When Juan Ovidio Arango was taken hostage by paramilitaries in Colombia, he never imagined that 13 years later he would be living in the Quebec town of Sherbrooke.

After two months in captivity, Arango was free, but continued to receive death threats from the paramilitaries.  It was only through a provision in Canadian refugee law that he was able to get himself and his family out of Colombia.

The elimination of the Source Country refugee class leaves two classes through which people can apply for refugee status. Both require applicants to be outside of their home country

The provision invited people living in what were designated “Source Countries” — where there was civil war or armed conflict — to find safety in Canada.

That invitation was cancelled earlier this month.

On Oct. 6, Citizenship and Immigration Canada announced the Source Country class would be eliminated, to allow the government to focus on providing help to people in “real” need.

Normally, a refugee is defined as someone who has been forced to flee their home country and cannot return.  The Source Country class allowed people like Arango, whose lives are threatened and are still living in their home country, to seek refugee status in Canada without forcing them to chance a dangerous border crossing. 

Before the class was eliminated, six countries were designated “Source Countries”: Colombia, Sudan, El Salvador, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I had to run to save my life.”

In Colombia, Arango's kidnapping was hardly out of the ordinary. Violence has been commonplace since the early 1960s when the left-wing FARC rebels and right-wing National Liberation Army paramilitaries took up arms against each other.

“It was the paramilitaries who tried to kill me,” Arango says, speaking in French. “I had to run to save my life.”

People who have escaped their home countries can apply for refugee status in Canada through agencies such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Red Cross, or at the Canadian border. But people in countries like Colombia fear they won’t survive the escape.

Multimedia Multimedia: Mapping the struggles An interactive map lets you explore the Source Country nations, and see the number of people who sought help last year.

That’s why the Source Country class was so important for Arango.

Arango was a public official in his hometown, which he said increased the risk he would be killed, kidnapped or both. “I had to request refugee status, and after 18 months I came here,” he says.

He lived in a fairly industrialized town, and says for those in rural areas or with less resources, escape would be even more difficult. “For the people who are in the little villages far away, where the paramilitaries have more control, it’s much harder to flee.”

“When I got here, I had absolutely no idea where I was getting off, or where I was. My only focus was that my wife and my son and my daughter were safe,” Arango says. “We arrived in a snowstorm, but we were safe.”

Colombia is the largest producer of cocaine in the world, and the conflict is fuelled by the drug trade, in which both the FARC and the paramilitaries are involved.

Hostage-taking, torture and mysterious disappearances are commonplace, so the Canadian government had been accepting Source Country refugee applicants from the danger zone since 1998.

The other five “Source Countries” were each selected because civil war, genocide, and gang-related or other violence that put their citizens in what the government called “refugee-like” situations.

Arango is now the president of the Colombians’ Association of Sherbrooke. He says he and his organization are disappointed with the government’s decision to eliminate the Source Country class. Without it, he may never have made it to Canada.

Even once refugees have made it to Canada, some still fear for their lives and for their families back home, pushing many of them to keep their identities hidden.

Risking it all

“It’s often very difficult to get out of your country,” says Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees. “The only way to do it may be using a smuggler, or paying huge amounts of money to do dangerous things like get on a boat or cross at a dangerous border crossing.”

Dench and the CCR, a non-profit umbrella group of organizations that sponsor refugees and help them settle in Canada, strongly opposed the elimination of the Source Country class when Citizenship and Immigration Canada first proposed the idea in March 2011. In fact, the CCR wanted the program expanded to more countries in conflict.

But Citizenship and Immigration Canada said the class didn’t achieve what it was supposed to and expanding it would be pointless.

“The objective of the class was to offer resettlement assistance to people in need of protection who were in their own country, and were therefore not under the mandate of the UNHCR,” Remi Lariviere, a media relations representative for Citizenship and Immigration Canada, wrote in an email.

“In practice, however, the Source Country class was an inflexible tool which did not allow the government to respond to emerging situations.”

