Law Times

Page 12 March 7, 2016 • Law TiMes www.lawtimesnews.com Lawyers helping refugees come to Canada BY MICHAEL MCKIERNAN For Law Times J acqueline Swaisland, like many Canadians, knew she had to do something when she saw the image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi's lifeless body washed up on a beach in Turkey. Kurdi's death in September focused national and interna- tional attention on the plight of Syrian refugees like him and his family trying to escape their war-torn homeland, and Swaisland, a Toronto immi- gration lawyer with Waldman and Associates, knew others in the profession would feel the same way she did. "It began informally as a conversation between myself and Jennifer Bond, who's a professor at the University of Ottawa, about what lawyers could do to help," says Swais- land, who also works part- time at the university, teaching a course in immigration and refugee law. By October, the pair had of- ficially co-founded the Refu- gee Sponsorship Support Pro- gram, with the help of a dona- tion from the university. The program is designed to help Canadians who wish to privately sponsor refugees by bringing together experts in the process, community organizations, and a swath of pro bono legal support from law yers and law stu- dents to guide them through the process. Of the 25,000 refugees the Canadian government has promised to resettle, around 10,000 are expected to arrive via private sponsorship. Fifty volunteer lawyers met with 450 interested members of the public at the inaugural RSSP clinic in Ottawa. "The response after the launch was amazing," Swais- land says, and since then, the growth has been explosive. More than 1,000 lawyers are currently registered to provide legal help to sponsors, with many concentrated in 10 major hubs across the country. In Toronto, clinics are held every couple of weeks to get applications in progress. "We were expecting things to slow up a little, but if any- thing, we're doing more cases now," Swaisland says. "Typically in Toronto, we do 35 to 50 cases at every clin- ic, but at our most recent one, there were 60. "We had about 55 lawyers, 29 students, and two experts all working on them." Most of the lawyers in- volved in the program practise in areas outside immigration and refugee law, but they have gone through a comprehen- sive training regime provided by the RSSP to bring them up to speed. However, not all lawyers in- volved in private sponsorship of Syrian refugees are new to the process. A significant chunk of To- ronto lawyer Sherif Ashamal- la's immigration and refugee practice has involved private sponsorship since a local char- ity approached him for help to sponsor Coptic Christians f leeing persecution in Egypt in 2011. Ashamalla typically acts as counsel on more than 100 pri- vate sponsorships a year. With the recent Syrian in- f lux, he has already passed that mark for 2016 in the first two months of the year. His previous experience gives Ashamalla a unique per- spective on the level of invest- ment the new federal govern- ment has put into expediting Syrian refugee claims. For example, when the sponsor and refugee applica- tions are submitted together to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada's central processing office in Winni- peg, Ashamalla says it usually takes four or five months just to get an initial assessment for completeness done in order to receive an official file number from the ministry. "Now you can get a file number on the same day they receive it in Winnipeg. It's un- believable," Ashamalla says. The next stage of the appli- cation occurs at the Canadian embassy where the refugee ap- plicant is based. A visa officer schedules an interview, security checks are carried out, and the applicant arranges a medical assessment before a final decision is made on the application. Most of Ashamalla's cases go through the Canadian em- bassy in Beirut, Lebanon. "From the time the embassy gets the file to the point where they're on a f light to Canada is now two months, whereas it used to take a year and a half, and in fact, it still does for my Egyptian cases, because it's just the Syrians who are get- ting the quick processing," Ashamalla says. His fastest case to date in- volved a single mother of a months-old baby who f led from Syria to Beirut following the death of the child's father. Ashamalla met her in the Lebanese capital while scout- ing for a possible refugee ap- plicant for five Toronto arti- cling students to sponsor pri- vately. Her application was with IRCC by the end of October, and the woman and her young child arrived in Canada on Dec. 27. "She's a vulnerable woman who was running out of mon- ey to support herself with in Beirut, so it was great we were able to get her out so quickly," Ashamalla says. LT FOCUS SAVE 10% Register before April 1, 2016 May 16, 2016 - Toronto | Webinar To register and learn more visit Powered by INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LAW SPRING FORUM 2016 CHAIRED BY Lisa R. Lifshitz, Partner, Torkin Manes LLP Cory Freed, Senior Legal Counsel, Microsoft Canada Inc. WWW.IT-CONFERENCE.CA THIS PROGRAM CONTAINS 3 PROFESSIONALISM HOURS Untitled-1 1 2016-03-02 10:05 AM it's back 2016 CANADIAN LAWYER'S LEGAL FEES SURVEY Complete the survey online at canadianlawyermag.com/surveys then check out the results in the June issue to see how your fees compare across multiple practice areas. Survey closes March 28 Watch for the results in the June issue! Untitled-1 1 2016-02-24 9:15 AM Sherif Ashamalla typically acts on more than 100 private sponsorships a year, but that's increased dramatically with the recent Syrian influx.

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