The Interesting Dilemmas of Private Sponsorship

by Stephen Watt, the co-founder of Northern Lights Canada, which facilitates private sponsorship to Canada

In some ways, the way Canada welcomes its refugees and newcomers is one of its biggest success stories, and a point of strength and national pride. And the feather in the cap of its multicultural policy is surely our private sponsorship program, which has come to stand as a model that other countries (like France and Australia, among others) have tried to emulate, without much success. There’s just something very made-in-Canada about the program that doesn’t travel well to countries that have less of a culture and tradition of welcoming outsiders.

And yet, and yet… before you dismiss this article as being more Canadian propaganda, let me take a moment for full disclosure. As someone who has been involved as a sponsor for over five years, and now spends a lot of my free time promoting the virtues of private sponsorship to others, I have seen a range of outcomes. Which you might expect, people being the complicated creatures that we are. When things go wrong, they can go very wrong indeed.

Most of the time, the experiences of sponsored newcomers and their sponsors pretty much live up to the hype. By the time they arrive in Canada, the newcomers are permanent residents – refugees no more. Within a year, they are usually well on their way to being established in their new country. Within three years or so, they are on the path to becoming Canadian citizens. And even still, they are likely to stay close to the Canadian sponsors who took a chance on strangers on the other side of the world, who welcomed them into their lives as if they were family. 

Yet the familial comparison points to one particular risk of private sponsorship. “They’re just like family,” is something you hear a lot from both sponsors and newcomers. This phrase means different things, depending on who is saying it. If you’re a Canadian, are you likely to take advice from a newcomer mom on how to raise your children? Yet most sponsors would find it normal and fairly sensible to advise a newcomer to put her kids to bed earlier than she might, say, in the Middle East, since a tired child makes a poor student.

There’s a power imbalance, in other words, between the sponsor and the sponsored, that is probably unavoidable and can lead to trouble. Case in point: some neighbours of mine sponsored a large family through the blended visa program. The family had been living in a refugee camp, and were vulnerable on a number of counts, including lack of literacy and some medical challenges.

To their credit, my neighbours did a valiant job in trying to get the family established when they arrived, but eventually some differences proved too much to navigate. The father in the family resented taking orders from a bunch of Canadian women who usually sided with his wife, since she was better equipped, in some ways, to adjust to her adopted country. When the sponsors would visit, translators by their side, he would smoke like a chimney and often tell the translators (also women) to fuck off in their common language. 

Needless to say, my neighbours didn’t stay especially close to the dad once the standard 12 months of settlement support finished.

The clash of expectations and cultures, when mixed with a power imbalance, can be a harmful combination. In such cases, the family comparison makes things worse. One woman I know, who had sponsored a number of younger refugees, cut ties with half of them when they did not follow her instructions about where to live and work. The fact that she often referred to herself as a ‘mother’ to the newcomers hinted at the problem. A mother is someone who loves you, but she’s also someone whose advice you’d better take. Or else.

Now we get to the problem of Canadian myth-making, which helps fuel participation in the private sponsorship program, and is at the heart of our nation’s policy on multiculturalism. The happy images of newcomers being greeted with Canadian flags at the airport by their sponsors and other well-wishers: these are entirely genuine. If you’ve never taken part in an airport arrival, let me tell you: it can be more emotionally rewarding than the best wedding you ever attended. Those tears are real.

Yet images tell different stories, depending on the context. The fact that our current Prime Minister took part in these airport greetings at the peak of the influx of Syrian newcomers in 2015 and 2016 show how easily such pictures, and the moments they capture, can be used for political or propagandistic ends. And even if we remove the Liberals from the equation, the fact that we’re draping newcomers in Canadian flags speaks volumes to the implicit message of these images. The airport arrivals are like newborns to our country, whose past experiences are barely relevant now that their Canadian journey has begun.

Seen this way, newcomers as blank slates, they are bound to find themselves misunderstood and underappreciated. Their differences with Canadian norms and practises are then seen as quaint oddities or outright problems. And there are inevitable moments of culture clash with their sponsors, classmates, or employers, who may not understand from where these differences arise.

And while we’re throwing around stereotypes, let me say, as someone born in this country, that part of being Canadian is to shrink from conflict and take the path of least resistance. When we run up against something we don’t understand, we stay silent or change the subject to something easier – like the weather!

Most private sponsors I know tend to do the lightest exploration of the cultures and experiences of the people they sponsor. They might know a bit about the history of the conflict or persecution that drove them from their homelands – whatever simplified version they were able to glean from a newspaper article, or the CBC. They might listen to a bit of the music, or take the easiest and most pleasurable road of eating all the food the newcomers are kind enough to cook up for them. (Guilty of that one!) 

But how much do they really dig into the differences that set the newcomers apart? Very little, because this kind of cultural learning takes work, and it can lead to – you guessed it, conflict. Do I really want to know that your religion says about people of my religion, or lack of religion? Or what it says about the ideal family arrangement? Speaking of mental work, do I really want to keep track of the leading poets in a language I cannot read, or the 7,000 years of other poets who preceded them? And only to find out you don’t particularly know or care about the poets I studied in school?

Yet what a wonderful thing if you do spend the time and energy. A friend of mine, Jaivet, works at a start-up called Needlist that brings tech solutions to humanitarian crises. In that role, he is sometimes called upon to talk to potential clients. One thing he learned in this job was that a “yes” was easy, but a “no” to a sales pitch was (paradoxically enough) more productive. As he says, “When someone says no, they are putting up a barrier to protect themselves. If you can dig into that barrier and discover what’s behind it, you’re much closer to finding the answer they need.”

In that spirit, let’s make the most of this giant multicultural experiment we call a country, and seek out people whose perspectives and assumptions we find alien or challenging. Let’s take a stance of openness and really listen, letting people tell their stories in their own terms, in their own language. And when our ideas clash and – heaven forbid – come into conflict, let’s dig into no, so to speak. That’s where the real discovery and connection begins.