Ali Daas fled a civil war to start a new life. He got one. Now, he defends a country that has changed a lot in the decade since it welcomed his fellow countrymen

Sailor Second Class Ali Daas deployed out of Victoria with HMCS Max Bernays on the first Monday in July. The offshore patrol ship headed north to join Operation Latitude, a maritime mission to assert Canada’s presence and sovereignty in the Arctic.

S2 Daas serves as one of the vessel’s naval communicators. His duties include relaying coded messages between allied ships and keeping the computers running and protected for the next three months at sea.

He’s also a qualified ship’s team diver and rescue swimmer, trained to conduct underwater inspections of the boat’s hull and jump out of helicopters into a churning sea – a remarkable undertaking for a young man who’d never even seen the ocean until he enlisted in the navy three years ago. But these skills become even more impressive once you know the long journey he travelled to join the crew of the Max Bernays.

Ten years ago, S2 Daas was just Ali Daas, a 13-year-old Syrian refugee landing with his family in a small, Prairie town in a strange country. He didn’t know a word of English; he couldn’t have found Manitoba on a map.

But he knew what it was like to run from gunfire when the only home you’ve known is exploding into civil war.

And what it meant to be suddenly poor, trapped in a neighbouring country that didn’t want you, lugging cement seven days a week to help feed your family and envying the other kids you saw walking to school.

Canada, he says, was the first place he remembers feeling truly safe.

Now, at 24, confident in his crisp, black uniform, proud of the Maple Leaf on his shoulder, and looking ahead to a career in the navy, he’s volunteered to keep Canada safe in turn.

A decade ago, Canadians achieved a remarkable goal: In 118 days, they helped settle 26,172 Syrian refugees – the Daas family included – with a national surge of grassroots generosity unmatched, before or since, by any other country.

And yet, the 10th anniversary of this historic act of compassion finds Canadians significantly less enthusiastic about welcoming strangers from a distant shore. Support for higher immigration levels has fallen since 2016, and most steeply in recent years. Fewer Canadians now agree that Canada has a responsibility to do its part to help refugees, according to the government’s opinion data. A continuing Environics survey suggests that suspicion of refugee claimants has grown.

Like many countries, Canada has reduced immigration and refugee targets – even though more strangers need a safe harbour than at any other time in recorded human history. Since 2016, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the global number of refugees displaced by war and violence has doubled to 41.6 million.

That doesn’t include the 67 million people forced to move within their own countries because of political upheaval or natural disasters. Without environmental action, the World Bank has estimated that over the next 25 years, more than 200 million will be internally displaced owing to climate change events alone. Safe spaces are shrinking; even today, according to the UNHCR, most refugees and asylum seekers flee one climate-ravaged place, only to arrive in another.

What will we offer as a country as this human need becomes more desperate? And what should we do as individual Canadians when the next call to action inevitably comes?

Luckily, we have new data to guide us. As the Syrians settled in and the one-year responsibility of financial and social care from their private sponsors passed, a frenzy of research began. Bureaucrats, scholars and international organizations started to evaluate how well Canada’s efforts actually worked.

The results of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, books and reports suggest Canadians are right to be cautious: Resettling vulnerable people in an unfamiliar country must be done carefully and with the right public resources, including affordable housing and language training. There are limits to what even the most well-meaning private citizens can accomplish on their own.

But these studies also tell a hopeful story. They provide evidence of the good work accomplished by co-operative, open-hearted communities. The long-term benefits of truly making room for the stranger in need. And what it means for a country to offer a welcoming example when so much of the world is closing its doors.

I first met Ali Daas in late summer 2016, when I spent a few days with his parents and siblings for a story about Canada’s nationwide effort to safely resettle Syrian refugees displaced by their country’s devastating civil war.

Ahlam Dib and Ahmad Daas, along with their three daughters and four sons, were among the first refugees to arrive in Manitoba in late 2015. They’d been sponsored by a volunteer group called Build a Village, who set them up in a modest but comfortable house on a main road in Altona, Man., a farming town of 5,000, located 10 kilometres from the American border.

Already strong in English, Ali helped translate for his parents during our interviews. A local farmer had loaned his family a plot of land, and standing by the rows of freshly planted soil, he narrated his mother’s fierce prediction that her Syrian tomatoes, their precious seeds carried to Canada in a suitcase, would grow plumper than ever in prairie soil.

