Ottawa has pushed a five-day pause button on the arrival of government-sponsored refugees in Toronto at the request of a non-profit agency handling local resettlement.

Mario Calla, executive director of COSTI Immigrant Services, said the large influx of Syrian refugees has put the non-profit organization behind in its task of finding housing for new arrivals.

“What we’re finding is that the families are larger than we had anticipated, which means that we would be looking for three- and four-bedroom housing,” Calla told the Star. “That’s more difficult to find, at least at the affordable level.”

In one of its daily reports to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, COSTI asked for a brief pause in refugee arrivals so it could hire more staff to track down suitable housing.

“The flow from the airplanes is not slowing down at all,” Immigration Minister John McCallum said in speech in Toronto Wednesday. “It’s just certain towns or cities need a pause.”

A spokesperson for McCallum’s department told CBC News in an email that “four communities, Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto and Halifax, have asked us to delay new arrivals for a few days.”

COSTI is under contract to the federal government to help find accommodations for refugees in the GTA. The Trudeau government aims to bring in 25,000 Syrian asylum seekers by the end of February. That’s on top of the 10,000 privately sponsored Syrians the Liberals say they are also aiming to accept by the end of the year.

With hundreds of refugees now cooped up in hotels in Toronto during the search for housing, voluntary groups committed to integrating Syrian arrivals voiced clashing views on the bottleneck.

“I can’t stand it anymore, the lack of preparedness,” said Michael Homsi, managing director of the non-profit group Friends of Syria.

“We stuff them in third-class hotels where nobody speaks one word of Arabic … There’s nothing to do for the children. Nothing, not even toys. And many are traumatized people,” he told the Star Wednesday.

Homsi called on the federal government to create a mechanism to hook up new arrivals with the private sponsorship groups clamouring to receive them.

Lifeline Syria disagreed.

“I don’t think anyone suddenly wants to see a blending of the government-assisted refugee flows and the privately sponsored refugee program,” Lifeline Syria spokesperson Peter Goodspeed wrote in an email Wednesday.

He said service providers like COSTI just need a little time to adjust to the “dramatic inflow” of refugees.

“They have had to ramp up their operations from a standing start that saw them handling a few hundred cases over a year, to one where they suddenly have to deal with thousands in a matter of weeks,” Goodspeed said.

On average it takes about two weeks for COSTI to find housing for new arrivals to Canada, according to the organization. With the influx of Syrian refugees, this wait period has doubled.

Former Toronto mayor John Sewell said that directly connecting government-sponsored refugees with private sponsorship groups would help solve a “substantial problem” by opening doors to permanent housing and the broader community for new arrivals as well as saving federal cash.

“It makes no sense for government-sponsored refugees to be stranded in hotels and barracks,” Sewell said.

Privately sponsored refugees’ needs are covered by their sponsors, but government-assisted refugees are taken care of by settlement groups which have agreements with the federal government.

The influx of Syrian refugee arrivals also forced agencies in Vancouver and Ottawa to request a break in the action earlier this week in order to hire extra staff and find permanent homes for those who have already arrived.

Asylum-seeking Syrians who were bound for any of the three cities — out of 36 designated as destinations for government-assisted refugees — will now remain in hotels for a few extra days or be redirected once their flights land in Canada this week, the immigration department said.

McCallum said at a news conference Wednesday that immigration officials were helping resettlement agencies hire more staff to help find medium-term housing for refugees.

“I am told this will be resolved in a matter of a few days, not longer than that,” McCallum said. “And, in the meanwhile, there are other places in Canada who are ready and willing to receive the refugees.”

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More cities could see Syrian refugees sent their way but federal funds to help support them will only last until March 2017.

As of Jan. 19, 11,866 Syrians in total have arrived in Canada, of which 6,456 are government-assisted, 4,664 privately sponsored and 746 a blend of the two programs.

With files from The Canadian Press

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