Aaron Price says he’s hoping to sponsor a refugee or family and take them into his Vancouver home.

Lifeline Syria says it costs about $27,000 to support a family of four refugees for a period of one year.

“The public, in this case, is far ahead of the government”, he said. This new round of funding is to hire staff and sponsor refugees, which Hoskins said was “vital humanitarian work”.

Mr. Clark said his government was surprised at how widespread the support became for the massive resettlement plan, spreading from big cities to small rural communities, and how little opposition or animosity there was.

In a press launch Thursday night time, Lifeline Syria referred to as on the to “act urgently” to the worsening refugee disaster, together with calls for to chop “complicated paperwork” and increase assets to expedite refugees’ arrivals.

“This is exactly what we saw in the late 1970s, when (there were) very similar and equally troubling photos of refugees fleeing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia by boat and washing up on the beaches of Malaysia”, he said.

Omidvar said Lifeline Syria has been overwhelmed by response from the public.

The Ontario government says Ottawa should pledge to bring 5,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of the year. “Whether it is through a faith group, whether it is through a neighbourhood group, whether it is just as a group of friends in stepping up and saying, we’ll be part of either sponsoring or welcoming or in some other way making sure that we can take the bad crisis in which these people find themselves and make sure that they can, for some of them, have the opportunity to be as blessed as we are to come to this country”.

Winnipeg immigration lawyer David Davis said the crisis is complex, regardless of which government is in power.

He said the public will help to resettle the refugees once they are here. It’s in the nature of things like this that the people who get public credit for this are the elected ministers, but the people who made this happen were public servants.

Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government accepted 5,000 Asian-Ugandan refugees expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin’s decree in the fall of 1972 and early 1973. But in sum, Canada’s refugee history has shown that, despite being surrounded by three oceans, Canada is not an island.

Kosovar refugees were brought to Canada in emergency airlifts, and benefitted from what Dench recalled as a “seemingly unlimited budget”. But prime minister Joe Clark and external affairs minister Flora MacDonald were in support.

Between May 4 and 23 in 1999, about 250 ethnic-Albanian refugees arrived in Canada every day during the war in the Balkans. Last year, 23,286 were resettled. The manuscript, written by academics Irving Abella and Harold Troper, documented how Canada had largely shut its doors to Jewish refugees from Europe before, during and even after the Second World War.

Sources: Canadian Medical Association Journal, Immigration Canada, Canadian Encyclopedia and Statistics Canada.