While Trudeau’s government is standing behind the plan to allow 25,000 refugees sanctuary, McCallum will also likely admit that the country will not meet a self imposed deadline to process all applications by the end of the year.
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Instead, 10,000 will be sponsored privately, with Ottawa aiming to reach its 25,000 target by the end of 2016.
The delay was announced as the deadly Paris attacks stir fears in Europe and North America that jihadists could seek to blend in with refugees in order to strike later. “Canadians have said, ‘Do this thing right”.
The government estimates the total cost of screening the refugees, bringing them to Canada, housing them when necessary, health support and other aspects of the plan will be between $564-million and $678-million over six years. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has his photo taken with students from a local school following an information session on climate change during a First Ministers meeting at the Museum of Nature on Monday, …
In different circumstances, the announcement of an ambitious plan to fly thousands of desperate Syrian refugees to Canada would have made for an unalloyed grand day in the young life of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
He says military personnel will help with screening and processing overseas prior to flights to Canada, including biometrics such as fingerprinting and digital photos.
Priority for government refugees will be given to families, women at risk, members of sexual minorities and single men only if they are identified as members of an LGBT community. We must do more and we are.
Refugees will go to 36 “destination” cities, 12 of them in Quebec.
Syrian refugees will have to undergo thorough, professional, one-on-one interviews, submit their biometric data, which will then be checked against Canadian and US databases, Goodale said.
For instance, the Canadian Armed Forces is preparing about 6,000 temporary beds, although the Liberal plan calls for most Syrian refugees to be flown directly to the communities where they will settle.
More than 500 officials have been assigned to work on the massive resettlement program, one of the largest of its kind in the world as it relates to the Syrian refugee crisis.
Also last week, the heads of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Canada Border Services Agency insisted that the government’s refugee-resettlement plan would not compromise national security.
“We are pleased that Mr. Trudeau has today listened to Canadians and abandoned a timeline that was not workable”, federal Conservative lawmaker Michelle Rempel said.
Officials expected the first group of refugees to arrive in Canada in early December, though they didn’t have a specific date.
Canada says it is already working closely with the UNHCR to identify and screen the most vulnerable refugees, the bulk of whom will come from Jordan and Lebanon.
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Canada has long prided itself on opening its doors wider than any nation to asylum seekers. That was on top of the ongoing resettlement of Syrians refugees that began in 2013. It flew more than 5,000 people from Kosovo in the late 1990s and more than 5,000 from Uganda in 1972, and it resettled 60,000 Vietnamese in 1979-1980.