In the living room, he quietly explained why his father struggled to speak about Ali’s grandmother still in Syria, who missed saying a final goodbye when the family escaped to Lebanon in 2013; she wept every time they spoke over Skype.

Like so many refugees, the Daas family had lost everything. In Damascus, the country’s capital, they’d been an enterprising, financially comfortable household. But in 2011, Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad used violence against his own citizens to quell peaceful, pro-democracy protests, and started a devastating civil war. Soon, his parents’ hotel jobs were gone, his mother’s dress shop had been ordered closed by armed guards and bombs had destroyed their thriving family farm in the nearby countryside.

They finally fled the country, joining more than 6.2 million Syrians who escaped across the border during the war. People crowded into neighboring Jordan, Turkey or Lebanon, or paid smugglers for treacherous sea journeys on overloaded boats to Italy or Greece, creating one of the worst humanitarian disasters in modern history. In Lebanon, the Daas family was forced to move regularly, searching for whatever work that they could find to survive; Ali, then 10 years old, would spend the next three years working manual labour nearly every day, falling asleep to dreams of the happy childhood he’d lost.

In November, 2015, newly elected prime minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada would settle 25,000 Syrian refugees over three months in the middle of winter – more than double the number of refugees typically resettled in an entire year. The government would sponsor half; the rest could only be achieved if private citizens mobilized immediately with money and time.

Within weeks, hundreds of private sponsorship groups, involving thousands of Canadians registered to host a family. In every province and territory, volunteers prepared warm beds and stocked kitchens.

Syrians began arriving by the planeload in December. In airport terminals across the country, exhausted families were greeted by strangers with “Welcome to Canada” signs and snowsuits for their kids. By February, the quota had been met, and more refugees were on their way.

By the end of 2016, more than 44,000 Syrians were starting new lives in Canada, according to government data; 21,745 came as government-assisted refugees, another 3,945 received support through a blended public-private model.

The remaining 18,930 refugees were sponsored entirely by regular Canadians in more than 350 communities.

Even today, only a few countries in the world allow private citizens to sponsor refugees, and none have done it as well or widely as Canada.

Since the program began 47 years ago, 462,420 private sponsored refugees have been settled in every corner of the country. There are now hundreds of groups, and countless Canadians, with expertise in helping newcomers succeed – a valuable resource no other country has so steadily enabled.

Syrian families were already arriving when Jessie Thomson received a phone call mid-December, 2015, from a friend working in Jordan for Unicef. Her friend had met a refugee who was voluntarily coaching and running a sports program for children in the Zaatari Refugee Camp, near the Syrian border. His young son had a disability and needed specialist care. “He’s an incredible guy,” her friend said. “Do you know anyone who could sponsor him?”

As it happened, Ms. Thomson did. Five months later, her sponsorship group greeted Mohammed Alkarad, his wife, son and his parents at the Ottawa airport.

Mr. Alkarad, a 12-time Syrian national champion wrestler, was a well-known teacher and coach in his home city of Daraa; he’d refused to spy on his friends and students when the protests began. His family sought temporary refuge in Jordan not long after his sister was shot and killed by a random sniper’s bullet while crossing an army checkpoint by taxi to see them on Mother’s Day. They’d been living in a tent for four years when they were approved to go to Canada.

He was impatient to return to coaching, so Ms. Thomson encouraged him to focus on language training, while she made contacts in the wrestling community. They welcomed Mr. Alkarad as a volunteer coach, and later supported Ms. Thomson’s and Mr. Alkarad’s efforts to start a new wrestling program tailored to refugee and immigrant youth.

This is how private sponsors help refugees integrate quickly into their communities: Teams of dedicated Canadians such as Ms. Thomson adapt to individual needs and network to find solutions.

During their 12 months of official support, sponsors are expected to provide housing, cover monthly expenses such as food, transportation and utilities, organize language classes and school registration and assist with job hunting. Across the country, in 2016, they provided driving lessons and private tutoring, found dentists to fix neglected cavities and friendly bosses with positions to fill. They threw birthday parties and picnics, and made trips to the zoo. And on quiet afternoons, they simply sat for tea, trading stories with the help of Google Translate.

“There’s nothing better than arrival day,” says Ms. Thomson, who has sponsored refugees since university. “But the real magic happens in the days that follow, in the meals shared, in the milestones.”

For the Syrian program, the federal government deliberately accepted responsibility for the most vulnerable people identified by officials in refugee camps. Compared to those who were privately sponsored, these government-assisted families tended to have more children and less education and were significantly less likely to speak English.

