First flight of Syrian refugees expected in Toronto Thursday

The federal government says there will also be another planeload that will be arriving over the weekend.

The first of 25,000 Syrian refugees to be resettled in Canada will arrive in the country today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, declaring it will be “a great day”.

An estimated 160 people will be onboard; a second flight will arrive in Montreal on Saturday.

The Canadian government is covering the cost of flights but many private groups will provide financial assistance for the refugees as they fan out to 36 communities across Canada.

All the Syrians to be resettled in Canada will have been chosen by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Kwan mentions that her office has been inundated with phone calls from hundreds of Canadians asking how they can help, whereas Dench mentions that the CCR is “overwhelmed and grateful” to hear from so many Canadians.

Initially, that promise had been to bring all those people to Canada by year’s end, but the government was forced to spread the commitment over a longer time period because of the logistics involved.

The refugees will be given a night’s stay in nearby hotels.

Because privately sponsored refugees come at the behest of citizens, and not the government, they should not be included as part of tally of 25,000 Syrian refugees accepted by Canada.

“Bringing about real change will take more than just individual people – or even individual governments”.

He also said recent elections in Turkey slowed the refugee processing there and it is unlikely any refugees now there will go to Canada by the end of 2015, iPolitics reported.

It wasn’t until the Liberals struck a cabinet subcommittee specifically created to roll out the program that plans began to coalesce – and one of the first things they heard from their global partners was a plea to reconsider their original year-end deadline.

Trudeau dismissed last week’s report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer projecting a fiscal surplus for the 2015-16 year, assuming no new Liberal spending plans.

The Obama administration has said it will take in 10,000 refugees over the next year. Those would be the cases targeted for settlement by the end of the year; private cases are easier because the support structure is already in place.

This is the cover of Thursday’s Toronto Star, Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper, as the country prepares to welcome the first tranche of Syrian refugees in the newly elected Liberal government’s resettlement program.

As of December 8, that number was 464.

Nearly 12,000 applications have been processed to date, according to the government.