Finding a Way to Make it Work

Dawn Edlund, former Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of Operations, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and Government of Canada Operational Lead for Operation Syrian Refugees, describes setting up new facilities overseas to interview more than 25,000 Syrian refugees.

Transcript: Finding a Way to Make it Work

Video length: 1:50

Light music plays.

An image fades up of refugees making their way through a border crossing. A man is holding a baby.

Text appears: Operation Syrian Refugees – Phase 2

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Text appears: Finding a way to make it work

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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: Public servants just can do extraordinary things when they’re given the time, energy, space, focus, resources … you know. The fact that we brought over 26,000 people in about 100 days … I had the opportunity of going over in January 2016 and visiting our 3 operational sites – so in Amman, in Beirut and in Ankara – and so I got to see firsthand, you know, what was happening with the interviewing process … with the medical examinations … with how we were doing with our partners on the ground in terms of security screening. So it was really quite amazing to see how we basically popped up 3 brand new visa offices from scratch in those locations, in fact in Beirut, I think we actually had built 4 different operational centers over time, the first one we outgrew.

We just had enormous support from Global Affairs Canada to set up these brand new offices from scratch, and the office in Amman in particular. We were in a military base and we opened, I think, November 29, [2015], and we started the first day interviewing maybe 80 people, but within a very few number of days, we were interviewing 500 people a day.

The image fades to a camera pan of many refugees waiting in line to a border crossing and holding duffel bags. The image then cuts to a mother with her children looking through her bags. The image fades back to Dawn.

dawn edlund: So, you could just see the pace and the scale and scope of how people were able to pull that together. It's not unusual for us to be resettling refugees. But doing it at the pace and the scale and the scope of what we were trying to do it as … that was definitely new and different.

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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.