The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Are we doing enough for our most vulnerable newcomers?
Everything I know about the short life of Ahmad Maher Al Marrach is so crushingly sad. That eight years ago, he and his family somehow managed to flee war-torn Syria as refugees in search of “a better life” here in Canada.
That in their new home “that is not what he found,” according to a Gofundme campaign set up to help his family.
On social media, it was said that the family, like so many Syrian newcomers to Halifax, “lived in poverty, in a dangerous environment, enrolled in an educational system that could not support them” and “left them feeling unsuccessful and unsafe.”
The family, the Gofundme campaign organizer wrote, “were barely surviving.”
And that was before Monday when police were called to the Halifax Shopping Centre where an injured teen lay bleeding in the parking lot. Ahmad later died in hospital.
As you probably know by now, two 14-year-olds were charged with second-degree murder in the death. The police said there was no indication that the incident was hate-related. As I wrote this, the motive for the senseless, tragic death was a mystery.
DEEP DESPAIR
So the mourning over his death was deep, within the local Syrian community, and at his old school where a poster of Ahmad appeared in a hallway, but also by those who had likely never met him but were moved enough by his tragic story to contribute to the Gofundme campaign which by week’s end had topped the organizer’s $50,000 goal.
There is nothing sadder than a young person’s death. The despair deepens when those charged with the crime are barely teens themselves.
And when the backstory is as forlorn as this one, in which a young newcomer’s dreams, even before their tragic end, seem to have been shattered by the reality of his new life.
That is what made me put fingers to keyboard: the question of how many narratives similar to Ahmad’s family’s — of newly arrived refugee families overwhelmed by struggles that most of us know nothing about — are out there?
And whether we are doing all that we can for them.
There is an urgency to this issue: although the messaging has quieted lately, until recently, the Houston government was aiming for Nova Scotia to double its population to two million by 2060 with a goal, in time, of attracting 25,000 newcomers per year.
That seems ambitious for a place half that size already struggling with our newfound status as an enviable place to live.
To put that in context, in 2021, the last year for which there are official numbers, Nova Scotia welcomed a record-breaking 9,025 new permanent residents, barely a third of what will be necessary to meet the necessary pace of immigration.
Many of those will be from other provinces, lured here by a real estate market that is still less overheated than elsewhere in the country, and the relatively new option of working remotely for an employer that could be anywhere.
Some though, will be new Canadians. Last June, the provincial government announced that it could welcome 5,430 immigrants in the upcoming year under the Provincial Nominee and Atlantic Immigration programs, up from a total of 3,857 in 2021.
GROWING PAINS
Our province’s growing pains present challenges for many of us. But for those forced to leave their countries and suddenly living in a strange new land, they must be particularly profound.
There is, for starters, accessing care in our over-burdened health-care system.
If it is hard for Nova Scotians, no matter how long they have lived here, to see a doctor, finding affordable shelter is no easier. Average rent for a two-bedroom home in Halifax at the start of April was $2,471 a month.
That is, if you can find an apartment in a city with a one per cent vacancy rate, in a province where the housing crisis is so acute that consultant Turner Drake & Partners predicts Nova Scotia will be short 41,200 homes in less than five years.
The shelter shortage helps explain why, according to United Way Halifax, Nova Scotia has the highest percentage of people living below the poverty line in the country, with Halifax experiencing the highest poverty rate of any Canadian urban centre.
The poverty situation may be worse for newcomers. According to a recent report by Canada’s parliamentary budget officer, the wage gap for new immigrants is narrowing, but in 2018 was still just 78 per cent of the medium income recorded by all tax filers in the country.
PACKED SCHOOLS
On top of it all, the province’s schools, particularly those in area’s experiencing a population influx, are jam-packed. Class sizes have swelled to unmanageable levels due to a lack of classroom and sometimes a shortage of teachers.
That is bad for all students but just imagine if you are a new immigrant, with rudimentary, if any, written or spoken English, dropped into a large class, taught by an overwhelmed teacher, without the kind of supports you need.
I have no idea if this was the case for Ahmad. But from what little I have been able to piece together, his days in Halifax sounded like they were hard, even before he stepped into that shopping centre parkade, where someone waited.
That is why we need to do what we can, not just to grow the province’s population, but to ensure that every citizen who arrives in Nova Scotia is able to find that better life we all seek here.