Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau personally welcomed Syrian refugees, including Syrian Armenian refugees, at Toronto airport. “Armenpress” reports that 163 refugees arrived in Toronto by the first government plane.
The PM welcomed a SyrianArmenian family Kevork Jamkossian, his wife and 16 month old baby, saying: “You are home. Welcome home.”
“We really would like to thank you for all this hospitality and the warm welcome,’ the father said to Trudeau through an interpreter. “We felt ourselves at home.”
“We suffered a lot. Now, we feel as if we got out of hell and we came to paradise,” Jamkossian said later.
As WashingtonPost reports, families were given teddy bears and winter clothing. Trudeau earlier thanked staff and volunteers who were processing the refugees.
Greg Keoushkerian, 26, waited at the airport for his best friend, whom he sponsored. Keoushkerian, a Syrian refugee of Armenian descent, said he and his family have been in Canada for 10 months and didn’t bother applying for asylum in the U.S.
“Canada has been so welcoming. People here respect each other here. It’s so multicultural,” he said.
Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is pushing forward with his pledge to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of February 2016.
