And I can’t quite figure out where the clog is. I can’t really forgive that — picking the timing of an election over the lives of Afghans.”
The other initiatives involved giving some Afghans in Canada an additional legal tool to stay in Canada as refugees; setting up a dedicated hotline to help staff at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) who had been overwhelmed at the time by thousands of phone calls and nearly 100,000 e-mails from Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban; and, finally, to provide additional mental health support to Government of Canada employees suffering emotional distress as they tried to help those Afghans.
Other advocates for Afghan refugees also complained privately to Global News this week about federal government “inefficiency and disorganization” then and now.
A series of written questions about these initiatives was put to the IRCC’s media relations department as well as current Immigration Minister Sean Fraser on Friday but neither office has, as of end of day Tuesday, been able to provide any response.
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