When Canada welcomed refugees — and paid their way
This week, I marked an important anniversary. Thirty years ago, on Sept. 6, 1985, I came to Canada with my parents and younger brother. We were Afghan refugees. I was 7 years old.
Brian Mulroney, the son of Irish immigrants, was prime minister and riding high with the largest majority government in Canadian history.
Like Syrians today, Afghans were capturing international headlines as the refugee crisis of the era. That June, a green-eyed Afghan girl in a Pakistani refugee camp became the cover of National Geographic magazine.
I was reminded of my early childhood chaos when the gut-wrenching photograph of little Alan Kurdi’s body lying face down on a sandy beach in Turkey went viral. His family was trying to reach Greece and possibly Canada.
Not only has Alan’s photograph come to define the desperation of Syrian parents trying to protect their children, it also symbolizes the incompetence of world leaders who seem unable or unwilling to respond to the Syrian crisis.
It is incredible to recall my own experience as a refugee child in the mid-1980s. We were treated humanely and fairly, qualities that left a deep impression on my young mind as the essence of what Canada represented.
My family’s experience was simpler. There were none of the bewildering bureaucracy and exorbitant costs that weigh upon the modern refugee.
We were in New Delhi, having fled Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and registered with UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. By 1985, there was no sign that the Soviet war was ending, so my parents decided to build a new life in the West. They were in their late 20s, spoke French and English and were university educated.
The Canadian government had begun accepting Afghan refugees.
My parents were interviewed at the Canadian Embassy only once. There was no language proficiency test. It took just six months for the envelope to arrive announcing that our application was approved.
We had no relatives in Canada so the federal government sponsored us — and loaned my parents money to buy flight tickets. We were quickly issued travel documents by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Upon arrival in Toronto, a dark sedan was waiting to take us to a hotel on Sherbourne St. My dad had $100 in his pocket — it says so on the one-page immigration form he has kept all these years.
For one year, the federal government paid for our rent, food, TTC passes and medication as part of a $1,200 monthly package.
The locus of our life was Welcome House, which no longer exists. The kindly lady there advised my parents to shop at discounters Knob Hill Farms and Woolco, the retail shop, which also no longer exists. My parents scoured the Star classified ads for jobs and an apartment. Within weeks they found both. The landlady who showed us the two-bedroom apartment in Scarborough said, rather grandly, “At night the lights across the city are on and it looks like Miami.”
My brother and I were enrolled in school by the end of autumn. We got snowsuits from Woolco, having arrived unprepared for the winter, plus a dining table and a set of four chairs. My parents recall that Woolco sent the bill to the government.
My parents went to work almost immediately. My mother got a job as a seamstress earning $4 an hour at a factory near our apartment. One day, one of the women at the factory told her, “You look like someone who should work in an office.”
My mother agreed, quit her job and went back to school to study early childhood education. My dad got a job delivering pizza, but on his first day he held the box under his arm like a book. The toppings slid off. The job wasn’t a success.
But he found another as a mechanic, thanks to a friend who had a contact at General Motors.
Jobs were plentiful then, and newcomers given opportunities. The system seemed designed to ensure new Canadians found their feet fast.
During my first Christmas in Canada, my main preoccupation was trying to win first prize in the arts club for making a holiday wreath out of crêpe paper. (I did not win.) The anxieties of life in New Delhi were forgotten. It is harder for refugees today. In 2013, only 5,790 refugees were accepted in Canada through the government-assisted program. In 1985, 12,846 refugees were resettled this way.
But these figures don’t even begin to reflect the scale of the problem. Nearly 60 million people in the world — about half of whom are children — have fled persecution and conflict, the highest since the Second World War, according to UNHCR.
My brother and I could have ended up like little Alan, or one of the African, Asian, Arab children clinging to dinghies on the Mediterranean. For these kids, life is serving up harsh lessons. Few will have the warm feeling I did as a child in Toronto in the winter of 1985.
Canada’s generous and practical policy toward my family has been paid back many times over.
My parents bought a house and became tax-paying, law-abiding citizens. My brother runs a high-tech company downtown Toronto and employs 20 people.
And, yes, my dad paid back the loan for the airplane tickets.