[LINK] Two articles on the government of Canada not evacuating family members from Syria

[rfmcdonald]

The first came from the Toronto Star's Peter Goodspeed.

Mike Wise sold his Toronto home two years ago to rescue his mother in war-torn Syria. He thought he had bought her freedom when she and Wise’s younger sister arrived in Cuba, just a three and a half hour flight from Toronto.

What he didn’t count on was Canada’s reluctance to offer sanctuary to Syrian war refugees.

Despite Wise’s five months of intense lobbying and appeals to senior cabinet ministers, officials refused to expedite his request to have his ailing, widowed mother, Shazia Khail Rashid, 66, and his sister, Sivin, 30, join him and three other brothers in Canada.

Instead, officials with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had to call on Sweden to rescue Wise’s family.

Now, a once close family is scattered around the world.

The second comes from the CBC's Kathy Tomlinson.

Canadian woman and her Syrian husband are speaking out from a Damascus suburb because they're frightened and desperate to flee the escalating danger together. They're distraught because her government is doing nothing to help.

"All we want to do is leave here. We want to just go to Canada and have a normal life," said Anya Sass, who was born and raised in Calgary.

"We are living in fear every day … I feel like it's not being taken seriously. They are just saying, 'Sorry you are in a war zone — but that's too bad. We have a lot of paperwork to do.'"

Sass said she was travelling through the Middle East three years ago, on a break from post-secondary studies, when she met Habib Alibrahim, fell in love, and married him.

"I never made it further than Syria," she said, with a smile. "It's not easy living here right now — but it's actually a lot harder to be away from him."

Alibrahim is an engineering student who says he is secular and has absolutely no connection to terrorism. He asked Go Public not to publish which sect his family is from, because its members are targeted by both rebels and terrorists.

"I feel my life is in danger," said Alibrahim. "Her life as well. Because we are married. She is married to me. She is married to a person from this religious minority."

These are both recent articles. The Canadian government seems to be taking a very long time to process applications, much longer than other governments.