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“It feels like a dream, and I’m absolutely very grateful to have made that choice, because coming to Canada is absolutely the best decision I have made in my entire life.”
had lived in Montreal for 10 years and loved it. Hadhad applied and ended up on the third flight of Syrian refugees to Canada in 2015, who were welcomed by then-governor general David Johnston. Over the next few weeks, 32 family members followed Hadhad to freedom. “It feels like a dream, and I’m absolutely very grateful to have made that choice, because coming to Canada is absolutely the best decision I have made in my entire life.”
Hadhad settled in the Nova Scotia town of Antigonish, which welcomed him and his fellow immigrants, “in a way that we have never imagined. We have never imagined that anyone in the world actually would care about us after the war started. Because what
— Tareq Hadhad
When the family decided to flee their homeland in 2013, they applied to 15 countries, and the process got even the optimistic Hadhad down. “I tried to
go to the U.S., to France, to Spain, to Portugal, to Australia, New Zealand. None of these countries actually
opened the doors for us, and I actually didn’t even think about applying to Canada, because I thought, how is Canada going to be different than all of those countries?”
Then Hadhad remembered a cab driver he met in Lebanon in 2014, who
22 LEGACY IN ACTION