A Syrian family’s hopes of reuniting with relatives in Victoria this year have been put on hold indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bishr settled in Victoria with his wife, widowed sister and young nephew in 2018. He was hoping to be joined soon by his mother, father and two teenaged brothers.
They had an interview scheduled for early March to determine their eligibility to settle in Canada, but the day before the interview they found out it was cancelled. They don’t know when it will be rescheduled.
“It’s understandable but so frustrating. We were in the final stages,” said Joanna Groves, who is part of a group that sponsored Bishr and his family to come to Canada and is now fundraising to bring over his relatives.
“Assuming that interview goes well, things can go quite quickly at that point. After the interview, we were crossing our fingers that we might welcome them in Canada.”
To protect his family, Bishr asked that his last name and the country where his parents are brothers are living not be published. He said he speaks to his parents most days. His seven-year-old nephew, Mohamed, likes looking at photos of his grandparents and dreams of the day when he will greet them at the airport.
Because of pandemic travel restrictions, Canada has pressed pause on most refugee resettlements, although Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said in a statement the agency continues to consider urgent resettlement requests on a case-by-case basis.
“Canada relies on referrals from partner agencies to identify and refer refugees for resettlement. Canada’s main partners in refugee resettlement, the United Nations Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration, have temporarily suspended resettlement departures for refugees overseas,” the department said in a statement. The government will resume resettlement operations “when it’s safe to do so.”
Bishr said he understands and supports the government’s decision to put resettlement on hold, but he wonders why the application process can’t continue. Having been through it himself, he knows the process takes months. Bishr would like to see interviews and applications go ahead online.
He worries about his family’s safety, especially since his father, a civil engineer, was laid off from his construction job in January.
His father’s job was tied to the family’s residency and allowed his brothers to attend school and his family to access health care.
“Once this pandemic is over, they will be illegal, so maybe the government will have the right to just tell them: ‘Go back to your country,’ ” Bishr said.
The family fled the Syrian province of Idlib, where a battle wages between the Russian-backed Syrian government and Turkish troops supporting Syrian insurgents. According to official reports, COVID-19 cases in the region are low, but Bishr said his friends who remain there believe there are thousands of cases and no resources to test for the virus.
The pandemic has made it impossible for his father to find odd jobs, and the family is living on savings to survive. Bishr knows their money won’t last forever, and he may need to support them on his salary as a labourer at Seaspan, where he has worked for about a year.
When COVID-19 hit, he volunteered to work the graveyard shift at Seaspan, cleaning and disinfecting everything overnight to prepare for the next day’s shift.
Groves said the family’s situation is worrying. “It’s not like Canada where, if you need help, there’s a social safety net,” she said.
Moving to Canada has changed Bishr’s life and he’s grateful for the opportunity to work, study English and imagine a future after leaving his war-torn country and spending years in limbo.
“Always, there was no future, just because I left everything in Syria and there was nothing there to start again,” he said.
Now that he’s in Canada, he feels hopeful again.
“I’d like my parents to have the same,” he said.
The group sponsoring Bishr’s family still needs to raise $18,000. Anyone wishing to contribute can do so online through the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria. The constituent group number is CG092-18, which can be found in a drop-down menu.
regan-elliott@timescolonist.com
• Online: icavictoria.org
