Why can’t they come to Canada?
Zakaria Mohammed Mokdad was one of the first Syrian refugee claimants interviewed in Amman, Jordan, last October.
A volunteer with the Office for Refugees, Archdiocese of Toronto (ORAT) listened to his story about fleeing the southern town of Busra al-Sham after the Syrian army attacked in 2012.
He laboured for hours over the 90-question form, according to my colleague Marina Jimenez, who was reporting on the ORAT trip.
Mokdad invited her back to his three-bedroom apartment, where he was living with his wife, their two young kids, his sister, two nephews and his mother.
In Busra, Mokdad had been relatively well off. He’d built a restaurant with a burbling fountain and a garden of jasmine trees where he served minced lamb and practiced French and English with his customers who’d come to see the area’s ancient Roman ruins. For more than three years now, he’s lived off the charity of friends and a brother living in Saudi Arabia.
“I will work hard and do anything,” he told Jimenez. “We will mix well with all the Canadian people.”
Mokdad thought his family had struck gold: ORAT approved them and, in November, they were matched to a private sponsorship group in Toronto, which raised $110,000 to bring them all here and support them for an entire year.
Originally, the application was for just Mokdad and his nuclear family. But, after speaking to his sponsors, it was expanded to include his mother, sister and nephews. How could he leave them behind?
By January, all eight family members had their medical tests and interviews at the Canadian Embassy. The immigration officer told them they’d all been approved, and to be ready to go within 10 days, Mokdad said.
So, the family began to pack up. They sold their fridge and dishwasher.
In Toronto, the sponsorship group rented a Scarborough house and furnished it, “right down to toothpaste and dishes,” says Debbie Rix, the leader of “Project Toronto Welcome.” At the time, the government was rushing to meet its own February deadline, and the motley group was told to expect just two days’ notice before the Mokdads arrived.
Since then, nothing. The Scarborough apartment sits waiting, empty, and Mokdad sits in the café of the hotel where he did that interview six months ago, chain-smoking cigarettes and worrying about the future.
“We are just waiting, waiting, waiting. This is really stressful for us,” Mokdad told me Thursday, over the phone from a busy street in Amman.
Much has been said about private citizens across Canada who poured their hearts and money into programs to sponsor Syrian refugees. Their frustration is founded: the government asked regular folks to help in the rush to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada as quickly as possible, because this is the biggest refugee movement since the Second World War and Canadians are compassionate. It sent extra staff to its offices in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan and processed people so quickly that many ended up in hotels for weeks because there weren’t enough settlement workers to help them all.
Then, without warning last month, the government stopped everything. It had reached its quota, it turned out, so the program was over.
You don’t call 911 and then tell the volunteer firefighters who’ve driven all night to get lost, particularly when the fire is still raging.
The backlash was fierce, and three weeks ago, Immigration Minister John McCallum relented and agreed to send staff back to those visa offices, to process another 10,000 Syrian refugees this year. They should arrive by early 2017, he said.
Can you imagine what that is like for people like Mokdad? It makes me think of Brian Sinclair, sitting in the Winnipeg hospital emergency, waiting for attention that never came. He died there after 34 hours.
“I don’t know what to do. I’m not allowed to work, and I love to work. I’m afraid if I work without permission, they will send me back to Syria,” Mokdad said, adding his calls to the Canadian Embassy have gone unanswered. “Why are we waiting here? I don’t know. Nobody will tell me.”
In Canada, Rix and her colleagues have not gotten any answers either. They’ve met with various politicians. “All they say is, ‘the application is in process,’ ” she says. (My queries to the immigration ministry about Mokdad’s file have not yet been answered.)
One thing is clear: Mokdad’s situation is not unique. I spoke to another Syrian family — this one in Beirut — over Skype yesterday. Four months ago, they applied to the United Church of Canada to sponsor them and in February they were matched to a private sponsorship group that had raised more than $70,000. Since then, they’ve passed their medical tests and interviews.
“We feel as though we reached the door of salvation, but we cannot enter,” said Housam. (He asked that I withhold his family name because he fears talking to a reporter might jeopardize his family’s application.) “We already wasted time during the war in Syria. That’s five years of our life wasted. Why, when the sponsors are ready, and we are ready, why are we waiting here in Lebanon?”
Traditionally, a year is not a long wait for a refugee who wants to come to Canada. The posted wait time for someone applying from Kenya is 75 months. But, instead of asking why the Syrian refugees are getting special treatment, shouldn’t we demand all refugees be processed faster, particularly when they have furnished homes and eager friends waiting here for them?
Being equally cruel is not the answer. The response of Canadian citizens to the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War is a chance to reset the bar on what it means to be truly compassionate. Catherine Porter’s column usually runs on Friday. You can reach her at cporter@thestar.ca.