But even accounting for those differences, studies show that privately sponsored Syrian refugees established themselves in Canada much faster. A December, 2024, study of Syrians in Gatineau found that compared to government-assisted refugees, those with private sponsors were significantly more likely to have a job, a large social network and a strong sense of belonging to their community.

A 2020 Statistics Canada analysis, which used a large national database to track the outcomes of refugees who resettled in the country between 1980 and 2009, and also accounted for differences in education and language skills, found that it took up to 15 years for government-sponsored refugees, as a group, to catch up to their privately sponsored peers.

What’s more, the study found private sponsorship provided the largest earnings benefit to refugees with lower education, especially women – suggesting, the authors wrote, a “far-reaching, long-term advantage” for the most disadvantaged group.

Building community connections and a faster sense of belonging may be the most valuable contribution of private sponsorship. Researchers tracking Syrian refugees since 2016 have found that those with private sponsors were more likely to say their health care needs were met and to report a sense of kinship and mutual respect with their settlement support circle.

Still, private sponsorship wasn’t perfect. While most sponsorship groups meet their obligations – and many go far beyond them – an Alberta study also found that some refugees received little assistance and had no easy way to hold their sponsors accountable.

Conversely, some refugees, when surveyed, reported that their sponsors were too overbearing, and failed to fully consider their own autonomy.

And while resettling so many Syrian refugees so quickly earned Canada praise abroad, it also overwhelmed domestic resources. Even in 2015, sponsors scrambled to find affordable housing. In larger cities, teachers struggled to manage an influx of students often grades behind their peers. There weren’t enough language classes, especially for mothers with young children.

The focus on Syrians, suggests Luisa Veronis, a social geographer at the University of Ottawa who studied in the program, also raised questions of fairness – both for refugees from other nations not making headlines but long awaiting their own flights to Canada, and about how equitably resources and donations were shared among refugees already in the country.

Still, many of the issues with private sponsorship are logistical: They could be solved, for instance, by ensuring sufficient public resources, such as language classes, and by providing standardized support and oversight, particularly to new sponsorship groups.

As positive as the studies have been, the program has also been affected by recent cuts to immigration numbers. In late November, 2024 – about a week before the Assad government was overthrown – the federal government paused new private sponsorship applications to catch up with a backlog, at first for one year, and now until the end of 2026. Meanwhile, Ottawa has also announced the lowest targets for privately sponsored refugees in a decade.

On the whole, private sponsorship is a Canadian success story of shared resilience and generosity, and, in many cases, enduring transformational friendships.

Roukaya Al Hajj Mouhamad, her husband, Mahmoud Al Abbas, and three young daughters landed in Alberta, in the dark, during a snowstorm in 2016, and were met by strangers who became, she says, a trusted second family. They offered warm jackets, strapped the bawling children into car seats and drove them all to a clean, cozy house in Drayton Valley, an oil town of 7,000 people about 140 kilometres southwest of Edmonton.

The sponsors themselves have a few regrets. They might have more fully considered how frightening that airport arrival must have been, says Rita Stagman, and taken those car seats more slowly.

Or reinforced the idea that it was safe to ask for help, says Dianne Nikiforuk, a retired nurse who oversaw the health care part of sponsorship; during an emergency hospital visit the first weekend, she learned that Mr. Al Abbas had been suffering silently with a severely infected tooth, fearful the family might be sent back to Syria.

When Ms. Al Hajj Mouhamad had her fourth baby, she returned almost immediately to language classes. “We would not have asked any women to go back to studying so quickly after birth,” says Ms. Stagman, wishing she’d pushed harder for the new mother to rest.

“We could have given them more space to be,” she says. “But you know, we were so anxious to have them become part of our little community.”

Ms. Al Hajj Mouhamad, however, has only praise for her support group of Grandmas. “If I need help today,” she says. “I know they would be there.”

Human fallibility aside, sponsors report their own positive benefits: exposure to a different culture, a sense of purpose, working with neighbours they might otherwise never meet. In Altona, where residents helped resettle 45 Syrian refugees – including the Daas family – over 12 months, there have been farewells as people moved away for school and work, but also graduation parties and weddings.

“It’s not just about helping, it is also about learning,” says Val Klassen, one of Altona’s sponsors. “Our Canadian way isn’t the always the best way. There might be new ways of doing things that we haven’t thought of.”

