It’s impossible not to notice the colorful posters as soon as you leave the Lionel-Groulx metro station, in the southwest of Montreal. The facade of the constituency office of the federal Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (IRCC), Marc Miller, is plastered with posters in solidarity with Palestine.
When I approach, Samar Alkhdour is standing motionless at the edge of the sidewalk, straight as an i, making a peace sign with her fingers. In a luxury SUV stopped at a red light, driver and passenger show her the middle finger while filming her. When the light turns green, they decamp.
Does that happen a lot, I ask him, before I can even introduce myself? It happens, she said with a big smile, but it doesn’t matter. There are at least as many horns of encouragement.
That day, Samar Alkhdour was on his 21ste day of sit-ins in front of the office of Minister Marc Miller. From Monday to Friday, rain or shine, she sits next to the door on her camping chair, with a small board with removable letters on which we read: “Day 201 of the genocide in Gaza. 45,000 Palestinians murdered. »
A few days before, she interrupted a speech by Mr. Miller in Montreal. The images have gone viral on the Internet. “Mr. Miller, I am Samar Alkhdour. You killed my daughter in Gaza in January and you ignored my calls for help, heartlessly and mercilessly,” he is heard saying on the microphone. “Marc Miller, child killer “, she chants as she is led outside.
When we sit down to talk, she warns me: “I don’t want the portrait painted of me to be that of a hysterical grieving mother.” That’s not the point. »
Grief is necessarily part of the story; an immigration story that largely precedes the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 and the start of the incessant bombardment of Gaza, and which turns into a nightmare due to the dizzying bureaucracy of IRCC. Samar Alkhdour was doing a master’s degree in international development when she requested asylum in Canada in 2019 with her husband and two youngest children. However, his eldest daughter, Jana, suffering from cerebral palsy, had to stay behind — due to lack of access to suitable transport when the rest of the family fled Gaza.
In 2021, the family was granted refugee status in Canada. But even by multiplying the procedures, the forms, the calls, and this, for years, impossible to set in motion the repatriation of Jana. Even for a severely disabled child, whose family had to emigrate urgently, we couldn’t keep things simple and done quickly. Humanity is not the strength of the Canadian immigration system.
Then came October 7. Jana’s safety, and that of all of Samar’s family left behind, was more compromised than ever. Samar redoubled her efforts to get her daughter out as quickly as possible, knowing that she would not survive long in the dramatic conditions in Gaza. By January 22, when the green light was finally given for repatriation, it was too late. She had died two weeks earlier of malnutrition.
The tragedy is of abysmal depth, but Samar insists: this story should not be read as an individual drama, but rather as the programmed failure of a system which views the lives of Palestinians as a negligible quantity.
Now, Samar is trying to get her sister, brother-in-law and their children to benefit from the emergency visa program created by the Canadian government to evacuate 1,000 Gazans with family in Canada. A resounding failure, by the admission of Minister Miller, who confided in March that his program could do nothing for the Gazans.
Exorbitant evacuation fees at the Egyptian border, security risks, cumbersomeness and confusion in processing applications. When we compare this program to the one set up to welcome Ukrainian refugees, there is a double standard is striking. 930,000 Ukrainians accepted, reception support measures, immediate, consensual citizen solidarity.
“It’s very good that the Ukrainians have benefited from all this,” Samar told me. Now we have to do the same thing. If we did it for a certain group of people, we can do it for another. »
This is the defense that the Canadian government clings to: yes, but in fact, it is not quite the same thing. What exactly is the difference, if not the dehumanization of a non-white population to whom hospitality is always offered with heavy caveats?
The Canadian government likes to play the impotence card on the Palestinian question. You know, we can’t do anything diplomatically, we do what we can. Yes, it would be nice if Israel agreed to the ceasefire and respected international law, but what do you want? The International Court of Justice continues its examination of the crime of genocide in Gaza. Until then, what can I say?
Canada behaves as if it were not a G7 country with considerable economic ties with Israel, and that it was not in a position to apply pressure where it counts to, on the one hand, ensure a safe-conduct to people eligible for asylum and, on the other hand, to stop the massacre.
Every day counts, concludes Samar. Every day that the whole world chooses to look the other way, to abandon the Palestinians to their fate, people die. “In Gaza, time is blood,” she says. How much longer will we let the clock tick?