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Jack Knox: Hurry up and wait for Syria refugees — it’s like pulling teeth

Note to Justin Trudeau: There’s more to saving Syrians than posing for selfies in the airport. Just ask the Victoria dentists who feel compelled to treat them for free.
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Julie Angus, whose father was born in Syria, is part of a Fairfield group trying to bring her aunt, uncle and three cousins to Canada. They were told in February that the family's arrival was imminent; they still aren't here.

Note to Justin Trudeau: There’s more to saving Syrians than posing for selfies in the airport.

Just ask the Victoria dentists who feel compelled to treat them for free.

Just ask the Vancouver Island sponsors still waiting for refugees they expected to arrive two months ago.

Good-hearted people who chose to side with angels and help the Syrians are finding the devil’s in the details of Ottawa’s refugee strategy.

That includes those at Victoria’s Hillside Dental Centre, where they’re discovering a federal program that provides the refugees with short-term care doesn’t come close to meeting the newcomers’ critical needs.

The centre has treated 30 Syrians in the past two or three weeks, many with severe dental problems far beyond those of a typical North American.

“We’ve had children who come in who cannot eat because they’re in so much pain,” says Hillside Dental manager Heather Slade. On Tuesday, a man showed up with all his teeth snapped off, just the roots showing.

Many have teeth that need intensive cleaning just to let dentists look at underlying problems; one woman spent six hours in the chair. Yet the cleaning isn’t covered by the federal program, so Hillside’s hygienists have been coming in on their days off to do the work for free.

Root canals (an $800 job) aren’t covered, either, but dentists are doing them rather than yank teeth that could be saved.

At other times, dentists choose to relieve a patient’s pain immediately rather than wait for authorization (a process that can take weeks), meaning they do the work without knowing whether they’ll be paid.

Hillside has tried to recruit other dental clinics to share the load, but they’re leery of a program that Slade calls “administratively cumbersome.”

Victoria MP Murray Rankin says he’s trying to help the dental centre. At the same time, he’s dealing with a related problem: a sudden bureaucratic backlog that has left Syrians languishing in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, even as their Vancouver Island sponsors stand ready to welcome them.

Once Canada reached its goal of bringing 25,000 Syrians to Canada by the end of February, Ottawa cut the extra immigration staff it had hired to handle the surge. As a result, private sponsors who had been told in February to expect the imminent arrival of refugee families now don’t know when they’ll get here.

Victoria’s Julie Angus is among the sponsors. The daughter of a Syrian-born father, she’s part of a Fairfield group that wants to bring her aunt, uncle and three cousins here.

The Syrian family’s story has been told here before. They stayed in their native Aleppo as long as they could, even remaining in their apartment after a bombardment killed the building’s other residents, before finally paying a smuggler to spirit them to Turkey in March 2015.

In mid-February, the Fairfield group got good news: The family had been cleared by Canadian authorities, and could be expected to arrive at any time.

That was two months ago. The donated Fairfield apartment that is to be their new home sits empty. Angus says her aunt and uncle are scared. She doesn’t know what to tell them.

A Duncan group went through a similar experience, hurriedly renting a townhouse in February after being told to expect a family of seven within a couple of weeks. Then, nothing but silence from Canadian authorities. Duncan’s Kathryn Holopainen says her sponsorship group doesn’t know what’s happening with the file. “Apparently, it’s sitting on a desk somewhere.”

So the sponsors continue to pay for a furnished townhouse in Duncan while the Syrians tread water in Turkey, crammed in a one-bedroom apartment with nine other refugees.

Rankin says that although Immigration Minister John McCallum assured him Canada would ramp up refugee processing again, the Victoria MP has seen no evidence of that actually happening.

The Greater Victoria Inter-Cultural Association’s Jean McRae, just back from Ottawa, says processing is beginning again, but it’s not easy to put all the pieces in place, that the ramp-up will mean transferring staff from visa offices elsewhere in the world.

That leads her to offer this bit of perspective: New sponsorship groups might be frustrated, but remember that prior to the end of February, those 25,000 Syrians were being processed at a lightning-fast pace relative to what those who work with refugees are used to seeing. Remember that it usually takes years, not months, to get a refugee to Canada from some parts of the globe.

McRae enjoys the benefit of experience, though. Rankin is anxious that Canadians who are newer to the refugee arena not be deterred by the recent hiccups. Don’t let the problems detract from the groundswell of support for the Syrians, he says.

“We should be so proud as a people that we’ve done this.”