In recent Environics surveys, a majority of Canadians still recognize the value of welcoming newcomers, and express support for the country’s diversity. Those who say that immigration levels are too high are more likely to criticize misguided government policy than the people coming in, and to raise concerns about housing shortage and an uncertain economy.

But even if “we’re inwardly focused for lots of good reasons,” Ms. Thomson says, the private sponsorship program can strengthen ties within communities and between cultures. “It’s not about numbers. It’s about a person in front of you who has a real story of grit and resilience and survival. It puts the human connection back into it all.”

Recalling his first days at sea, on a 33-metre training boat travelling the Strait of Georgia, S2 Ali Daas says, “I remember nothing but puking.”

But when he could lift his head to the horizon, the view was like nothing he’d imagined: mountains rising against sweeping sky, the forever blue of the ocean and – most magical of all – a pod of whales swimming playfully around and under the ship, like a marine welcome party. “This is where I want to be,” he told himself.

I reconnected with S2 Daas over Zoom from the port bridge wing of HMCS Max Bernays on the Friday morning before he deployed, while, in the background, a commanding voice on the loudspeaker ran the crew through emergency drills.

Now in the third year of a four-year contract, he’s planning to stay in the navy. He likes the adventure and camaraderie and, of course, he’s long past the need for seasickness pills.

When I met him as a teenager, Ali was already flourishing. At school, he was catching up quickly. Even though he felt older than his peers, he worked hard to make friends, who boasted to me that they now knew how to curse in Arabic. He and his 12-year-old brother, Mohamad, were busy collecting clients for their summer lawn-mowing business.

Finding him in the navy, however, was unexpected; the Syrian military, under Assad, tortured, bombed and killed tens of thousands of civilians. Soldiers had taken everything from his family. I remember being shown a satellite image of his devastated farm, blasted with craters, and Ali’s father leaving the room, overcome with emotion.

Ali’s decision to enlist, he admits, was a hard sell for his parents especially; later, when he’d chosen the navy, he eased his mother into the idea by saying he was working in an office – and leaving out the part about the office being on a boat.

As he explains, the push and pull between two cultures was always the most stressful part of being a refugee in Canada. He didn’t want to cling to what made him different; he wanted to seize the chance to thrive. And the more independent and “Canadian” he became, the harder his parents tried to keep him Syrian.

Today, if asked where he’s from, he’ll say Altona, Man., without hesitation. In Lebanon, he’d fall asleep with shoulders sliced bloody from carrying bags of cement and dream of a place where a bus would take him to school, he’d have friends his own age and life would be easier and ordinary.

“And when I moved to Altona,” he says, “it was everything I’d dreamed.”

For all they’d suffered as a family, the Daas household in 2016 was full of teasing and laughter. Sponsors popped in and out like close friends, organizing appointments, chatting at the kitchen table, accepting yet another heaping plate of homecooked food from Ali’s mom, who never allowed a visitor to depart unfed.

Even as they waited for the Syrian seeds to sprout, the Canadian roots were growing. By the end of high school, Ali – like his older sisters – was on the honour roll, excelling in math and earning a scholarship to study science at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

Then the pandemic interrupted school, and a military ad on social media caught his attention. The honour and meaning of his decision to serve was so powerful, he says, “I was literally crying filling out my application.” In August, 2023, he arrived with a busload of new recruits for basic training in Quebec. During an exercise in the woods, the cracks of gunfire dragged him mentally back to Syria. “But this time, I wasn’t hiding,” he says. “I felt powerful.”

He picked the navy and headed for the West Coast because he’d always wanted to see the ocean. When he had the chance to train as a diver, he woke at dawn every day for six months, worked out for an hour, swam for a kilometre and then ran 10 kilometres after work in the evening. After he passed the course, the lead dive instructor, who had served in warzones, reminded him that his worst experiences were unique strengths: They’d taught grit and resilience in a way most Canadians, even his navy peers, would never understand.

As he tells the military social workers every time he’s assessed for deployment, and they learn his story for the first time, “I’m not the child you’re imagining. I’m the person you’re looking at today.”

But he would never have become that person, he says, without the private sponsors who made Altona feel like home. “Without them,” he says, “I would not be here.”

For many years, the Syrian seeds planted that first summer grew beans and tomatoes on the family’s rented plot – until one of his sisters bought a farm outside Altona. His parents live there now, raising chickens and sheep and crops and dogs, their ambition to tend Daas land once again, fulfilled. And his mother has since come around to her oldest son’s chosen career path: “She tells me she’s proud of me.”

