A Refugee Crisis

A Refugee Crisis

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 A Syrian refugee child cries at the Al Zaatri refugee camp

"You cannot solve a refugee crisis involving millions of people by just seeking to airlift them to a handful of developed countries. That is completely unrealistic and, in fact, is not a long-term solution.
"We're looking with the UN at those people who have faced, if you will, secondary persecution. They fled Syria because of the war and now they're facing danger in some of the camps.
"The UN frankly just needs to get them out and those are the people we are focusing on.
"The choice I am announcing today is to help Syrians. This is not a choice against other refugees. We continue to receive people from Bhutan, from Nepal, from East Africa and from elsewhere.
"Canada is meeting its commitment to the UN and making an important contribution to the coordinated global effort to help Syrian refugees."
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, Canada

Canada is a geographically huge country. A country well known within the international community for welcoming a heaping huge share of immigrants from other countries wishing to emigrate to a country where freedom and equality are taken seriously enough to be unequivocally enshrined in law and encompasses everyone. Canada also accepts more than its share, if it can be put that way, of refugees referred to it by the UN Refugee Agency.

And Syria is a country that is shedding its population at a rapid pace. It is a country in transition, in the process of destroying itself. Its infrastructure, to be certain. But also its people within various communities; those representing the majority Sunni Syrian population as well as those representative of the ancient Syrian Christian population. The Druze seem less affected, but are not immune.

All fleeing from the brutal oppression of a minority-Alawite (Shia) government that finds it feasible to send its military to bomb civilian enclaves rather than reach a conciliatory agreement for power-sharing between two fundamentally conflicting sectarian streams.

By United Nations estimates, two million Syrians have fled their homes in towns, villages and urban communities of considerable size in Syria throughout the past year, during the raging civil war that is tearing the fabric of the country into irreparable shreds. While the ultimate goal is to somehow find a solution of long-term duration to solve the political crisis wracking Syria, the short-term response is the urgent need to aid desperate refugees living in uncertainty and misery.

Canada is absorbing 200 high-risk refugees, people in immediate danger in refugee camps themselves. And those very specific refugees include women facing sexual violence, children, gay men, and religious minorities. An additional 1,100 privately sponsored refugees are set to be welcomed into the country, the required paperwork expedited for that purpose. These are for the most part Syrian refugees with an existing link to Canada through family members already settled there.

"Almost all of the family-class applications that were in our system have already been finalized", said the minister. Another 5,000 refugees from camps set up in Turkey are scheduled for resettling in Canada by 2018 -- mostly representing Iraqis and Iranians who have fled war and oppression in their own countries, seeking the promise of a better life in Canada. Their absence from refugee camps in Turkey will help free up space for more Syrians seeking haven in Turkey.

Several million in Canadian funding is also scheduled to aid the UN's global resettlement capacity, and to support the assistance with resettlement of displaced Syrians within Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. A widely-affected geography that has been attempting to absorb huge numbers of desperate people fleeing the butchery of a tyrannical regime.