Canada's Response To The Syrian Refugee Crisis

The number of refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria and Iraq to neighbouring countries has now passed four million, confirming this to be the world's largest refugee crisis for almost a quarter of a century under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) mandate. The UNHCR has observed that Syria and Iraq’s only hope is the humanity shown by the neighbouring countries in welcoming and saving the lives of refugees. Canada must step up to this global challenge and assist Middle Eastern and European countries in resettling refugees. Complacence and inaction will lead to the loss of more lives, and further tarnish our humanitarian values and reputation at home and abroad. As Canadians we think of ourselves as a haven for refugees,

Also, because we believed, falsely, that taking in tens of thousands of refugees would launch a never-ending flood of alien outsiders who could not be integrated into Canadian society. That describes the Hungarian refugee crisis of 1956, Vietnamese refugee crisis of 1979, and the Harper government’s insufficient and heartbreakingly late response to the Syrian refugee crisis of 2014 and 2015. Today there is no excuse for repeating Canada’s earlier mistakes; we have learned these lessons the hard way, over and over, everyone in Ottawa knows that swift, engaged, mass action saves lives and benefits Canada. On the ground, we should provide more help through a well-funded and well-planned humanitarian aid effort. Simple steps Canada could take to ease the refugee crisis are, dramatically increasing the resettlement target for Syrians and for refugees overall, expedite all Syrian applications by increasing staff resources at appropriate visa posts, remove the UNHCR documentary requirement for Group of Five refugees to allow Canadians to privately and directly resettle

Looking at the conflict geographically the self-proclaimed caliphate by ISIL stretches from the conquered towns along the Syrian-Turkish border, through its de-facto capital of Raqqa, in northern Syria, across the obliterated Iraqi border into Mosul, Tikrit, and Falluja, down to the farming towns south of Baghdad, roughly a third of the territory of both Iraq and Syria. Reports have shown ISIL continues to gain large swaths of land around the region and combined with the five year civil war within Syria, simply resettling refugees to Canada will not solve the larger issues at hand. The refugee crisis must go beyond offering our spare bedrooms to refugees, while this is a symbolic gesture of opening our hearts, and is an important starting point to develop sustainable long-term settlement outcomes. We have seen similar simplistic suggestions such as providing arms to the opposition to resolve the Syrian civil war that generated the current international refugee crisis. While global geo-politics makes it extremely difficult to reach sustainable political solutions as in the case of the 70-years Israeli-Palestinian conflict, much deeper international diplomatic and political actions are required to develop long-term solutions. Refugee resettlement must be approached as a partnership between community groups, organizations, local territorial authorities, and refugee and migrant communities, with