Ten years later, former Syrian refugees are running their own restaurants and bakeries, barber and mechanic shops. They have started growing companies, such as Aleppo Soap in Calgary, and Peace by Chocolate in Nova Scotia. They are working as teachers’ assistants and tradespeople, organizing cultural events and food festivals.

In Drayton Valley, Ms. Al Hajj Mouhamad will soon graduate with her high school equivalency – just ahead of her eldest daughter. She hopes to start a construction business with her husband. In Ottawa, Mr. Alkarad is running a summer camp for young athletes. And in Montreal, there’s Nour Utayim, one of the first female Syrian refugees in the world to become a pilot.

Ms. Utayim, along with her mother and two brothers, was sponsored in the Montreal suburbs by a local church group. Within two years, she’d enrolled in the flight school not far from her house, working two jobs to pay for school, walking an hour each way in the winter to attend early morning instruction.

One of her first pilot jobs was with Air Inuit, flying between northern stations or evacuating people with medical emergencies to Montreal. Two years ago, Ms. Utayim was hired by Air Canada, and today, the 31-year-old is criss-crossing the globe, a pilot on the long-haul 787.

“It’s important to believe in refugees, and give them a chance,” she says, recalling the sponsor who helped her research school options and the flight instructor who showed up early to teach her. “They’re starting over to build a good life. They’re highly motivated individuals bringing in diversity, experience and resilience.”

They just need time, as decades of research show. Most Syrian refugees arrived in Canada speaking little to no English, carrying their only possessions in a single suitcase.

But by 2018, according to the federal government’s Syrian Outcomes Report, which surveyed Syrians who arrived between late 2015 and 2016, more than eight out of 10 refugees had learned enough English to communicate without help at doctor’s appointments, in social settings, while shopping and at their jobs. Within two to three years of arriving in Canada, 57 per cent of Syrian respondents reported being employed, and 23 per cent were looking for work. Their incomes were low, the report found, but rising the longer they live in Canada.

What’s more, 90 per cent of Syrian refugees described their sense of belonging to Canada as strong – the same percentage as those born in the country.

Canada’s efforts are, ultimately, a story of young people – half of the Syrians refugees who arrived that year were under the age of 18. Many of them had missed years of school; compared to younger children, teenagers and young adults were more likely to struggle socially and academically.

But by 2018, 86 per cent of Syrian parents surveyed said all their children were in school. And today, many of those young people are graduating from high school, getting their first jobs and applying to university, says Leah Hamilton, a researcher at Calgary’s Mount Royal University who co-edited the book, A National Project: Syrian Refugee Resettlement in Canada.

“These youth have resettled and integrated in a way that’s really optimistic for the future,” Dr. Hamilton says. “Our compassion helped create those opportunities.”

We should not be surprised by these outcomes. Refugees arrive with different resources and levels of trauma; individually, they don’t find their footing at equal speed. But as a group, according to Statistics Canada, refugees have higher rates of entrepreneurship than people born here and they are more likely to work in the trades and health care, two sectors with chronic labour shortages. Their children attend university at nearly equal rates to Canadian-born peers. Nine out of 10 refugees become Canadians citizens, the highest of all newcomers. And within 20 years on average, they’ve paid more in taxes than they’ve received in government assistance.

It may be initially expensive to help someone rebuild their lives when they’ve lost everything. But in the final tally, refugees give back more than they take.

Mohammed Alkarad, the wrestling coach in Ottawa, would give this advice to the man he was 10 years ago: “It will be tough for the first few months. But in the latter half of the first year, you will start adapting. And then eventually you’ll love the water in your city, and it will become your home, and if you travel out of Canada, you will realize you couldn’t live anywhere else.”

Because, in the end, he says, “one’s nation is not defined by land, but by the people you love.”

In Drayton Valley, the residents who supported Roukaya Al Hajj Mouhamad’s family, have applied to sponsor her husband’s brother and wife, and their children. The town is more diverse today, but Ms. Stagman is aware that bringing in newcomers might be controversial. She gets that people feel that money is tight. But “it causes me angst,” she says, “to think we’ve shifted away from looking after each other.”

As for S2 Daas, he’s at sea until the end of September, asserting Canada’s sovereignty. He knows he’s training for a possible future that sends him back to a war zone. “I’m going to be ready for it,” he says. “I signed up for this. I know who I’m fighting for, and I know who I’m here for. This is the flag I carry on my shoulder every day.”

A Syrian sailor’s Canadian odyssey