A few years ago, The New Republic held a contest for most boring news headline. “A Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” won. But at least one worthwhile Canadian initiative is far from boring – and it is saving lives.

This week, Dean Barry, Immigration Counsellor with the Canadian High Commission in Canberra, came out to Wellington to tell us how Canada manages to accommodate so many refugees. They do it by letting communities help.

Private sponsors sign up to provide financial and emotional support for a refugee’s first year in the country. If a sponsoring organisation knows refugees abroad that they want to help, they can nominate those refugees. The government runs extensive background checks to ensure the nominated refugee meets security requirements. The government also vets the sponsors to make sure that they are up to the rather substantial task. If the sponsors simply want to help whoever is in most need, they can sponsor the next refugee on the UN High Commission for Refugees list.

Canada has almost 40 years’ experience on which to draw, beginning with the support Canada provided to Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s. The government, and sponsoring organisations, have learned rather a lot about how to make this kind of programme work.

The sponsorship channel reduces, but does not eliminate, the fiscal cost to the government of accepting new refugees. Government-funded health care services and education are provided immediately on arrival. But both of those are rightly seen as investments in people who will become future taxpayers and patriotic citizens.

More importantly, sponsored refugees wind up having better outcomes in Canada than those entering the country through the government’s standard quota. Being sponsored embeds you in a local community, with people who care and who can help with the simple details of daily life in a new country that can be daunting for any migrant.

And the potential to sponsor someone – to bring them out of misery and into a better life – opens hearts and wallets. Where Kiwis might fear that nobody would want to take on that responsibility, Canada has the opposite problem: the government cannot process new refugee applications quickly enough to meet sponsor demand.

New Zealand can and should learn from this worthwhile Canadian initiative. Double the refugee quota, which has not kept up with population growth. But also allow a sponsorship path to let more caring people help.