Quebec City preparing to welcome Syrian refugees
After having been vilified in the media for saying Quebec City ideally would not welcome any “frustrated 20-year-old Syrians,” Mayor Régis Labeaume may have felt vindicated Monday.
But if he did, he wasn’t letting on publicly, following a report that Canada’s Syrian refugee plan would be limited to women, children and families. Federal Immigration Minister John McCallum is set to unveil details of the muchanticipated plan on Tuesday. Unaccompanied Syrian men seeking asylum will be excluded, the CBC reported, because of ongoing security concerns.
Labeaume had to retract comments he made last week about Syrian refugees. The mayor said at the time: “If you have orphans, we’ll take them in Quebec City because we would feel very useful. I don’t know if it’s possible ... Let’s start with orphans, then families with children, and then single people, but not too many,” he said, adding “families are less scary to people than frustrated 20-year-olds. We would feel more useful welcoming children.”
The mayor back-pedalled two days later and said his comments had been misinterpreted. “Still, ‘frustrated guys,’ I shouldn’t have said that. When you think about it, I’m the one who’s a frustrated old man.”
“If we have a contingent (of refugees) arriving on Dec. 1, we will do everything we can. We will get to work. I presume that we will start paying bills because we have no idea who will pay,” Labeaume said.
Until details of the federal plan are revealed, the mayor will not be making additional comments, said his press attaché, Paul-Christian Nolin.
But as Labeaume waited for federal signals, on the ground, preparations accelerated. Quebec City is expected to welcome between 500 and 800 refugees starting next week, with the Valcartier military base at the heart of operations.
Dominique Tessier from the Department of National Defence said CFB Valcartier will be asking some personnel who are temporarily staying at the base for training and courses to move to another wing “to free up contiguous space for possible refugee accommodation.”
Quebec City’s Centre Multiethnique, which has been helping refugees settle in the provincial capital for the past 55 years, said its phones have been ringing off the hook. “We haven’t felt any negativity, on the contrary,” said Marie-Claude Gilles, the centre’s vice-president. “We had about 60 volunteers; now we’re more than 100. Our volunteer training sessions are full until January.”
Gilles said the centre is waiting to find out whether it will have to go collect the refugees from Valcartier, to help them acquire social insurance and medicare cards, open bank accounts, find apartments, and register children in daycare or school.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Red Cross told the Montreal Gazette it has raised $6.6 million so far to provide refugees with assistance during their journey and after they have landed in Canada. That amount has yet to be broken down by provinces, said spokesperson Carl Boisvert. “Usually, our mission is to take care of refugees’ basic needs for shelter, food and clothing,” he said, adding the Red Cross is waiting on McCallum’s plan before taking any further action. “The federal government will assign us a task,” Boisvert said.
The Red Cross website states that for every dollar donated to registered Canadian charities between Sept. 12 and Dec. 31 in response to the conflict in Syria, the government of Canada will match it by setting aside one dollar in its own Syria Emergency Relief Fund, for a maximum of $100 million.