PERTH-ANDOVER, New Brunswick — Cities and towns in Atlantic Canada are helping resettle people fleeing violence in other parts of the world, reflecting what some see as the same spirit that moved Canadians to aid the Underground Railroad, which came through Maine, more than a century ago.
A network of 450 Canadian Baptist churches in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador are spearheading an effort to relocate 50 families from Syria, Iraq and other countries whose populations comprise the largest refugee migration since World War II.
“From a Christian perspective, it’s the right thing to do,” said Michael Fredericks, a young pastor at the Perth-Andover Baptist Church, which is supporting a Syrian family of five expected to relocate early next year.
The Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches has been helping relocate one or two families per year in communities across the provinces for a while. But the network’s members recently decided to increase their efforts to 50 families per year as part of a new plan to relocate 10,000 refugees by September 2016. The recent waves of refugees risking their lives to escape by sea and land to Europe left Fredericks and others convinced they should help in some way.
In August, the first church to sponsor a family through the group’s expanded efforts welcomed an Iraqi family in Paradise, Nova Scotia. Two weeks later the photo of a drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish beach “woke up the world,” Fredericks said.
“I have myself a 3-year-old son, and it affected me in a big way,” said Fredericks, who also has a 4-year-old daughter with his wife, Julia. “These people have nothing except the immediate family they have with them.”
Since the start of the civil war among the repressive Syrian government forces, rebel groups and the terrorist organization Islamic State in 2011, more than 7 million people have left their homes and remain displaced within the borders of Syria, and another 4 million have fled to neighboring countries. An estimated 2 million Iraqis also have been displaced since the violence after the American-led war in 2003 and the subsequent rise of ISIS.
Families being relocated to Atlantic Canada likely left their countries a year or more ago and have been living in refugee encampments in Turkey and Lebanon while being screened by the United Nations and Canadian government, Fredericks said in a public presentation in October in Perth-Andover. Those who’ve made it to Europe aren’t eligible for Canada’s resettlement program.
In the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches’ resettlement arrangement, the federal government and the church communities split the expenses for one year, totaling about $30,000.
That will pay rent, bills, clothing and food; volunteers and service organizations will help with integration and job placement. In Perth-Andover, a town of about 1,770 across the border from Fort Fairfield, Maine, Dr. Moheb Zaki, a general practitioner with roots in Egypt, is going to help the family with Arabic translation and learning English.
“A big part of what we’re going to do is help them learn the language, culture and what it means to be Canadian,” Fredericks said.
The family tentatively approved for refugee resettlement in Perth-Andover includes a mother, father and three boys under the age of 6, Fredericks said.
“If we can raise the money easily enough, then we’ll try for two families,” Fredericks said.
Fredericks and other supporters have encountered “a little bit of pushback” in their campaign to bring in refugee families.
“It’s probably partly to do with the Canadian election,” he said, referring to the Oct. 19 vote for a new prime minister and a proposal in Quebec to ban government workers from wearing niqabs, the Islamic face veil.
“Jobs are a little scarce” in Perth-Andover, Fredericks said at the public meeting, referring to another concern. But, he said, immigrant families likely would benefit the local economy overall.
“We have a hospital, we have schools, we have everything that a family needs to succeed,” he said. “They come with thankful hearts but an incredible work ethic. These folks are coming as people who will do anything to feed their families. They’ve walked halfway across a continent.”
‘We’re all refugees’
Canada, like the United States, has a tradition of helping resettle people fleeing persecution and violence in other parts of the world.
Fredericks noted that from 1979 to 1981, Canada took in 60,000 “boat people,” some of the 1.3 million southeast Asian residents who fled their countries after the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. (More than 800,000 of those refugees resettled in the U.S., including in Maine.) In 1981, Perth-Andover welcomed a Vietnamese family, Duong and Psan-Cu Lao and their 9-month-old daughter, Hai Macau. Duong worked for McCain Foods, the Florenceville, New Brunswick-based vegetable company, Fredericks said. They later moved to Toronto and opened a Chinese food business.
Many of the Vietnamese who sought refuge in Canada have fared well, according to a 10-year study of the immigrants by Morton Beiser, a researcher at the University of Toronto. After a decade in Canada, Beiser found that 86 percent of the more than 1,000 former refugees studied were working and speaking English.
In Perth-Andover, a number of villagers watching today’s mass exodus from the Middle East have rallied around the cause of supporting families, cognizant of the country’s past welcoming strangers.
“On the national level, I really think we could bring more,” Dean Butterfield, a former Geological Surveys worker and corrections officer who writes a column for the New Brunswick based Blackfly Gazette, said.
Butterfield likened the refugee effort to the Underground Railroad, which helped fugitive slaves from the American South escape into Canada through Maine during the Civil War.
“I think it’s great that the tradition is still being carried on from so long ago, the people coming to Canada for freedom,” Butterfield said. “It’s analogous to the same thing we’re seeing, people leaving from Iraq and Syria to start a new life.”
Joe Gee, a 37-year-old Perth-Andover farmer, organized the third annual Tomlinson Lake Hike to Freedom earlier this month to help commemorate the mostly unknown history of Maine and New Brunswick’s role in the Underground Railroad. The roughly 3-mile Freedom Trail hike highlights what Gee describes as the northernmost passageway of the Underground Railroad, an abolitionist volunteer network estimated to have resettled as many as 30,000 slaves.
It is “one of the greatest movements to have happened in North America, and the secret to its success was its secrecy,” Gee said.
He started the event in 2013 after working with an African-American man at a Presque Isle nursing home. They were picking fiddleheads in the area and started wondering about the Underground Railroad’s history.
Gee learned that in Fort Fairfield, Quakers with the Maple Grove Friends Church likely housed and aided refugee slaves — a federal crime punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in prison after 1850. He believes the runaway slaves followed Tomlinson Lake Brook east from Fort Fairfield into Perth-Andover, where they were aided by the Tomlinson and Fitzherbert families.
“Once [in Perth-Andover] they would have gone over the hill to the Saint John River and might have jumped on a boat headed to Saint John or Halifax, Nova Scotia, where there were already large black communities established,” Gee said.
Gee’s ancestors were among the first European settlers in the area, including a British solider who was granted farmland after the War of 1812, and he sees the Underground Railroad history and modern resettlement aid as a common link between past and present.
“We’re all refugees here,” he said.
To donate to the refugee relocation effort in Canada, visit The Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches online at http://baptist-atlantic.ca/.