At a News Conference Marking the Arrival of 25,000 Syrian Refugees to Canada in Four Months
Ottawa, Ontario
February 29, 2016
As delivered
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
It is a great pleasure for me to be here today.
And I am here with Maryam Monsef who will say a few words in just a moment and then we will both be happy to take your questions.
So this is a terrific day for us because we have now achieved our target in phase 1 of this project, that is to say two days ago, two days before the deadline, we admitted the 25,000th Syrian refugee to Canada.
So it is great news that we have achieved our objective and that the 25,000th Syrian refugee arrived in Canada two days ago.
So it is a great victory I say for phase 1, but that does not mean that the job is complete because the next task on which we are currently embarked is to welcome people with open arms, to help them find housing, to help them learn English, to help them to get a job, so that sooner rather than later these new soon-to-be-Canadians will have successful thriving lives in our country.
So we are celebrating the achievement of phase 1, but we’re not popping any champagne because we are completely conscious of the fact that there remains a large amount of work to do.
We are conscious of that fact, but we have a certain amount of optimism because we have welcomed waves of refugees in the past from various countries, and yes, it was not easy at first, but after some time they were successful, and I am confident that these groups of Syrian refugees will be successful too.
So the main thing I would like to do today is to say thank you. I want to say thank you to all of those thousands of people who made this possible, beginning overseas with the Governments of Jordan and Lebanon, the UNHCR, the National Organization for Migration. We could not have done what we have achieved without the support of all of those groups.
And here at home, I want to thank Canadians from CN with its $5 million gift to little children who wrote welcoming messages, of which I have a few and I’ll get to that in a minute, so from CN to the little children and everywhere in between, so many thousands and thousands of Canadians have come out to support.
So I want to thank provincial colleagues, municipal colleagues, settlement provider organizations, but above all, as Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, I want to thank the staff of my own department, especially here at the airport where they have been here day in, day out for weeks and weeks and weeks working tirelessly to welcome the refugees. And I think for them I’ve been told by many it’s a bittersweet experience. It was the job of a lifetime, but you can’t go on at this pace forever, so I think some of them will be happy to get a few days off as well.
So I do think we have done the right thing. As time goes by, as I have seen the refugees and where they were coming from in Jordan and Lebanon, as I see on television the smiles on their faces when they get here, as I see pictures of them tobogganing in Maryam’s riding in Peterborough, I am more and more convinced that this is the right thing, and I am very grateful to all Canadians who have helped to make this a success.
So I am more and more convinced that this was certainly the right thing to do. And I think that the world has seen what we have done, and so I would like to express my deep gratitude to everyone who helped in this process.
And as I said, I have some little letters here from small children and they were given to me by MP John Brassard from Barrie who happens to be a Conservative MP, and I think that’s a good thing because it sends the signal one more time that this is truly a non-partisan project with all party support. And Maryam and I will be handing out some of these letters to refugee children when we meet them.
So with that, I would like to turn over to my colleague Minister Monsef who is really the perfect minister to be talking to you today because she is herself a refugee from Afghanistan and at the grand age of 31 is now a minister in the federal cabinet, so I think this sends a message to six-year-olds getting off the plane that we are about to meet: maybe in 25 years they, too, will be a minister in the federal cabinet.
You know, Canada is a country open to all and I am delighted that my colleague and friend Maryam is here to greet the refugees and to say a few words to you.
Thank you.
