Canada on track to welcome 10000 Syrian refugees by years end

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.

“We suffered a lot”, Kevork Jamkossian, who arrived with his wife and baby girl, told the New York Times on arrival.

He says the resettlement of 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of February is a national project, not a government one.

The “new Canadians”, as Trudeau called them, were processed in the terminal and were given public health insurance cards, winter clothing and other supplies they might need to begin their new lives, The Times reports.

Asked about the schedule and number of flights required to bring 10,000 refugees by year’s end, he replied: “Well, we are still very serious about hitting our target of 10,000 by the end of the year, and I think you can do the math as well as I can”.

There’s a ton of worldwide news coverage today of Canada’s prime minister welcoming Syrian refugees to the country.

One refugee arriving with his family at the airport was heard telling the Prime Minister through an interpreter, “Now, we feel as if we got out of hell and we came to paradise”. A further 10,000 government-sponsored Syrian refugees will arrive over the course of 2016.

The plane carrying 163 Syrian refugees touched down in Toronto just before midnight on Thursday and will be followed by a second military airlift to Montreal on Saturday.

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greets onlookers in the Hall of Honor before the Speech from the Throne in Ottawa, Canada on December 4, 2015.

Harper’s government insisted Syrian refugees needed to be carefully vetted in case they posed a security threat.

Individuals and groups have volunteered to make arrangements for their stay, education, jobs and other needs.

“We’re not going to sleep until they get here”, she said outside a Travelodge hotel near Pearson International Airport around 2 a.m. Canada is doing the right thing by providing refuge for those so desperately seeking safety. It airlifted more than 5,000 people from Kosovo in the late 1990s, more than 5,000 from Uganda in 1972 and resettled 60,000 Vietnamese in 1979-80.