Let’s get it right

Prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau’s pledge to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of this year is certainly well-intended. Waves of desperate humanity, fleeing a horrific war, are crying for assistance. And it’s a good number. This country’s paltry resettlement of about 2,500 Syrian refugees so far should be a source of national shame. But it may not be the right deadline. A growing chorus of voices is warning that it will be extremely difficult to resettle so many people properly in the two months remaining before the end of 2015. The incoming Liberal government, and a new immigration minister, won’t be sworn in until next week. The learning curve in grappling with these complex files is sure to be steep, and time is fast running out.

Still, as recently as this past weekend Trudeau held to his election promise of welcoming 25,000 refugees by Dec. 31. “The commitments I made in that platform, I’m going to keep,” he assured CTV’s Lisa LaFlamme in an interview that aired Saturday. The refugee situation is “something we’re getting cracking on right away.”

That’s entirely proper. If it’s at all feasible to vet applications, perform necessary security checks and conduct medical reviews for 25,000 people by Trudeau’s self-imposed year-end deadline, then every effort should be made to do so.

But if that proves unachievable — even with the best of intentions and most strenuous efforts — the new prime minister would be best advised to let his deadline pass and simply bring in as many people as practical by year-end, with the rest to come later.

It’s more important to resettle these refugees the right way than to do it with excess haste, rushing to meet an arbitrary deadline.

The magnitude of the challenge is enormous, involving the resettlement in just two months of 10 times as many Syrian refugees as Canada has accepted since the war erupted.

During the campaign, Trudeau expressed support for sending military planes carrying security and immigration officials to refugee zones in the Middle East and quickly airlifting people out. Canada did something similar to rescue the “boat people” who fled Indochina in the late 1970s. But even that may not be sufficient if newcomers are to be properly assessed.

More than 60,000 Vietnamese refugees were successfully resettled in Canada over the course of about 18 months — almost 3,400 people a month. Putting the Syrian situation in context, if that monthly rate was tripled it would still fall well shy of meeting Trudeau’s year-end goal.

It may prove too much to hope that the departing government’s disastrous response to the Syrian refugee crisis can be reversed in just two months. What Trudeau can do, even if he misses his deadline, is show Canadians and the world that this country is back as a compassionate and generous place of refuge for those in desperate need.

Whether 25,000 Syrian refugees arrive here by New Year’s Day or in the months to follow, the important thing is that they come.