Chris Friesen and Housing Stock

federal Immigration Department: Even though the group added 700 beds to its housing stock, it is still taking time to find permanent homes, Chris Friesen said. "Nobody is stuck in an airport for a week or something like that," he said. "Overseas, what it means is either they will put them on later flights or they may them to new centres that have current capacity just to keep the flow going," he said, according to Huffington Post Canada. Friesen said it also took more time than expected for the federal Immigration Department to process the cheques newcomers use to pay for their first homes and other needs. A surge of arrivals in the last month filled temporary housing to capacity and the settlement groups responsible say they need time to move people into permanent homes before they can accept any new cases. "Nobody is stuck in an airport for a week or something like that." The director of settlement for the Immigrant Services Society of B.C. says the pause in Vancouver will last five days, beginning Tuesday. Ottawa also feeling overwhelmed In Ottawa, officials had been gearing up for large numbers of privately sponsored refugees but what came first was the influx of government-assisted ones, filling the available beds. The pause only applies to government-assisted refugees, those whose costs are covered entirely by the federal government. A delay in accepting new government-assisted refugees could last as long as a week. "The timing just needs to be spread out a bit, it just been this huge influx over a two-week period," said Leslie Emory, the executive director of the Ottawa Immigrant Community Services Organization. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.