Karin Gordon and Hospitality House

refugee resettlement: Liberals shift immigration focus to family reunification, refugee resettlement The plan is for Canada to bring in 280,000 to 305,000 new permanent residents in 2016, including 51,000 to 57,000 refugees. "We're very pleased," said Karin Gordon, resettlement executive director with Hospitality House, an agency with a mandate to sponsor as many refugees as possible. "We've lost at least 20 people in the Mediterranean we had sponsorships for," she said. "They just couldn't wait any more." While Gordon supports an increase in the number of refugees accepted by Canada, she worries about a lack of human resources to process claims in a timely way. "The previous government was not funding visa posts properly, and so there was a huge bottleneck of processing sponsorship applications," she said, according to CBC. Hospitality House is currently helping more than 1,000 refugee claimants come to Canada. Canada is shifting its policies to allow more family reunification and refugee resettlement, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister John McCallum said. Some of the claimants have waited for years to have their papers processed, she said. Denetto also said an increase in the number of new Canadians admitted to the country has to be paired with an increase in funding. Move in the right direction' The interim head of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba offered similar praise for the plan. "It absolutely a move in the right direction," said Shereen Denetto, interim executive director at IRCOM. Denetto praised Canada increased focus on reuniting families rather than accepting immigrants based on economic needs. "The federal government has heard what the sector has long been saying — to make immigration successful, we have to make it easier for families to be reunited," she said. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.