Shadi Alkhalifeh was full of guilt when he, his wife and three children were picked to resettle to Canada last year, leaving behind their loved ones in Turkey and Syria.

Almost a year after arriving in Uxbridge, the family lives comfortably in a modest three-bedroom apartment; the children are in school and learning; and Alkhalifeh, a former surgical nurse, works as a personal support worker in a mental health facility in Newmarket.

Since coming to Canada, Alkhalifeh has been tirelessly looking for ways to help bring his loved ones here, including his parents. The Uxbridge sponsorship group that brought the Alkahlifehs to Canada is already sponsoring his younger brother, Mohamad, in Turkey.

“That is our dream,” said Alkhalifeh, 39. “Life is miserable in Turkey and Syria for my family. We think of them all the time. We are happy we have the opportunity for a new life in Canada but we are missing our families a lot. Our new life is incomplete without them.”

However, the journey of family reunification won’t be easy because Ottawa limits the number of refugees that can be resettled by sponsorship groups each year.

After welcoming more than 48,000 Syrian refugees into the country over the last two years, Canada is faced with a new challenge known in the refugee sponsorship circles as the “echo effect” — the surge in demand to sponsor the families and relatives of recently resettled refugees, said Janet Dench of the Canadian Council for refugees.

In 2017, there are only some 16,000 private sponsorship spots for refugees. Separately, there are 7,500 spots for government-assisted refugees and 1,500 for those referred by visa offices, who are selected by authorities and prioritized for the most vulnerable. The spots must accommodate refugees from around the world.

A spokesperson for the Immigration Department said the government has to limit the number of applications so officials can “work through large inventories and reduce wait times.”

While asylum-seekers must typically obtain a refugee determination certificate from United Nations to be eligible for resettlement in Canada, Ottawa exempted all Syrians and Iraqis from the requirement in 2015 and 2016. However, this year, only the first 1,000 are not required to get the UN designation.

As a result of the “echo effect,” the Immigration Department currently is having problem finding community groups to sponsor refugees to fill the visa-office-referred refugee spots because community sponsorship groups would rather focus on bringing in those connected with their sponsored families.

“When you resettle refugees, there are family members that they are concerned about,” said Dench. “You hear them talk about their parents, brothers and sisters somewhere else. It is hard for sponsorship groups to sponsor somebody else and turn your back on a real situation before you.”

Rob Shropshire, who works on refugee sponsorship and special projects at the Presbyterian Church in Canada, said his sponsors only picked up 10 refugee cases referred by Canadian officials this year, less than a third of the 33 total in 2016 when sponsorship groups were desperate to match with just about any Syrian family.

“Last year we had a lot of interest for the (visa-office) referred cases, but not this year,” said Shropshire, whose group has been allotted only 77 spots for refugees from all countries under the church’s cap this year. “There is a big demand for named sponsorships for Syrians.”

Colleen Colman, a volunteer with Ripple Effect, the sponsorship group that brought the Alkhalifeh’s to Canada, said getting their loved ones out of harm’s way has preoccupied the family’s mind and affected their full settlement.

“They have a lot of guilt being safe and away, and not able to help. Part of the heartache is they need to establish themselves before they can sponsor their family members,” said Colman. “It occupies a lot of their waking thoughts. It’s like a piece of them is not in Canada yet.”

In addition to the annual cap, Canada’s refugee sponsorship program only allows resettlement of those displaced outside of their country of origin. In Alkhalifeh’s case, his parents, Mahmoud and Sabah, and a younger sister, Ataa, are still stranded in Syria.

The only option for Alkhalifeh is to bring them to Canada on his own under the family reunification program, which only allots 10,000 spaces for parents and grandparents this year through lottery. However, as a family of five persons, he would need to make $66,654 a year to be eligible to sponsor his parents; he now makes only $14 an hour while working 42 hours a week — less than half of what he needs.

Alkhalifeh said he and his family last saw his parents in 2010 before civil war erupted in Syria. Since then, they only communicate through WhatsApp and Skype when internet service is available in Damascus.

“My kids miss their grandpa and grandma, and all their cousins. We just feel so sad,” said Alkhalifeh, who has lost some 3,000 precious family photos that were on his smartphone after it was infected with viruses. “If you can help us to see our family, we would be really grateful.”

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Debbie Douglas of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants said Ottawa must remove its caps on refugee resettlement and put more resources into processing sponsorship applications.

“Family reunifications for refugees should be a priority. The government needs to lift the caps and beef up the processing time,” she said.

Between November 2015 and this past July, Canada welcomed 25,000 government-assisted Syrian refugees, as well as 19,000 by private sponsors and 4,400 under the joint government-and-private sponsorships. There are some 5,000 government-supported and 16,000 privately-sponsored applications in process.