Canada has announced it will double the amount of Syrian refugees it admits in 2016.
John McCallum, the minister of immigration and citizenship, said Monday from the Jordanian capital of Amman that the country’s resettlement program will expand to take 50,000 Syrian refugees next year. Canada had already promised to resettle 25,000 refugees by the end of February.
“Everyone in Canada is waiting to meet you,” McCallum told one family in Amman, where he was meeting Syrians heading to Canada.
Since Nov. 4, roughly 1,400 Syrian refugees have arrived in Canada.
“They step off the plane as refugees, but they walk out of this terminal as permanent residents of Canada with social insurance numbers, with health cards and with an opportunity to become full Canadians,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said upon greeting the first Canadian Syrian refugees in Toronto in early December, according to the BBC.
“This is something that we are able to do in this country because we define a Canadian not by a skin color or a language or a religion or a background, but by a shared set of values, aspirations, hopes and dreams that not just Canadians but people around the world share,” he said.
