Evacuation plans underway for Canadians fleeing Middle East war

More than 108,000 Canadians in the Middle East have registered with Global Affairs Canada, but only about 3,500 of them have asked for help to get out of the region.

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said Friday there were a number of options for Canadians looking to get out of the Middle East, including a chartered flight set to take 180 Canadians from Dubai to Istanbul Saturday.

That said, there’s still a group of Ontario students and their professor trying desperately to get home.

“Let’s be clear: my purpose as foreign minister is to make sure that I am doing whatever possible to support Canadians in the region — over 160,000 Canadians at that, and making sure that they have the means to exit the region should they wish to do so,” said Anand.

Anand says there are about 3,500 Canadians who have asked for help to flee the war torn Middle East and right now Canada has arranged three modes of transportation.

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“Either through our chartered flights, through blocked bookings on existing airlines and by ground transportation,” said Anand. “Seaway is always another possibility, but we are cognisant of the dangers of traveling through this means of transportation at this time.”

A group of 16 students and one faculty member from Queen’s University in Kingston, are stuck in Qatar following the closure of airspace in the Middle East.

“I started to fly to Toronto on Qatar Airways and an hour-and-a-half in, something like that, we turned around and so the captain came on the intercom and indicated that we were returning to Doha,” said Stephen Lougheed, a professor of biology at Queen’s University.

Lougheed said their Qatar Airways flight back was forced to return to Doha — the capital of Qatar — amid escalating conflict in the Middle East.

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“I wasn’t concerned that the plane was going to go down or anything like that, but I was certainly unsettled and concerned for my students and certainly a little bit nervous as to what was to come,” said Lougheed. “But at that point, we didn’t really know the full details of what had happened, so we were just waiting to get on the ground again.”

“The recommendation still is to shelter in place, and no we don’t have any tangible timeline as to when we’ll get to it,” said Lougheed.

Some Canadians did manage to get out, landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport Friday.

One person said it was tough to get a flight, and another person said the flight was good if not stressful.

Conservative defence critic and MP James Bezan says there should be a parliamentary debate before any sort of Canadian military deployment in the ongoing war in Iran, even though Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada has no plans to join the war, but couldn’t rule it out if allies asked the country for help.

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