REFUGEES WILL FACE A CULTURAL CLIFF IN CANADA
and Canadians will be tested, too. Matthew Fisher reports from the overcrowded refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon.
‘All I know about Canada is the weather.”
That is what Ali Alali, a former Syrian culture ministry clerk who fled ISIL with his family last year, told me when I asked him what he knew about the country he might end up calling home one day soon. He even pretended to shiver, making a joke about how cold he imagined it might be.
Alali was one of dozens of Syrian refugees with whom I spoke during the past week in Lebanon, where many of the 4 million Syrians registered with the UNHCR are living. I asked everyone I talked to about what they knew about Canada. Only half of them, like Alali, were aware that it was cold there. About the same proportion knew that Christians lived there.
Almost nobody could tell me where Canada was, except that it was far away. Mentioning the names of Justin Trudeau or Stephen Harper drew a total blank. So did any mention of hockey.
Aside from a few of them who had relatives or friends who had emigrated to Canadian cities such as Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, the refugees that Immigration Canada is considering for selection appear to be blissfully ignorant about where they could be going.
Mustafa Sharawi, who with his wife and six children fled the rebel-occupied Syrian city of Idlib four years ago, expressed it succinctly.
“You ask me what I know about Canada and my answer is that I cannot even tell you what Syria is like any more.”
Their responses give a hint of the limited awareness of Canada that the 25,000 Syrians who will soon be on their way are likely to possess, not to mention the vastly different life experiences.
Imagine that you were a Syrian day labourer or a cigarette vendor with a wife and six children. Such a person would have lived his life until now by the rules of a deeply conservative patriarchal society that puts family honour above all else and would have been ruled by a dictator before being ruled by his equally ruthless son.
The typical family of the refugees that Canada is considering have mostly lived out in a desert, where temperatures dwell in the high forties for months at a time.
Having run from the most savage conflict yet in a region notorious for them, the refugees who have found sanctuary in Lebanon have been safe, but have not been made to feel terribly welcome. They have been living six or 8 or 10 of them crammed into one or two rooms. They scrape by doing menial work for which they get paid about one-third of what locals get.
As welcoming as most Canadians will be, they must also be understanding of the cultural cliff that their prospective compatriots will leap off the moment they step on board an aircraft for the first time in their lives and then step off on Canadian soil. All immigrants to Canada face similar challenges, but many of them chose Canada because they already had personal safety nets awaiting them there in the form of relatives or friends from the old neighbourhood. They also will have had a far better idea of what to expect when arriving in the dead of winter in one of the coldest places on earth.
Canada’s “refugees” will be nothing the like the million or so generally far more worldly Syrians who bolted for Europe this year. Many of the so-called Syrian refugees that I met during the spring and summer in Spain, Morocco, Greece and Sweden clearly had money and made no secret that they were country shopping for the best asylum deal they could find. Not for them a life in exile in what they regarded as second-tier countries such as Hungary, Italy, Poland or even France, which almost none of them thought worthy of them.
Their goal, repeated like a mantra in every interview was that it was Germany or Sweden or bust because those countries had the most generous handouts and offered lots of chances to seek higher education.
Aside from the affluent refugees, there were also large groups of single young men with no obvious skills among those who caught the wave to Europe. These kids, who security officials regard with particular anxiety, seemed to think of their trips as a lark. The civil war in Syria was a strong factor in their departure, but a big part of why they left home was to escape the cultural straightjacket there and have some fun.
Canada rightly decided it wanted no truck with those who were so obviously economic migrants, more than they were genuine refugees. Ottawa’s priority is to take strong family groups that are still languishing in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey because they could not afford the extortionate fees charged by human smugglers to get them to Europe.
Canada’s refugees are being drawn from a pool of the poorest of the poor. The prospective settlers whom I met in Lebanon and during previous visits to Jordan and Turkey overwhelmingly struck me as honest people who have lived through the twin hells of Bashar Assad’s tyrannical regime and subjugation by ISIL and the other violent outfits that want to inherit his mantle. Rather than inquiring even once about what entitlements Canada might provide them with, they repeatedly declared that their overriding consideration was simply to find a place to go that was peaceful.
Lacking higher education or easily transferable skill sets, and with scant English or French, they will require an immense amount of help and encouragement when they arrive on the other side of the pond. They will be in for a tough slog once they get their parkas, toques and galoshes on.
This is the refugees’ crucible. But it is Canada’s crucible, too.
ALMOST NOBODY COULD TELL ME WHERE CANADA WAS, EXCEPT THAT IT WAS FAR AWAY.