It was difficult to add new countries to the Source Country list, Lariviere said. Besides, very few people actually entered Canada under the class compared to the number who applied. In 2010, an average of 18 per cent of those who applied were accepted.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada said it is refocusing its efforts to help refugees who meet the UNHCR definition and who have already fled to another country. When Canada receives refugee applications that have been screened through UNHCR, the acceptance rate is more than 85 per cent.

“The only way to (get out of your country) may be using a smuggler, or paying huge amounts of money to do dangerous things like get on a boat or cross at a dangerous border crossing.”

“Canada’s resettlement program is most effective when CIC works with partners like the UNHCR,” Lariviere wrote.

By screening applicants, UNHCR acts as a filter so that CIC only views applications they are likely to accept.

“They want somebody else to do the triaging,” Dench says. “They want someone to be pre-screening things and say ‘These are the ones that are most likely to fit the criteria.’”

Some organizations such as the Red Cross used to screen Source Country applications as well. But with corruption rampant in the designated “Source Countries” and more applications than they could handle, the organizations began to focus on applications from outside the country of origin. This left the majority of Source Country class applications being sent directly to the Canadian embassy.

An impossible choice

Since UNHCR’s mandate also only recognizes refugees as people who have fled their country of origin, it leaves out people who are living in situations like Arango’s — those who face danger whether they try to escape or stay. 

“There are people who are calling us directly from Colombia who are really in danger, but we don’t know what to do to help them,” says Louise Corriveau, who has worked with refugees in the resettlement agency "Services d'aide aux Néo-canadiens" in Sherbrooke.

“There are people who are calling us ... who are really in danger, but we don’t know what to do to help them”

In the process of escaping their homes and arriving in a neighbouring country, refugees leave behind their means of support — both financially and emotionally.

“Many Colombian women who have been forced to flee the violence in Colombia have gone to neighbouring countries such as Ecuador… and end up prostituting themselves in order to support themselves,” the CCR’s Janet Dench says.

Francisco Olivero fled Colombia in the late 1990s and was lucky to land in the United States, where he was able to send for his two sons. Now living in Canada, Olivero wants more of his family to have the chance live in a peaceful country, but knows they will be risking their lives to do so. Without the Source Country class, Olivero’s sister and brother-in-law are forced to make the dangerous crossing into Ecuador in order to qualify as refugees. They have decided it’s not worth the risk, and think they are better off staying in Colombia.

With his family still in danger at home, Olivero is afraid to reveal too much about his identity for fear his relatives will be targeted in Colombia.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney refused to comment on the decision to eliminate the Source Country refugee class.

 The Canadian government maintains that people like Olivero's family are not abandoned. Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney has discretionary authority to respond to people in danger in their home countries on a case-by-case basis. Lariviere cites the risk of honour killings or anti-gay violence as potential situations in which the Minister might intervene. The minister declined to comment to Capital News on the policy change, despite repeated requests.

While eliminating the Source Country class, CIC is also increasing the number of refugees accepted by 20 per cent, which amounts to an additional 2,500 people annually.

Still, these will be people referred by UNHCR or private sponsors. People still living in Sierra Leone, Guatemala, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, El Salvador and Colombia are ineligible.

“If the files are accepted by UNHCR, all the better, but the files that went to the embassies [to apply for refugee status under the Source Country class] were files that also deserve to be evaluated,” Corriveau says.

Dench says that while the CCR maintains its position that the Source Country class is an important tool for bringing people safely to Canada, she’s not sure what else to do.

“We had our opportunity to give our input and it clearly did not sway the government, so there aren’t many options left for us,” Dench says.

Corriveau agrees.

“What can we do? We can scream, we can cry, but we don’t have any power over the government,” she says. “But of course, we can’t be okay with this.”

Mapping the Struggles

Click on the highlighted countries to find out more about why it was designated a Source Country, and how many of the refugee applications received were accepted last year.