Syrian war’s awful toll would stretch across Canada
Numbers cannot tell the story of a nation's tragedy, but as Shannon Gormley writes, they can help bring it closer to home.
If Canada were Syria, large parts of this country would be wrecked: abandoned by the living and home to the dead. But which parts, precisely? Where might the wreckage lie?
Syria’s crisis is unfathomable to all but those ruined by it; 470,000 people are dead. Another 11,300,000 are displaced. Numbers this absurd must be made familiar to be believed.
As things stand, the crisis remains inaccessible. Population indicators are obviously poor measures of collective trauma. Syria’s war is certainly much worse than suggested by the comparison to Canada that you’re about to find here. This one won’t reflect the particular geography of war. Nor will it adjust for Canada’s population size, which is larger than Syria’s; nor reflect the full losses to a country’s culture and society.
Still, let’s say it’s enough, for the moment, to account for the loss of human beings.
Having come to terms with the weakness of the whole exercise, we might consider the most gentle possible reckoning of what would happen to our country, then, If Canada Were Syria:
Ottawa is deserted. Toronto is deserted. Montreal: deserted. Vancouver, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Calgary, Saskatoon, Quebec City and Guelph are ghost towns, too, as are Brockville and Perth. As for Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon — these also, whole provinces, have been vacated.
Canada’s greatest metropolises and many of its smaller places, too, are empty. Gone. Cleared out.
The next question is: Where would we flee?
Most of us can’t leave Canada, or won’t. That means everyone from Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Hamilton sticks to our borders even if we’re pushed to the edges. We stay in our country, if not in our homes, left behind in the debris that was once a nation by circumstance if not by choice. When the bombs fall, we disperse then huddle, finding shelter in anything with a roof on it, from schools to hospitals. Not that these are safe from our leaders, who target them.
But some of us run farther, heading for the hills abroad.
Maybe we do it because we have more money; maybe because we take on the risk of running ahead before sending back for our families, assuming they’re still alive and we are, too. Our friends warn us that we may be greeted by barbed-wire fences, detention cells and roving gangs of neo-Nazis. But what’s that to planes that spit fire, the bombs and the sarin? When those of us from Winnipeg, Calgary, Saskatoon, Quebec City, Guelph, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon are forced to choose between the devil we know and the devil we don’t, we leave for an uncharted hell.
Some of us bring our kids along. But the kids who are lucky enough to get out of the war may not get to class: More than 1.5 million of our refugee children aren’t enrolled in school. Before the war, our classes taught about 25 children each. The kids have had to leave their desks empty in 60,000 classrooms, and their futures behind.
These are the living. So what of our dead?
Six years of largely governmentsanctioned homicide has killed an estimated 470,000 Canadians. Everyone from Windsor, North Bay, Sarnia, Kingston, Cornwall, Hawkesbury and Cobourg is dead.
At their time of death, the inhabitants weren’t all civilians. Which isn’t to say that they deserved to die. Some were fighting in good faith against a repressive regime; others were forced by a repressive regime to fight.
But if someone can only bring themselves to care about civilians, they should know this: Of the mortuary cities of Windsor, Kingston, Cornwall and Cobourg, every dead body in Kingston, Cornwall and Cobourg belongs to a civilian.
“Civilian” is such an inexact term, though. We can parse it further. Surely we’ve learned that in a civil war death doesn’t discriminate by age.
And so, I’m afraid we have to look at the dead kids now.
Of the 207,000 murdered Canadian civilians, 24,000 are children. Of course, you will have a difficult time picturing 24,000 dead children for reasons of scale as much as emotional capacity.
Imagine this instead: Their corpses could fill 308 Canadian school buses. Three hundred and eight bright yellow hearses, your standard-size Blue Bird, carrying as many as 78 small bodies each.
Anyway, while we are leaving behind everything we own and know, or burying our families, or dying ourselves, the world is debating.
It debates the merits of intervening to try to save some of the Canadians. It worries that the repression and killing of Canadian is complicated, as if any war is uncomplicated, and that our war is not their problem, as if the bodies of our kids are not washing up on their shores.
We die, we run, we climb into rafts and choke on gas and still the world debates, debates even the merits of taking us in. It worries that Canadians aren’t good at finding jobs immediately after escaping civil war; or that we are very good at finding jobs, too good, better than their own people.
We will worry too: those of us abroad, about whether we’ll ever get to go home, or be made to feel at home in the places to which we’ve had to flee; those of us stuck, about whether we’ll ever get out.
But anyway, it’s just a silly thought experiment. Canada is Canada and Syria is Syria, so in the midst of the greatest humanitarian disaster of our lifetimes we can return to feeling proud of that one time we let in 25,000 refugees, equivalent in size to many unknown towns rather smaller than most of the 20-odd places we’ve imagined could belong to the dead and the driven-out if Canada were Syria.
Their corpses could fill 308 Canadian school buses. Three hundred and eight bright yellow hearses ...