(Ottawa) Ukrainians have until Sunday to apply for their emergency visa to come to Canada.
Canada has granted some 960,000 emergency visas to Ukrainians following the 2022 Russian invasion.
Canada appears to have seen a sharp increase in Ukrainian newcomers in the month leading up to this deadline. By the end of February, 248,726 Ukrainians had traveled to Canada, but it is unclear how many remained.
The Minister of Immigration, Marc Miller, estimated that the number of new arrivals should approach 300,000 by the end of March.
Although the visa that allows Ukrainians to work and study in Canada is temporary, the vast majority of those who came to Canada and stayed have signaled their intention to settle permanently.
With the visa expiring on Sunday, many Ukrainians face difficult decisions about where their future will take them and whether they ever plan to return home. This is the case for Lilyia Dvornichenko.
It was 4:40 a.m. when bombs began falling on M’s hometown of Kharkiv.me Dvornichenko in Ukraine, located just an hour from the Russian border.
Her jaw was tight and her tone neutral as she described the first terrifying moments two years ago, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of her country.
PHOTO BAZ RATNER, REUTERS
“Everyone thought it would be over the next day. The day after. The next day it would be over,” she said, recalling her trip, sitting in a hotel cafe in Warsaw, Poland. “It was getting worse and worse. »
With a sad laugh, she described the effect stress had on her body, how she looked like a skeleton after just a few days.
Mme Dvornichenko helped organize a convoy of vehicles to take his family members across the country and slept in an abandoned preschool where they were not allowed to turn on the lights for fear of being targeted by airstrikes.
She was only able to cross the border by wielding a crowbar to prevent other cars from blocking their path on a lawless road, as millions headed towards the safety of Poland.
She spoke with a calm and sober air as she recounted those terrible days. It was only when she spoke about her decision not to return to Ukraine that her voice began to tremble and she hid her face.
“The patriotically correct thing would be to go back, right? Create jobs, take jobs, pay taxes, restore, she said. But I kind of lost faith that it was fixable. »
Few people take an expensive trip to Canada lightly. Even though many members of M’s familyme Dvornichenko got the visa, they all made different decisions about what to do. While one niece chose to come to Canada, other family members stopped their trip in Poland, while others still remain in Ukraine.
As a single professional fluent in English, Mme Dvornichenko said Canada offers an attractive option because she has a good chance of eventually obtaining permanent residency. But she also supports her parents, who will probably never obtain Canadian citizenship.
“I can drag them to a completely foreign country for three years and then send them back,” she says. I can’t… It’s absolutely useless. »
She also doesn’t think she can go home herself.
Like many Ukrainians in Canada, she plans to continue fundraising and supporting the war effort abroad.
With his parents’ apartment in Kharkiv destroyed, as well as everything they owned in Ukraine, the idea of returning there, even after the war ends, seems unlikely.
“I understand I have reasons, right? But at the same time, I wish it were different. Really,” she argued.
The United Nations refugee agency says 6.5 million Ukrainians were registered as refugees worldwide as of February 2024.