| Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
| speeches
Good morning. Thank you all for coming to spend a few minutes with us today. This is an important day of the year. It's the last day of 2015, a year that has by many measures been an extraordinary year and a year with a great deal of accomplishments to celebrate as Canadians.
| Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
| speeches
Thank you. Good morning. Hello to everyone. This is probably my last of these regular briefings of the year. One never knows, but I think it is the last. And consistently, I have tried to take Canadians through the whole story, with the pluses and the minuses. And this being the last event, probably, for the year, I do have a number of things to relate to you.
| Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
| speeches
Hello. Good morning, everybody. It's a pleasure for the two of us to be with you today. What we're going to do is I'm going to turn over to my colleague Jane Philpott, who will talk about the Interim Federal Health Program.
| Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
| speeches
Well, thank you very much and good morning. Hello everyone. I have four things to announce this morning – not necessarily all of equal importance – but four things to tell you.
| Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
| speeches
Thank you very much, Your Excellency. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. It's a great pleasure for me to be at an event hosted by His Excellency because the two of us go back a bit to the time he was Principal of McGill.
| Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
| speeches
Thank you, Jane (Philpott). And good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is a happy day and this is an important day for Canada because it is today that we are announcing a detailed plan to rescue 25,000 Syrian refugees from the most dire circumstances and to bring them into Canada where we will certainly welcome them with a smile. We will welcome them with a smile, but we will also equip them and their families to begin their new lives here in Canada.
| Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
| speeches
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Dr. Daud, I know that Humanity First does terrific humanitarian work and also on refugees and settlement. So for that reason, it is a huge pleasure and honour for me that I am here to give my very first speech as Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.
