Evan Solomon on the refugee crisis, and a Ugandan family who entered his own life 43 years ago
With the Syrian refugee crisis engulfing the federal election campaign, I reconnected with the first refugees I’d ever met, to see it through their eyes. Shamshidun—he goes by Sam—arrived in Canada in 1972. That’s when our lives interconnected. Like many Canadians, my parents had heard that the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin had ordered the expulsion of people of South Asian origin. More than 80,000, many Ismailis like Sam, were forced to flee. My parents responded instinctively. “How could we not see the parallels to the ’30s in Europe?” my mother recalls.
At the time, Canada didn’t even have a diplomatic office in Uganda, but Pierre Trudeau sent a team to Kampala to help. Between September and early November, the Canadian mission screened, selected and airlifted 6,000 people out to Canada. It was the biggest resettlement of non-Europeans—read non-whites—in our history until then. Next to the bureaucratic complexities we hear about regarding Syrian refugees, the process was almost implausibly simple.
Read more at the Source: Why the Syrian refugee crisis has eluded our leaders’ grasp – Macleans.ca
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