First refugee airlift includes 5 cousins

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greets a family of refugees from Syria as they arrive at Pearson International airport, in Toronto, on Friday, Dec. 11, 2015. Another planeload of refugees is expected to arrive Saturday.

“This is a significant step in fulfilling our plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada in the coming months”, Trudeau said in a statement. The former Conservative government had declined to resettle more Syrian refugees, despite the haunting image of a drowned three-year-old Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach. The pair said they had made arrangements with airport security to have the items -and several hundreds more bags – brought to the designated terminal where the government flight landed.

The military aircraft carrying 163 Syrian refugees arrived in Toronto Thursday night.

They applied for refugee status in January and learned Monday that they would be on the first government-arranged flight, she said.

Trudeau’s government will settle 10,000 refugees by the end of the month, and another 15,000 by February.

Hamid Osman has some advice for the Syrian refugee family who will soon be resettled in Whitehorse, the Yukon capital about 211 miles (340km) north of Juneau, Alaska.

The country’s Immigration Minister, John McCallum, informed that all of Canada’s 10 provinces approved the measure to accept refugees. “More refugees are Syrian than any other nationality”.

“We are saying: ‘OK, we’re ready, send us some cases, ‘” she said.

While CN has donated the money, it’s still uncertain who will be in charge of distributing it. But he said “the $5 million from CN will be committed to the housing needs of refugees”.

“Canada’s business community has always been ready to aid those in need”.

She added that organizations like hers are “inundated” with donations and offers to help.

“There are a lot of moving parts to coordinate and it’s very hard to plan when you don’t know numbers, you don’t know dates”, he said. The US doesn’t seem like that.

As Middle East Eye reported last week, Canadian officials opened a registration centre in Amman at the end of November in hopes of speeding up the refugees’ arrival.

“They’ve been having a very hard time there so we wanted them to have a good start here in Canada since all dreams come true here”, she said.