Chris Alexander and Sponsorship Applications

sponsorship applications: The government will also put more diplomats on the ground overseas to screen refugees, more than double the number of staff working to process sponsorship applications here in Canada, and appoint a special co-ordinator to handle the overall file of Syrian and Iraqi refugees, according to The Chronicle Herald. Security screening will remain the top priority, Chris Alexander, the minister of citizenship and immigration, said Saturday at a news conference in east Toronto where he campaigning for re-election on Oct. 19. Syrians fleeing the civil war and sectarian conflict will no longer have to prove they are convention refugees under the United Nations Refugee Agency, but will be presumed to be refugees by Canadian authorities for the purposes of vetting their applications. Alexander stressed that the government is accelerating our existing commitment to refugee resettlement, not increasing the actual target numbers. A campaigning Prime Minister Stephen Harper has also proposed to bring in an additional 10,000 Syrian refugees if re-elected. But the new measures, which are expected to cost $25 million over two years, could speed up the movement of some 10,000 Syrian refugees to Canada from the current three-year timetable by about 15 months, he said. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.