In a touching exchange, Jamkossian thanked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the warm welcome and for making them feel at home, to which Trudeau replied “you are home, welcome home”.
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This fulfills the Canadian government’s pledge to accept 25,000. “They keep thanking us for our hospitality and taking them in and giving them this opportunity to build a new life and keep them safe”, Crombie said.
“Everyone is excited. We will be ready”, said Lorig Garboushian-Katrjian, a coordinator at the Armenian Community Centre of Toronto, which has helped sponsor 71 refugees arriving on the first plane.
Edishou said his family was pleasantly surprised when he received a call on Wednesday morning from the Office of Refugees, Archdiocese of Toronto informing him that his three brothers-in-law would be arriving on the first military flight Thursday.
This first group of 163 refugees arrived from Lebanon by Royal Canadian Air Force jet.
Then, a further 15,000 spaces would be reserved for government-assisted refugees, with the goal of bringing them in by the end of February. However, popular sentiment began to shift after the photo of a dead Syrian toddler, who had washed ashore in Turkey as his family began to make their way to Canada, grabbed worldwide headlines in September.
Canada’s much more populous southern neighbor plans to take in just 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year, and even that is provoking opposition.
The Canadian programmes are a practical expression of support to Syrian refugees and demonstration of solidarity to those countries in the region hosting more than four million Syrian refugees.
In the USA, several Republican governors have tried to stop the arrival of Syrian refugees in their states in the wake of the deadly attacks blamed on Islamic extremists in Paris and California.
Thursday’s airlift is the first transport of Syrian Refugees since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal party won the October 19 election, marking a clear shift in immigration policy. “We are just happy that they are now out of danger and can start a new life here”, said Edishou, an Iranian native, whose wife came from the Syrian village in Al-Hasakah, which fell to the ISIS terrorist group earlier this year.
– Responding to the public outcry, the Conservatives increase available resources for the processing of refugee applications, promise to speed up resettlement of the 10,000 originally promised places and announce they’ll match donations for Syrian relief. The boy had relatives in Canada, and the refugee crisis became a major campaign issue.
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He said Canada has a tradition of assisting people from other countries, such as through the Canadian military’s involvement in airlifting more than 5,000 mainly Muslim Kosovars in 1999 amid the war in Yugoslavia and evacuating about 7,000 Ismaili Muslims expelled from Uganda by dictator Idi Amin in 1972.
