FROM HOMELESS TO HOME
OTTAWA• With suitcases stacked on luggage carts and blue bags full of info from government agencies on top, 163 Syrians lined up at the Beirut airport Thursday to begin the long journey to Canada.
They boarded a military plane as the vanguard of 25,000 refugees the Liberal government wants to bring to Canada by the end of February.
Photos taken by the Canadian Forces at the airport point showed a mix of men and women, teens and young children, some being offered teddy bears by Canadian officials.
The flight left Beirut en route to Germany, where the military Airbus was to stop for refuelling and a change of crew before heading on to Toronto, where it was expected to arrive late Thursday night.
All the Syrians on board are being sponsored by private groups, many of whom had filed the paperwork months ago to bring in some of the estimated 4.3 million people displaced by the continuing civil war.
But the sponsors will have to wait awhile longer before they personally greet the new arrivals. The first Canadians the Syrians will meet on landing at Toronto’s Pearson airport will include civil servants and border officers who will complete the final pieces of paperwork required.
From there, 116 will head to new homes in the Toronto area. Another four will go to Windsor, Ont. Sponsors in Kelowna, B.C., will welcome four, three will go to Coquitlam, B.C., and one to New Westminster, B.C. Twenty are bound for Calgary and the final 15 to Edmonton, the Immigration department says.
A second flight is set to arrive in Montreal on Saturday.
“We have great hopes for the success of this group of people that are arriving and their families as they build their new home here in Canada,” said Arif Virani, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of immigration.
While Syrian refugees have been arriving with some regularity since the Liberals were sworn into office Nov. 4, they have been carried on commercial flights. Thursday sees the first government aircraft return from a deployment specific to a program that began as a Liberal promise months ago.
Well before the election, the Liberals had called for Canada to increase its commitment to Syrian resettlement, suggesting back in March that 25,000 was their number. The Conservative government had initially pledged to take in 11,300 people by the end of 2018.
But during the election campaign, the Liberals put forward a more ambitious goal — the government would take in 25,000 people itself and work with private sponsors to bring in even more. To meet the goal, about 10,000 would be those who have private sponsors at the ready. A further 15,000 spaces would be reserved for government-assisted refugees, with the goal of bringing them in by the end of February.
Thousands of Syrian refugees have already arrived, but the Liberals only count those who’ve landed since they took office on Nov. 4 as part of their commitment.
As of Dec. 8, that number was 464. The government says it has 12,538 applications currently in the system.