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Winnipeg Free Press
44 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Academics call on Ottawa to speed up Palestinian student visas
OTTAWA – A group of Canadian academics is calling on the federal government to speed up approvals of student visas for Palestinians after two students who were accepted at a Canadian university died before they could leave the region. Ayman Oweida, chair of the Palestinian Students and Scholars at Risk Network, said the two students, twin sisters, were killed in an airstrike in Gaza in December. The Palestinian Students and Scholars at Risk Network is a volunteer group of Canadian academics that helps connect Palestinian students at the graduate level and above to research projects in Canada. But its work was set back by Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip. The Canadian government has no diplomatic presence there — which means students in the enclave have no way to register biometric data with the government in order to complete their visa applications. The network says it has placed about 70 students in universities across the country, several with full scholarships. 'In addition to the two students that were killed, 15 students in Gaza who we've accepted have lost family members … direct family members, brothers, sisters, parents, and so on,' Oweida said. Oweida, who researches cancer treatment at the University of Sherbrooke, said one student who was supposed to work with him on a project has been stuck in Gaza for a year. He said the Canadian side of the network has reached out to MPs to try to resolve the issue, without success. 'I think the Canadian government has really an amazing opportunity here to step up its game and do something … to resolve this issue and bring these students home, home meaning Canada,' he said. One of the Canada-bound students still stranded in Gaza is Meera Falyouna, who is living near the Rafah border crossing. The 25-year-old masters student said she applied to the University of Regina while living in a tent with her family in December 2023. She was accepted to the industrial engineering program in April 2024 and submitted her Canadian student visa application in July 2024. Falyouna said she was supposed to start her studies last September. Because she's unable to provide the necessary biometric data for her visa application, she said, her file remains stuck in limbo even as she watches friends move on to study in places like France, Ireland and Italy. 'I don't want to be among the dead people. I want to be counted as dreamers, as future engineers, professors, doctors,' Falyouna told The Canadian Press. 'I want to be a person who has impact to Canada and also one day to return back to my country and help to rebuild the Palestinian academic system.' Matthew Krupovich, a spokesman for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, said that biometrics can only be completed once someone leaves Gaza. He added that countries in the region, including Egypt and Israel, control their own entry and exit requirements at their borders. People coming to Canada from Gaza also have to undergo an additional security screening since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel. 'As security screening is conducted by agencies outside IRCC, we are unable to provide average processing times. Each application is different and as a result, the time it takes to process may vary,' Krupovich said in an email response. 'All study permit applications from around the world are assessed equally and against the same criteria, regardless of the country of origin. Security screening is one, but not the only, factor that can result in higher processing times.' The Rafah border crossing into Egypt has been closed since May 2024. Falyouna said the rest of her family got to Egypt just five days before the border closed. Falyouna said she fears she and her fellow Palestinian students could lose their placements entirely. 'I'm receiving now a support from my professor. She pushed to accept my defer letter every time, but I'm still in risk to not be accepted next time because I already asked for a defer for my admission three times before,' she said. Aaron Shafer, an associate professor specializing in genomics at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., said that a Palestinian student who was going to work with him has been trapped in Gaza for eight months. Shafer said he thinks the student has lost weight in the last eight months due to a dire shortage of food in Gaza. 'He probably weighed — just looking at photos, we've never met — 60 kilograms, but he's a small guy. And last week he said, 'We're happy because people are getting food. We haven't received any yet, but we're happy,'' Shafer said. Shafer said that about a third of the students who have been accepted by universities in Canada are already in Egypt but are still waiting for their visa applications to be processed. 'It's literally 70 students. And so that's what we're asking for, is to process the visas of 70 students that have positions in Canadian labs,' he said. For now, all Falyouna and the other students can do is wait and try to survive. 'I want to say to the Canadian government that we want to be treated as other students who came from at-risk situations from countries of the world like Ukraine and like Syria,' she said. 'We want to be to treated like them. We want to be treated fairly, we want to have the support they got. We just want to be alive to complete our dreams.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 4, 2025.
CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
I spent years feeling like an outsider in Canada — until my children helped me see it as home
This is a First Person column by Magdalena Olszanowski, a writer and communications professor who lives in Montreal, and is part of a Canada Day series exploring what Canada means to people across this country. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ. "What's so wrong with being Canadian?" my nine-year-old child asked me at dinner. "We're Montrealers. We're Canadian." My skin crawled. I always saw myself as a Pole living in Canada. Not a Canadian. I built this moat around me based on my experiences immigrating to Toronto from Warsaw, Poland. My parents and I moved with a single suitcase in the dead of winter in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But my two children were born in Montreal and knew only this land as home — a stark contrast to the moat I had imagined for myself. My child sensed my conflicted feelings. Around the time of U.S. President Donald Trump's re-election, my nine-year-old began questioning the antagonistic sentiments about Canadian identity they had grown up hearing in their own home. But this was the first time they'd ever questioned my feelings about Canadian identity so pointedly. I fumbled through an explanation about how we as Polish-Greek Jews celebrate our bountiful heritage and its customs, but the justifications I had built up over decades were suddenly inadequate against a child's clear-eyed logic. If being Canadian was so wrong, what was I doing here? Microaggressions in Canada When I moved to Canada, I didn't know English. I didn't know about Canadian culture. I didn't know how cold it could get. Most of all, I didn't know how this country could ever be my home. My welcome as a tween didn't help. "You know what Polish people are called?" a classmate said. "No," I said, narrowly opening my mouth to accentuate the "o" so as not to betray my hard syllable-timed Polish accent. "Kielbasa," he said, rolling the 'i" and anglicizing the word. "Fat, juicy, stinky kielbasa." Each harsh syllable reinforced the idea that I didn't belong here, widening the gap between who I was and who I thought I needed to become. Despite growing up in a city teeming with immigrants and first-generation kids, it felt like being Canadian meant following a white middle-class lifestyle. Or carrying a name that never made anyone pause or stumble over syllables. At 11, I insisted that my parents officially anglicize my name, only to return to my birth name a decade later. I wanted so badly to fit in, yet I derided where I would be fitting into. My parents, filled with acculturation stress — the psychological strain of adapting to a new culture — weren't equipped to help me navigate this either. But the contempt I held for the world I was trying to enter may have kept me from seeing my place within it. The moat I thought was widening between me and this country was actually filling up with the sediments of daily belonging. Belonging to Canada In 2011, when I moved to Montreal and later became a mom, the disconnect between identity and belonging started to narrow further. Quebec gave me an identity that eventually became perennial: an allophone mother. I had to put in effort for Montreal's language and cultural differences to experience its bountiful offerings. This effort at understanding was the welcome I was waiting for when I arrived in Canada, now realizing it could only flourish with my tending. In our yard, my daughter asks to plant flowers, so we do — native flowers such as wild bergamot, fireweed and yarrow. I choose the latter two, because they grow both in Warsaw's forests and along Quebec's roadsides. We bike around with books to share with Les Croque-livres (little free libraries). "Mama, I love our neighbourhood," my nine-year-old says, holding up an Elise Gravel comic they found tucked in a turquoise free library in a ruelle verte (green alley) near our home. When I overhear them explain Orange Shirt Day to their sister over nalesniki (Polish crepes) with maple syrup, while they both don matching Every Child Matters shirts, or when they make up rhymes in Frenglish about the MPs on posters during election time, I realize this is what it means to be Canadian. I'm the immigrant parent observing my children's fluency in languages I'm still struggling with, but they've shown me the many reasons that being Canadian is not succumbing to nationalism or bumper sticker cliches or letting the past wholly define me. It's using my own experience of cultural erasure and alienation — being seen as a stereotype rather than a whole person — to teach my children about xenophobia and to fight against it. It's ensuring that Indigenous presence is never erased from our understanding of what it means to be Canadian. It wasn't until that incisive question from my child that I realized that my efforts to fit in over the years were actually gestures toward building a more welcoming Canada for all. By participating in the historic Quebec student strikes, co-ordinating a "Yes In My Backyard Festival" for years, teaching Canadian cinema that foregrounds Indigenous stories and taking my children when I vote, I was helping shape a more inclusive Canada. I've realized that belonging in and to this country can take many forms. Like plants, it relies on cross-pollination to flourish. I'm grateful my children's fresh eyes taught me to embrace what was already blooming around me.
CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
Palestinian students say visa delays have stranded them despite admission to Canadian schools
With two of their peers killed last year, more than 70 Palestinian students are raising the alarm over stalled immigration to Canada despite admissions and scholarships at universities across the country, stranding them in Gaza or nearby Egypt and Jordan as they wait out a war. "The situation in Gaza is getting hard day by day, they are targeting many crowded and random places," said Meera, an industrial engineering student who has been accepted to the University of Regina on scholarships to pursue a master's degree, but is stuck waiting in Gaza City, where she's unable to submit a completed visa application to the federal Immigration Department. "Like so many other students, I become trapped with my dreams," she told CBC News in an interview. CBC News is only using her first name due to concerns for her safety. CBC has seen her acceptance letter from the University of Regina, as well as paperwork showing she has started an immigration file with the Canadian government. In December 2024, twin sisters Sally and Dalia Ghazi were killed after being accepted into a PhD program at the University of Waterloo in southern Ontario, in what the school described as an Israeli airstrike. "They didn't even start their dreams," said Meera, who knew the sisters. "They were very excellent girls who were always asking new opportunities and new chance to know more information about opportunities in Canada," she said. WATCH | Twin sisters from Gaza set to attend Canadian university killed in war: Gaza twins set for University of Waterloo killed in war, school officials announce 7 months ago Duration 2:02 Like dozens of other students, Meera has tried getting through to Canada with the help of a Canadian non-profit called Palestinian Students and Scholars at Risk. (PSSAR). According to PSSAR, there are more than 70 students who are stuck in Gaza waiting to get here. The federal government maintains the primary issue for Palestinians trying to leave Gaza and enter Canada is obtaining security clearance by providing photos and fingerprints, known as biometrics. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) cannot administer these tests on the ground since it has no presence in the war zone. "Movement out of Gaza remains extremely challenging and may not be possible at this time, as countries and other actors set their own entry and exit requirements," IRCC said in a statement. Professors find government explanation thin IRCC's explanation did not satisfy Aaron Shafer, a professor in Forensic Science at Trent University in Peterborough, who is working with the PSSAR to bring over another Palestinian student waiting in Gaza. "We know that other countries have managed to do this. France, for example, has managed to facilitate safe passage for students," he said. "I would call on and ask the Canadian government to try to facilitate something similar." In January 2025, French media reported some 32 students had managed to get to France to pursue studies over the course of the previous year, including at least one directly from Gaza. Shafer also says about a third of the students PSSAR is attempting to help have already left Gaza and are waiting in Egypt or Jordan, where the Canadian government still has yet to process their paperwork. "They could be in their lab tomorrow at the University of British Columbia or the University of Toronto, if the Canadian government would process their visas," he said. Alaa, one student CBC News spoke to in Cairo, Egypt, said he submitted his immigration paperwork in May 2024. He's been waiting for approval since then. Accepted into a PhD program in Montreal, Alaa says he has not received any update from IRCC. CBC News has also seen his documentation and is agreeing not to use his fill name in concern for his safety. Alaa says he lives alone, separated from his wife and four children who remain in Gaza, and is barely able to speak to them. He completed previous degrees in Gaza, but says his university, like all others in the territory, has been levelled in the war between Israel and Hamas that has been raging since October 2023. "That's a reason also that's made me take a decision to travel to Canada to complete my PhD, to return to Gaza, to enrich and contribute to rebuild our academic establishment." WATCH | Professor in Gaza returns to a university campus destroyed by war: 'This is really a crime:' Professor returns to ruins of Gaza university 5 months ago Duration 2:52 Clock ticking on admissions Another obstacle the students are facing is expiry dates on admissions or scholarships. Meera told CBC News she has already twice deferred starting at the University of Regina, and is concerned about having to do that a third time. The admission letter CBC News saw for Alaa said his offer is valid only if "it is followed by a course registration in the Fall 2025 semester." Asked about delays for students who have already gotten out of Gaza and are waiting for visas elsewhere, IRCC said "each application is different, and as a result, the time it takes to process may vary. Processing times can vary based on a variety of factors, such as whether an application is complete, if IRCC has to wait for additional information, how easily IRCC can verify the information provided, and the complexity of an application." IRCC also did not directly answer a question about whether it is in touch with France or other allied countries about best practices to assist students leaving Gaza.
