Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan said the air force is prepared to “airlift refugees to Canada every 48 hours if needed”, although current plans rely largely on privately chartered aircraft.
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In Canada, recently elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a Liberal, has backed off a campaign promise to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees there by New Year’s Day – limiting the intake of exhausted, poor and huddled masses this year to 10,000, as long as none of them are single, heterosexual Syrian men.
The government also announced it is honoring a commitment made by the previous Conservative government to match donations by Canadians to the global relief efforts.
He said people who were previously supportive of the refugee plan “had a few more questions”.
“Our officials are in constant discussions with UNHCR and we will make sure that they will get the money as soon as they need it”, she said. “In last 10 years we’ve been seeing a lot of cuts to the sector, a lot of cuts – anywhere between 2 percent of the budget to 100 percent of the budget, which was quite traumatizing, very disheartening”, said Huda Bukhari, executive director of the Arab Community Centre of Toronto.
The announcement stood in contrast to ongoing controversy over refugee admittance and support south of Canada’s border with the USA, where Republican candidates for president oppose the settlement of any refugees and the House of Representatives has passed a bill aiming to restrict United States aid. The move away from refugee resettlement meant many agencies dedicated to the task of helping refugees find housing, jobs, schooling, language classes have cut staff, programs and services for a decade.
“For Canada it would be about 11 million refugees – 11 million refugees!”
Bibeau said: “Canada will continue to stand by the people of Syria and their neighbouring countries during this conflict”.
“Our assistant deputy ministers this week said this is the most exciting, exhilarating thing they’ve worked on”, Tunis said. “We were aware that people were going to raise security as a reason not to welcome refugees at all”.
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The 100 million funding is tied to specific goals including to address urgent needs inside Syria, the refugee response in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq as well as the emergency response in some European transit countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia.
