Trudeau: Welcoming Syrian Refugees is ‘What Makes Us Canadian’

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a statement this week in time for Canada’s Thanksgiving Day which emphasized that the holiday is “a time to reach out to those less fortunate – here in Canada and around the world – and lend a helping hand.” He’s talking about the more than 30,000 Syrian refugees Canada has embraced over the past year. “As these and other newcomers celebrate their first Thanksgiving in Canada,” Trudeau urged, “let us never forget that helping those in need is at the heart of what makes us Canadian.”

As CIJ News reports, since Trudeau’s government assumed power in November 2015, Canada has resettled about 32,000 Syrian refugees, “including 16,875 government-assisted refugees, 3,233 blended visa Office-referred refugees and 11,811 privately sponsored refugees.”

In his September speech at the UN General Assembly in New York, Trudeau spoke of welcoming the refugees “not as burdens, but as neighbors and friends, as new Canadians.” He described them as white-collar professionals who were forced to leave their homes and find shelter in refugee camps in the neighboring countries. “Doctors and lawyers. Teachers and entrepreneurs. They’re well educated. They work hard. They care about their families. They want a better life—a safer and more secure future for their kids—as we all do.”

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Trudeau reiterated his confidence that the refugees will boost the country’s economic growth because many of them are “pharmacists and bankers and professionals.”

John McCallum, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, begs to differ with this rosy projection. In a conversation with the Executive Director of Global Diversity Exchange at the Cities of Migration Conference in Toronto in March of this year, McCallum described the Syrian refugees as uneducated, illiterate in Canadian French and/or English, culturally foreign, and overburdened with children:

“But let me just end by giving you a profile of our current group of refugees, the government–assisted ones from Syria. Talk about vulnerable. It’s difficult to imagine a more vulnerable group of people, because on average they speak not a word of neither English or French. They in general have very little education. They in general as you’ve seen in the media, and I’ve seen it at airports, they have many, many, many, many children, and in general they have never been on an airplane in their lives before they came from there to here.”

McCallum also confirmed that the “great majority of the Government Assisted Syrian Refugees are Muslims” and did not even come from refugee camps.

Helping these people may be “at the heart of what makes us Canadian,” as Trudeau said, but the question is, do these so-called refugees themselves intend to become Canadian, or will they steadfastly remain rooted in their home culture and refuse to assimilate, as we have seen with Muslim immigrants/refugees in Europe?

Good night and good luck, Canada.

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