Stephen Harper Rejects Refugee Meeting Under Mounting Worldwide Pressure

While he told a Toronto audience this morning that it’s time to be less partisan, he laid the responsibility at Harper’s door.

Speaking to CTV’s Question Period, Liberal Party head Justin Trudeau said it’s time for the party leaders to meet and craft an improved Canadian response.

The Liberals say Canada should take in 25,000 Syrian refugees before next year while the New Democrats say they should bring in more than 46,000 government-sponsored refugees to Canada by 2019.

But at a campaign event in nearby Mississauga, Harper rejected the overtures as “partisan games” at a time when the federal government is already taking action. “The government is ceased with this issue”.

“There’s no country that I know of that has done as much as Turkey to take in people“, said Mulcair. “My chief of staff has reached out to his to try and get a discussion rapidly”.

The Syrian crisis gained renewed prominence last Wednesday after the widely publicized drowning deaths of two young Syrian boys and their mother, who apparently wanted to join family in British Columbia.

“Having extra individuals on the bottom there can be a good suggestion and naturally we might use army belongings to start out shifting refugees out of the world extra quickly, however it all begins with political will and Mr. Harper has proven no will in any way to start out bringing a bigger variety of Syrian refugees extra quickly to Canada”, Mulcair stated in Dorval, Que.

Tima Kurdi, the aunt of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body lying on a Turkish beach last week was captured in a news photograph that moved people around the world to demand that more be done to help resolve the Syrian refugee crisis, mentioned the overwhelming obstacles in her letter to Immigration Minister Chris Alexander earlier this year. “I think everyone can agree that we need to do more”, Trudeau said. “We’re obviously very pleased Canadian are seized with this issue and Canadians want us to respond”.

“We’re not doing enough”.

“Let me also assure Canadians that we’ll make sure we have the processes in place so that we make sure we help the most vulnerable first“.

Mulcair didn’t instantly reply whether or not he had raised the precise difficulty with Selcuk Unal, the Turkish ambassador to Canada, however the NDP stated Paul Dewar, their overseas affairs critic who’s operating for re-election in Ottawa Centre, did converse to him about it lately.

A formal promise to help Syrians didn’t come until the summer of 2013 and since then, Canada has promised to take in 11,300 refugees by the end of 2018.