Afghan MP Forced to Flee Homeland Pleads with Canada to do More to Help Refugees

In this excerpt from The Toronto Star, former Afghan MP Naheed Farid and three Canadian senators, including Senator Omidvar, call on the government to bring Afghan refugees to Canada more quickly.

A member of Afghanistan’s Parliament forced to flee her homeland after the Taliban takeover last year is pleading with Canada to do more to help bring Afghan refugees to safety.

Canada promised to resettle at least 40,000 Afghan refugees last summer and Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said in late May more than 14,000 have now arrived.

But Naheed Farid, who sat in Parliament in Afghanistan for 11 years, and three Canadian senators said Thursday the applications for the remaining 26,000 are already in processing and yet there are still thousands of desperate people waiting for a chance to flee to safety.

They’re asking the federal government not to stop at 40,000, to make it easier for Afghans to get visas, and to create a special high-level committee led by Fraser to tear down the bureaucracy that is making the whole process more difficult than it should be.

”Even if the threshold of 40,000 refugee intake is already full, the responsibility and the determination and the commitment is not done yet,” Farid said, joining a news conference in Ottawa via video link.

Farid said Canada has done so much already to help but there remains a dire human rights and humanitarian situation facing millions of people that demands an even bigger response.

The senators said their offices are flooded with requests for help and at first, efforts to work with embassy staff, diplomats and immigration officials succeeded. But Ontario Sen. Ratna Omidvar said the protocols and processes Canada put in place to help have instead become an ”impregnable fortress” of bureaucratic red tape that not even senators can break through.

Read the full article in The Toronto Star