Finding a Place to Call Home

Dawn Edlund, former Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of Operations, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and Government of Canada Operational Lead for Operation Syrian Refugees, recalls some of the challenges settlement providers encountered as they welcomed refugees and some of the innovative solutions they developed.

Transcript:  Finding a Place to Call Home

Video length: 4:26

Light music plays.

An image fades up of a small child with his family as he waves to the camera.

Text appears: Operation Syrian Refugees – Phase 5

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Text appears: Finding a Place to Call Home

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Transition to a woman speaking to the camera, with flags in the background.

Text appears: Dawn Edlund, Former Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of operations, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and Government of Canada Operational Lead for Operation Syrian Refugees

dawn edlund: What happened, like … again, I go back to the … it was very difficult to plan who was arriving where and when. Come about late January, early February, where the government-assisted refugees were going … the community capacity to actually house these people in their initial housing, which is normally in hotels, began to falter because people were just arriving too quickly.

The image fades to a picture of Carl Nicholson and a women. They’re holding 2 paintings of trees and snow. The image then cuts back to Dawn.

dawn edlund: And so, I remember Carl Nicholson from our service provider organization here in Ottawa calling us up at one point and saying, I can’t take anybody now for, like, give me a week, because it’s … it’s Winterlude in Ottawa and all the hotels are booked. And so, then we … we ended up with people staying in our hotels for much longer periods of time than would normally … than would have been, you know, ideal. So we had to change our hoteling strategy so that we actually … if people were going to stay in the hotels, not 2 nights but rather 2 weeks or 4 weeks or 6 weeks. We had to bring integration programming into the hotels so that they could start some language classes; that they could go out on some excursions.

The image fades to a picture of a man and a woman ice skating. The image then fades to children sitting around a large table playing with toys. The image then fades back to Dawn.

dawn edlund: There were … 53% of the people we brought in were under the age of 19 in that first initial swoop, and so, you know, there were a lot of young kids running around, and the government-assisted refugees in particular had very large families, and so you needed to have things organized …

The image fades to a picture of a small boy painting in a classroom. The image then fades back to Dawn.

dawn edlund: … so the kids would have things to do instead of just kind of running amok in the hallways of the hotels. And so, we tried a couple of different things. We had the Rexdale Women’s Centre … we procured a hotel for them away from the airport …

The image fades an image of 2 women speaking in front of a makeshift classroom inside a hotel. The image cuts to a mother in the same room listening while she is holding a young boy. We then see a close-up to 3 men listening carefully. The image then fades back to Dawn.

dawn edlund: and they just moved in and set up, like a whole integration set of programming for the Syrian families to be housed in that hotel for however long it took, so that’s one thing we did to try and alleviate that … the delays in … people in our hotels. In British Columbia we worked with Chris Friesen’s organization and set up kind of a hub and spoke model …

The image fades to a picture of man in consultation in an office. He is chatting with an office worker. The image then cuts back to Dawn.

dawn edlund: that Chris’s group would look after things, but we actually destined people to other communities in B.C., not all into Vancouver, because you can imagine, with families … you know, some of the Syrian families were … 22% of them were 8 to 10 plus in terms of the numbers of people in the family, and so housing in a place like Vancouver for such large families … that’s pretty impossible.

The image fades to a mother with her son at an airport terminal. The image then cuts to a young girl sitting in the airport terminal and smiling. The image then fades back to Dawn.

dawn edlund: So, we took people out on day trips to like, Kelowna, to Abbotsford … I forget some of the other ones, but then to say, would you be interested in moving … not staying in Vancouver but being in Kelowna? And so that worked out for … for folks finding permanent housing more quickly.

And then the third thing we did, which was also innovative on the housing side, is we worked with New Brunswick. So, New Brunswick was, I think, the sole province or territory who, in the middle of the operation, stuck up their hand and said “We want to take more. We gave you this idea we [would] take so many, but we actually think we can take more.” And so we worked again with my counterpart in the province, Charles Ayles, and with the service provider organization in Fredericton, and we procured a hotel in Fredericton and we moved, I think it was 237 Syrian refugees from either … our hotels either in Montréal or Toronto … took them to Fredericton and then all the communities and all the service provider organizations sent representatives in to interview the Syrians in those hotels … in that hotel, and find out about their language skills and their … what kind of jobs they’d worked at before …

The image fades an image of 2 women speaking in front of a makeshift classroom inside a hotel. The image then fades to three men sitting down and smiling. We then see a close-up to the 2 women addressing the group. The image then fades back to Dawn.

dawn edlund: what kind of credentials they had, and then they actually enticed them to move to communities where they had good employment prospects. So, you know, Bathurst needed a welder, and we found out one of the Syrians was a … had a welding background. We said “Do you want to move to Bathurst, there’s going to be employment for you there, and here’s the other kinds of things we’re going to do for you.” And so that really helped get people into their destination communities a lot more quickly.

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The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada corporate signature along with the copyright message “Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, represented by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 2020.” are shown on screen followed by the “Canada” wordmark.