Exporting Canada's Resettlement Model? Reflections on the Private Sponsorship Program

Description

Following the Syrian refugee program, the Government of Canada led a major effort to internationalize private refugee sponsorship through the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative. Four years later, what have we learned about this effort to export and internationalize aspects of Canada’s program? Panelists will draw from their chapters in the recently-published volume, Strangers to Neighbours: Refugee Sponsorship in Context (MQUP 2020).

Moderator:
Geoffrey Cameron is research associate at the Global Migration Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He has a PhD from the University of Toronto, where he was a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, and an MPhil from the University of Oxford. His forthcoming book is Send Them Here: Religion and Refugee Resettlement in North America (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), and he is co-editor of Strangers to Neighbours: Refugee Sponsorship in Context (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020)

Panelists:
Megan Bradley is associate professor of political science and international development studies at McGill University. Her research and teaching focus on refugees, human rights, humanitarianism, transitional justice, natural disasters, and gender. She serves as Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of International Development, and Associate Director of the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies. She also coordinates the McGill Refugee Research Group. She is the author of Refugee Repatriation: Justice, Responsibility and Redress (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and The International Organization for Migration: Commitments, Challenges, Complexities (Routledge, 2020).

Craig Damian Smith is senior research associate at the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University. He was previously Associate Director of the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and he is a Research Affiliate at York’s Centre for Refugee Studies. He is also the founder of Pairity, a data-driven platform to facilitate community-based refugee integration.

Shauna Labman is an associate professor of human rights in the Global College at the University of Winnipeg. She co-founded the Migration Law Research Cluster at the University of Manitoba and was a consultant for the Law Commission of Canada, the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in New Delhi. She is the author of Crossing Law’s Border: Canada’s Refugee Resettlement Program (UBC Press, 2020), and co-editor of Strangers to Neighbours: Refugee Sponsorship in Context (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020)