Canadian Prime Minister welcomes Syrian Armenian refugee family at Toronto airport

Canadian Prime Minister welcomes Syrian Armenian refugee family at Toronto airport –

ARMENPRESS, The Canadian Press – Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau personally welcomed Syrian refugees, including Syrian Armenian refugees, at Toronto airport. “Armenpress” reports that 163 refugees arrived in Toronto by the first government plane.

 The PM welcomed a Syrian-Armenian family – Kevork Jamkossian, his wife and 16 month old baby, saying: “You are home. Welcome home.”

 “We really would like to thank you for all this hospitality and the warm welcome,’ the father said to Trudeau through an interpreter. “We felt ourselves at home.” “We suffered a lot. Now, we feel as if we got out of hell and we came to paradise,” Jamkossian said later.

 The Jamkossians were the first family to be welcomed by the Prime Minister. 

The family — the father is a blacksmith and the mother a sales clerk — was the first through processing in the wee hours of Friday morning after the government aircraft landed following a long flight from Beirut.

The family fled Syria, spent eight months in Lebanon and now they came to Canada because here, their daughter Madeleine will have many opportunities, the parents said.

“We suffered a lot,” Jamkossian said. “Now, we feel as if we got out of hell and we came to paradise.”

Trudeau and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne were on hand to welcome the first two families from the plane that brought 163 Syrian refugees to Canada. They were joined by the ministers of immigration, health and defence, as well as local mayors and opposition immigration critics.