The First Flights

Dawn Edlund, former Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of Operations, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and Government of Canada Operational Lead for Operation Syrian Refugees, talks about the 99 flights that brought Syrian refugees to Canada.

Transcript: The First Flights

Video length: 2:18

Light music plays

An image fades up of a Canadian military plane at the airport.

Text appears: Operation Syrian Refugees – Phase 3

The image fades to black and turns into a blurred background.

Text appears: The First Flights

Screen fades to black and music stops.

Transition to a women speaking on 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: To get to the 25,000 mark by the end of February 2016, people mostly came by chartered flights – chartered aircraft that we got through the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Between December 10 [2015] and February 29 [2016] there were 99 flights that came.

The image fades to a Canadian military plane pulling up to a terminal gate. The image then fades back to Dawn.

dawn edlund: So, the IOM would organize busing people from where they were living to the actual … sometimes they went to an airport … a hotel to stay overnight, and then they would bus them very early the next morning to the airport. Transport Canada requires … if you’re chartering planes to come to Canada, they actually have to be inspected by Transport Canada officials, and so there were a couple of folks that I met in Ankara who were heroes in terms of the number of places [where] they’d been checking out the planes, making sure everything was good before people boarded the flights. When we tried to schedule the first flight and figure out, you know, what day that would actually be, it was kind of a chicken and an egg, because we couldn’t book … we couldn’t set up for the flight until we knew there were going to be people on it, but we couldn’t set up the date for the flight unless we knew people had exit permits, and they couldn’t get their exit permit unless they knew what day the flight was, and so it was very complicated. I have a story of one of our officers working in Beirut, you know, basically kind of 20 hours straight on, you know, 35 cups of Nescafe and writing out the … trying to figure out, you know, who is going to sit on the plane and how many folks are we going to get going, and then, you know, the very complicated process of getting the exit permit documents to the Lebanese authorities so they could issue the exit permits and then bring them back. And in the end, we actually … the first 2 planes were both done by the Department of National Defence, so the Canadian Armed Forces…

The image fades to refugees exiting the plane into the terminal. Then the image cuts to a mother and daughter sitting down in the terminal smiling. The image then fades back to Dawn.

dawn edlund: and they were … we filled them. So, there was 164 people on one flight, I think, and 165 or 167 on the second.

The screen fades to black.

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.