You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.
Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.
Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar (via quotespile)
Fulla Nayak made international news when her grandson Narayan Nayak claimed that she could be the oldest woman living in the world. She claimed her secret was smoking weed every day.
Of those stuck in limbo, nearly 2,000 had been identified by the United Nations as being amongst the most vulnerable — and whose applications had been put on hold for at least several weeks by the Prime Minister’s Office in the spring.
Canada’s Immigration department had accumulated a backlog of nearly 7,500 applications from Syrian refugees by the time three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach at the beginning of September, the Citizen has learned.
Of those stuck in limbo, nearly 2,000 had been identified by the United Nations as being amongst the most vulnerable — and whose applications had been put on hold for at least several weeks by the Prime Minister’s Office in the spring.
The government did not respond to questions about why there was such a backlog, or how many files remain unprocessed today. But some are concerned it may be related to the government’s desire to prioritize some groups of Syrian refugees over others.
The refugee crisis emerged on the election campaign trail again Friday, after a CTV report said the Prime Minister’s Office had gone through refugee applicant files to make sure Christians and other minority groups were given priority to come to Canada.
The report alleged the Conservatives had prioritized groups with large communities already in Canada in the hopes of swaying those populations to vote for the party in the election. The report also alleged the PMO had pushed Citizenship and Immigration Canada to exclude Sunni and Shia Muslims.
[…]
Some feared the backlog could be intentional. Figures obtained by the Citizen show between January and August, nearly 90 per cent of the 600 privately sponsored Syrians – those not referred by the UN and brought in by groups other than the government – were vulnerable religious or ethnic minorities.
In contrast, only about 20 — or six per cent — of the 350 referred by the UN and admitted into Canada fit that description. That’s because the UNHCR has resisted the government’s desire to prioritize ethnic and religious minorities. Its policy is to help the most vulnerable, no matter their religion or ethnic background.
Under fire in early September over the slow rate by which Syrian refugees were arriving, the government said it would take action to move things faster.
Canadian Council for Refugees executive director Janet Dench wondered how many Syrians who don’t fit the government’s preference when it comes to religion, ethnicity or some other category have been stuck in the queue.
“How much of it is also because some of these refugees do not meet Canada’s preferred profiles of people for resettlement and are being punished by being put at the back of the queue and made to wait?” she asked.
“And are they basically hostages that are being held in order to pass a message to the UNHCR to try to force the UNHCR to comply with Canada’s preferred profiles of people for resettlement?”
At a campaign event in Montreal, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said the Conservatives were playing “a dangerous game,” and “intervening to make sure the neediest on Earth, those Syrian refugees, would not make it to Canada.”
Speaking in Toronto, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau expressed anger at the suggestions that PMO staff were poring through applicants’ files “to try to find out which families would be suitable for a photo-op for the prime minister’s re-election campaign. That’s disgusting.”
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