Roundup: Refugee plans leaking out

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We have some more details on the Syrian refugee plans that have started leaking out – 900 Syrians arriving per day starting December 1st, primarily from camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey; military facilities are being quickly winterized to help house them, mostly in Ontario and Quebec; and it looks like Christmas leave and vacations are being cancelled for a number of civil servants and military personnel to help make this all happen in time, which will cost in overtime. All will be identified by the UNHCR as resettlement candidates and screened on the ground (screening process explained here), and once they land and additional checks are made, they’ll immediately be made permanent residents. And it sounds like there may also be an advertising campaign to help Canadians who want to help out and do more to help the refugees. We’re due to get the official confirmation for these plans by next week, so we’ll see how much of all these leaks bears out then, but it does appear that the ambitious plan is coming together, and perhaps all of the overblown concerns for plans nobody has seen or articulated may be for naught.

Good reads:

  • After being mobbed in Manila, Trudeau hopes to turn that celebrity towards his hope-and-optimism message.
  • After his bilateral meeting with Trudeau, Obama seemed to insist we’ll sign the TPP deal soon, never mind Trudeau’s plan for more consultations on it.
  • In the Duffy trial, we finally got to hear some answers from Gerald Donohue, the man running the alleged slush fund for Duffy’s office. (O’Malley recap here).
  • An encrypted hard drive was stolen from a returning office, and now Elections Canada has to spend $23,000 on credit history monitoring for affected employees.
  • Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski referred to a provincial candidate as an “NDP whore,” but he insists he said “NDP hordes,” not that most people believe him.
  • Here is a glimpse at the health minister’s “activist” agenda.
  • The Parliamentary Budget Officer crunched some numbers on veterans’ benefits.

Odds and ends:

The move to eliminate evening sittings and replace them with morning ones in the Alberta legislature is problematic for a reason, as explained here.

It looks like pick-and-pay cable packages should be available before the end of next year.

The finance minister is delivering an economic and fiscal update this morning.

One thought on “Roundup: Refugee plans leaking out”

  1. Canada has processed in times of crisis thousands of Refugees nothing new for Canada and Immigration Officers. So why all the focus now on how can we do this? The UNHCR system is very good, I know it well, it works. So this will be a by plus to the Canadian plan. We also have been taking Syrian refugees for decades, this is just the latest group, again nothing new. If it works out as promised by Trudeau it will be a great thing for Canada and our reputation.

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