[LINK] Joe O'Connor in the National Post on Syrians in Atlantic Canada

[rfmcdonald]

Joe O'Connor's National Post article "Atlantic Canada, stuck in demographic death spiral, sees huge opportunity in Syrian refugee influx" examines how some Atlantic Canadians look to Syrian refugees as a way to keep the population of the region afloat.

Mike Timani wanted to be an engineer. It was his life plan, and it changed, abruptly, in 1975, when civil war broke out in Lebanon. Timani’s village overlooked the Mediterranean. His parents owned two homes. One was shelled in the fighting, a direct hit that destroyed half of the house while the family was sitting in the other half. Fear and death became the Lebanese norm, and so Timani’s father urged his son to leave, which he did, in 1976, fleeing to Canada because he knew it was a “peaceful country.”

Timani got a job busing tables at a Toronto hotel. He didn’t really know anyone, or how to speak English, but he knew how to work hard and has gone on to employ 60 workers — half of whom are immigrants — at the Fancy Pokket Bakery in Moncton, N.B.

“I understand what civil war is like,” says Timani, who opened his bakery in 1989, specializing in pitas and bagels and the like. “I understand how hard it is to start over. But I was a hardworking guy, as many of us immigrants are.’’

Moncton was among 36 communities identified this week — as were nearby Fredericton and Saint John — by the federal immigration minister, John McCallum, as potential destinations for Syrian refugees. New Brunswick’s government has said the province can accommodate 1,500 Syrians. It will inspire a warm and fuzzy, kindhearted-Maritimers narrative, to be sure, but there is another more urgent storyline at play: the Syrians might desperately need a home, but New Brunswick desperately needs the Syrians.

It is the quid pro quo of the refugee crisis, at least in Atlantic Canada, where the provinces are stuck in a demographic death spiral, with rapidly greying populations, young people leaving for jobs someplace else and shrinking tax bases, lurching under the weight of the retired, the sick and the old.