Intact donating $75,000 to help Syrian refugees get jobs in Canada

Two days after The Co-operators Group Ltd. announced its intent to provide $250,000 towards helping Syrian refugees find jobs in Canada, Intact Financial Corp. said it is donating $75,000 to immigrant employment centres across Canada, with a goal of helping Syrian refugees.

The federal government will have brought in “15,000 government-sponsored Syrian refugees by the end of February 2016,” Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith told the House of Commons earlier this month.

The civil war in Syria “has displaced 11.6 million people, including 7.6 million people internally, making the situation in Syria the largest humanitarian crisis worldwide,” the United States Central Intelligence Agency notes in its World Fact Book.

Toronto-based Intact stated Wednesday that the Intact Foundation will be donating $75,000 to immigrant employment centres in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver.

“The intention is to focus on Syrian refugees,” an Intact spokesperson told Canadian Underwriter, adding that the employment centres receiving donations would be registered charities.

Known until 2009 as ING Insurance Company of Canada, Intact Financial’s companies include: Intact Insurance; non-standard Ontario auto carrier Jevco; direct writer belairdirect; Equisure Financial Network Inc.; and Canada Brokerlink Inc., which operates brokerages in Ontario and Alberta plus Macdonald Chisholm Trask in Atlantic Canada.

Intact’s donation is intended to “help support immigrant placement through mentorship programs,” Intact said in a release. “Intact Insurance and belairdirect will also work with the centres to provide employees the opportunity to mentor immigrants who have expressed an interest in finding employment in the insurance industry.”

On top of that, Intact said it has donated $100,000 to UNICEF Canada to help Syrian refugee youth.

Related: The Co-operators commits $250,000 to helping Syrian refugees gain employment

“With the support of Intact and other generous Canadian donors we are reaching the most vulnerable children with critical health, education and protection programs to ensure a whole generation of children is not lost,” UNICEF Canada president and CEO David Morley stated in a release.

The Intact Foundation “has contributed over $26 million in charitable funding to over 1,300 organizations nationally” since 2004, Intact noted.

Intact is the top Canadian P&C insurer when measured by net premiums written in 2014, according to the Canadian Underwriter Statistical Issue. The Co-operators ranked sixth, ahead of Desjardins, which in 2014 was counted separately from State Farm.

The Co-operators announced Dec. 14 it has committed $250,000 towards “a special one-time grant program” that would “support organizations’ initiatives aimed at preparing refugees for employability in Canada.”

Co-operators employees are eligible to use two paid days a year to volunteer towards such efforts, the carrier said Dec. 14. That policy does not necessarily apply to agencies selling Co-operators policies.

In Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) “continues to commit gross, systematic abuses of human rights and violations of international law, including indiscriminate killing and deliberate targeting of civilians, mass executions and extrajudicial killings, persecution of individuals and entire communities on the basis of their identity, kidnapping of civilians, forced displacement of Shia communities and minority groups, killing and maiming of children, rape and other forms of sexual violence, along with numerous other atrocities,” the United States Department of States notes on its website.

ISIL “seeks to inspire terrorist attacks for the mass displacement of refugees and for the intimidation of others,” Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan recently told the Commons in Ottawa.

Photo: Officers with Canada Border Services Agency review Syrian refugees’ documents in Beirut, Lebanon. Photo by Corporal Mathieu Gaudreault, Canadian Forces