‘A few dozen' Uyghur refugees are now in Canada as part of lagging refugee program, MP confirms
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'A few dozen' Uyghur refugees have now been resettled in Canada, the MP behind a motion promising to resettle 10,000 of them confirmed to The Gazette on Saturday.
While the motion, which passed Parliament unanimously in 2023, called to resettle all 10,000 refugees by the end of 2025, Ottawa had only managed to resettle one refugee prior to this latest group of arrivals.
MP Sameer Zuberi wouldn't specify how many Uyghur refugees have been resettled, or could he say when exactly they began arriving, telling The Gazette only they'd arrived in the past few weeks and he'd met with some of them.
Uyghurs, who are native to the Xinjiang region of China, have suffered repression at the hands of the Chinese government, with an estimated one million people detained in hundreds of facilities across the region, according to Human Rights Watch. Considered a genocide by the House of Commons, Chinese state repression has allegedly included enslavement, sexual violence, forced sterilization, mass surveillance and the repression of the Uyghur language and Islamic faith.
In April, Zuberi told The Gazette he was frustrated at the resettlement program's slow pace. He pointed to the civil service as the potential source of the hold up, saying 'they're the only ones who are at this point not moving on it.'
He reiterated that call for accountability Saturday. 'At the end of the day, the civil service is the vehicle by which the government's operations happen.'
'I'd like to see the civil service move faster on this and all the government move faster on this,' he said.
Though Zuberi admitted immigration authorities were nowhere near their goal of resettling 10,000 Uyghur refugees by the end of 2025, he said he wasn't ruling it out as a possibility. 'I believe that with political will we will achieve it.'
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