Liberals’ ambitious Syrian-refugee plan was a gamble - and they won

Theglobeandmail.com
March 2, 2016

The 25,000 Syrian refugees will very quickly be closer to 40,000. The government’s 25,000 target was reached Sunday, but another 15,000 applications are already completed or are being processed - and Immigration Minister John McCallum says they will be able to come to Canada.

When the Liberals first came to power, the 25,000 target seemed a logistical impossibility - they stretched their election promise by two months, while many argued even that pace was too fast. But Mr. McCallum insists the target “galvanized” the public service to act, and without it, the initiative would never have taken off.

Now the number will be close to 40,000 soon. Mr. McCallum is to announce next week the specific number of Syrian refugees to be resettled by the end of the year. But in an interview, he said that in addition to the 25,323 who have arrived, the 3,123 whose applications have been approved and 12,098 whose applications are already being processed will be able to come, too.

“All those who are in process who wish to come to Canada should be able to come,” he said.

It appears almost easy to bring in refugees by the planeload now. Four months ago, the new Liberal government had no idea how to do it. It’s still not clear if it was wise to rush so much – 42 per cent of the refugees who’ve arrived don’t yet have permanent housing. But it stands out as a rare instance of risk-taking, goal-setting government kicking the bureaucratic machinery into action.

“If we had not set ambitious targets, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the number,” Mr. McCallum argued. “It certainly galvanized the public service into action.”

Let’s be clear about what the Liberals won’t say: They were flying by the seat of their pants. The Conservatives had come under fire in the election campaign for accepting so few Syrian refugees, and the NDP promised to bring in 10,000 by year end. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals outbid them, promising 25,000. The number wasn’t nailed to a real plan.

Mr. McCallum admits the Liberals found resistance within the public service. “One definition of real change is you’re doing something you’ve never done before. This was that,” he said. “They’d never done anything, I don’t think Canada had done anything, quite so fast.”

There were changing plans. The Liberals were talking about allowing temporary entry before security checks but that idea was quickly dismissed after the Paris attacks in November.

The first set of challenges was the logistics abroad. Canadian officials had to get Lebanon to ease exit-visa requirements. Jordan offered a staging area at Marka airport, but Lebanon, Mr. McCallum said, “was trickier because Hezbollah controls the airports.”

Then health checks became the bottleneck, until the Canadian Forces set up a system to speed it up, “so that it was 10 times faster.” Officials learned to do several steps of the process concurrently, rather than insisting Step 1 come before Step 2, Mr. McCallum said.

Identifying refugees for resettlement was a big task, but the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and International Organization for Migration handled much of it, encouraging the Canadian initiative. “They were both super-keen to help us - because the climate of the world was a little anti-refugee,” Mr. McCallum said.

Then, of course, there were obstacles in Canada - which linger. Housing was the biggest, and still is. More than 40 per cent are in hotels, even with more than 200 municipalities resettling refugees. The portion in permanent housing rose from 52 to 58 per cent in the past week, Mr. McCallum said, but it will still take time to house them all.

And there are the challenges of language training and jobs, especially for government-sponsored refugees.

“They truly are vulnerable. Very, very few of them speak either English or French. In general, they have very little education. They have many, many children. And they’ve probably never been on an airplane before the flight to Canada,” Mr. McCallum said.

The initiative still remains to be judged by how successfully they settle, and the costs that come in. But the Liberals have already gambled and won: A brazen, barely planned target pushed the lurching machinery of government to move thousands of people to new lives - and that’s a rare thing.