Kenney defends taking Iran, Iraq refugees over Syrians on trip to Turkish camp

OTTAWA – The NDP and a Syrian Canadian group are questioning why Immigration Minister Jason Kenney chose to accept Iraqi and Iranian refugees when he visited fleeing Syrians in Turkey last month.

They say he misled the Canadian public by touting a visit to support Syrian refugees in Turkey, which currently hosts about 200,000 of them.

They question why he decided that Canada would take 5,000 Iraqis and Iranians instead of Syrians, and whether he was just playing politics with the Syrian crisis.

But Kenney’s spokeswoman Ana Curic says there’s a perfectly good explanation for the decision: Turkey won’t let any fleeing Syrians leave the country until the United Nations officially declares them actual refugees.

What’s more, Curic says, Canada is co-operating with the UN’s refugee agency, which doesn’t want to push the resettlement of the hundreds of thousands of fleeing Syrians just yet.

The UN wants all countries to push for a political solution to the two-year-old civil Syrian civil war that has claimed 90,000 lives, displaced four million people internally and forced 925,000 to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.