When Mimi Merrill fled to Canada in 2003 as a student and refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, it was 17 years before she saw her mother again.
Her mother was eventually able to make a brief visit to Canada. However, when Merrill applied for her mother to become a permanent resident of Canada through the Parents and Grandparents Program sponsorship visa, the application was denied. “I don’t know if I’ll see her again,” Merrill says.
Today, Merrill is refugee sponsorship coordinator for the Anglican diocese of Ontario—and one of many Anglicans across Canada speaking out against about cuts to refugee sponsorship and foreign aid in the latest federal budget announced Nov. 4, warning that these cuts will harm humanitarian efforts and even put lives at risk.
The first budget tabled under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney, which Parliament will vote on Nov. 17, would reduce Canada’s international assistance by $2.7 billion over four years. It would also see a 30-per-cent reduction in privately sponsored refugees from 23,000 in 2025 to 16,000 in 2026.
As both a refugee herself and coordinator of refugee sponsorship efforts, Merrill says she knows both the heartbreak of families that have been separated and the joy of those that have been reunited. She has seen refugees who have gone on to attend university or own businesses in Canada.
“We know these people,” Merrill says. “We meet their families who are here, and we see their hope. A lot of people have been separated for a very long time.”
“My child has only met her grandmother briefly for a few months,” she adds. “It brings me joy when I see refugee families be able to grow up with their grandchildren and see all those things. Everyone deserves that.”
Alongside Hope, formerly known as the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, has signed a letter expressing concern over the cuts to international assistance as part of a coalition of more than 100 NGOs, led by Cooperation Canada and the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health.
Executive director Will Postma says Alongside Hope is looking at encouraging supporters to contact their MPs to speak out against what he calls a “serious reduction” in aid. He also strongly criticizes the reduction in privately sponsored refugees the federal government will allow into Canada.
‘Fewer and fewer that we are going to be able to help’
“We’re saddened and we’re shocked by this 30-per-cent decrease in allocations,” Postma says. Through their churches and dioceses, he says, Canadian Anglicans are “doing amazing work … helping refugees who are resettled as new Canadians contribute to the economy, contribute to our social fabric, contribute to the vitality and flourishing of our churches.”
Fifteen Anglican dioceses across Canada are currently sponsorship agreement holders (SAHs), meaning they are private sponsors of refugees who also help refugees resettle as new Canadians. Each Anglican diocese SAH has a refugee coordinator, who meet annually as the Alongside Hope Refugee Network to exchange information and strategize prior to the annual meeting of all Canadian SAHs with the government.
Refugee sponsorship, Postma says, is an area where Canada has led the world as a place where “those who come as refugees are cared for, so that they in turn can care for others.” He calls the decrease in privately sponsored refugees “alarming” and “a pushback on really good work by Canadian citizens, by Canadian voters, by Canadians who care for the needs of people who are fleeing such hurt and harm in their communities and just want to take care of their families like we do here.”
Jane Townshend, chairperson of the Anglican diocese of Huron refugee committee, says the cuts to refugee sponsorship have had an immediate impact on her work. Speaking to the Anglican Journal on Nov. 11, Townshend said she had received eight sponsorship requests from people around the world that morning alone.
“We are receiving daily requests from people and it’s fewer and fewer that we are going to be able to help,” Townshend says.
Recalling conversations at a meeting in her diocese about the impact of the cuts on refugee sponsorship, she adds, “You feel like you’re playing God … That feeling came out, and was stated in the meeting, of trying to see who you can help and who you can’t help.”
Eritrea, Sudan, Syria and Afghanistan are significant source countries for refugee applications in her diocese, Townshend says.
The diocese of Huron recently received members of a family in Eritrea, who were in Sudan when the latter’s ongoing civil war broke out in 2023. The family split up “to try and see who was going to live and make it,” Townshend says, with father and children going one way and mother and children going another. Local authorities eventually picked up the father and the children with him.
“We believe Dad was killed back in Eritrea,” Townshend says. The children with him, the youngest a girl of 13, “are all in jail until what we understand is 2026, but we really don’t know,” she adds.
Meanwhile, the mother and children with her recently arrived in Canada in the diocese of Huron. “That’s our daily reality,” Townshend says.
Sarah Cooper, coordinator of the diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island’s refugee sponsorship program, notes that the government plans to reduce refugees allowed into Canada occurs at a time of record displacement for people around the world.
More than 122 million people were forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence and human rights violations at the end of April 2025, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“It doesn’t really track,” Cooper says. “We’re going down in the numbers we’re accepting to Canada, and yet the crisis worldwide is at a peak.”
Foreign aid cuts mean ‘steep reduction’ in health care: Postma
Cuts to foreign assistance will further hurt efforts by Canadians to help people in other parts of the world, Postma says.
Health may be one of the biggest sectors affected, he adds. Canada had played an important role in ensuring access to HIV antiretroviral medication in remote and rural areas of the global South, Postma says, as well as support for vaccines and immunization against diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria that people in marginalized areas remain vulnerable to.
“We’re really concerned,” Postma says. “We see this as a steep reduction in care.”
Funding from the Canadian government has previously helped support Alongside Hope initiatives such as the “solar suitcases” program in East Africa, which pays for portable solar power units that provide vital electricity at rural health clinics in Mozambique, Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania.
Federal government funds also helped support Alongside Hope’s maternal and child health program, All Mothers and Children Count, from 2016 to 2022. This “highly impactful” program, Postma says, “saved lives, connected health outcomes to food security and strengthened partners and their work with local governments” in the same four East African countries.
Postma emphasizes that money spent on foreign assistance represents only 0.35 per cent of Canada’s gross national income, according to Cooperation Canada.
Foreign assistance, he says, “is about dignity. It’s about compassion. It’s about care for those not just who are vulnerable or marginalized, but those who have been made vulnerable and made marginalized by climate change or by the vagaries of our globalizing world.”
“This is also an investment,” he adds. “It’s not just money that goes out the door in support of those who are in need, but it’s an investment in stability in stronger communities and partners around the world where we work.
“It could be Ukraine. It could be our partners in Gaza working with the Episcopal diocese of Jerusalem. It could be our partners in South Sudan or Kenya—many parts of the world where we are active not just in funding, but also in relationship building.”
Speaking against cuts to refugee sponsorship, Cooper likewise emphasizes community and relationships that link Canadians and people in need in other parts of the world.
“Jesus himself … was a refugee,” Cooper says. “There’s a lot of rhetoric out there that ‘we have to help our own,’ and my question would be, well, who’s our own?”
“I think God would want us to think of the world as our own people … Our own is humanity,” she adds. “When we see someone suffering, that person is our own, so we help them. We have the capacity do that in Canada, so we should do it.”
