Canadians in Lebanon encouraged to leave, but for many, it’s unfeasible

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Even if Ziad Kamali wanted to heed warnings from the Canadian embassy to hop on the next available plane out of Lebanon, the country’s battered financial system, along with Canada’s high cost of living, won’t allow for it.

“You know how much rent is in Canada?” he said from Tripoli, Lebanon. “It’s terrible. If I want to leave with my family I need $25,000 to start for rent and furniture and everything. This money, we have it in the bank, but we cannot access it.”

So he, like many Canadians in Lebanon, says he plans to stay put, even as officials urge them to leave the country in the face of escalating border clashes between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.

Their predicament jogs memories of 2006, when all-out warfare between Israel and Hezbollah killed around 1,300 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis. As bombs rained down across the country, Canada spent $100-million evacuating 14,000 citizens by boat and plane.

While Canada has yet to initiate evacuation efforts this time around, the Canadian Armed Forces are working on contingency plans with allies in the event that Canadians, permanent residents and their families need to be evacuated from Lebanon.

The Deputy Commander of the Canadian Joint Operations Command, Major-General Darcy Molstad, told reporters in Ottawa Friday that Canada and its allies have set up a “multinational non-combatant evacuation operations co-ordination centre” in Cyprus.

“There’s nothing that’s telling us that something is going to happen in Lebanon, right now,” he said. He added that the armed forces are watching intelligence and activities on Lebanon’s border with Israel, and in particular actions from Iran-backed Hezbollah, which is operating in Lebanon.

Fears that Hezbollah and Hamas, in Lebanon, will open a second front against Israel as the country prepares to send troops against Hamas in Gaza are increasing. On Thursday, Hezbollah said it fired a heavy barrage of rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel. The United States has dispatched naval ships into the Mediterranean Sea near Israel and Lebanon in an attempt to deter the militant groups from expanding their attacks on Israel.

“We are making plans and preparations, in co-ordination, to be prepared to react if we have to,” Maj.-Gen. Molstad said.

Late Wednesday, Canada increased its travel warnings to Lebanon to the highest possible level. The government is urging people not to travel to Lebanon at all and for those already in the country to leave. Approximately 14,500 people in the country have registered with Global Affairs, one of the department’s assistant deputy ministers, Julie Sunday, said Friday.

“Our best advice to Canadians right now is to leave Lebanon while there are commercial options,” Ms. Sunday said.

That advice has proven unrealistic for many of the roughly 40,000 to 75,000 Canadians in Lebanon. The country of 6.5 million people slumped into economic meltdown four years ago, when decades of government corruption and irresponsible banking practices led to a run on the banks. Inflation hit triple digits and banks imposed strict withdrawal limits, even barring depositors access to life savings.

“The banks essentially took everybody’s money,” said Jade Youssef, a resident of Toronto, Ottawa, Windsor and Montreal before moving to the southern Tyre region of Lebanon to care for his elderly mother and open Proflex Canadian Fitness Club. “You have to live on what you make every month. It’s been like that three or four years.”

Those who already have return tickets to Canada are trying to change them to an earlier date, said Mr. Kamali, president of the Lebanese Canadian Association of the North. “It’s hard,” he said. “Many flights have no seats and some airlines have stopped coming.”

In 2006, he said, some people left the country through the Syrian border, but since the start of a civil war in 2011, that country has been considered an active conflict zone as well. Instead of escaping the country, Mr. Kamali said, some people in southern regions bordering Israel have migrated north around Beirut and Tripoli.

“It’s just very difficult to leave Lebanon right now,” he said.

Seventeen kilometres from the border, Fatima Haidar’s family held a meeting on Thursday afternoon to debate the ethics of staying versus leaving.

“What makes us more valuable than my cousins who don’t have Canadian citizenship?” Ms. Haidar said from Nabatieh, Lebanon, where she runs a school called the Canadian Lebanese Academy of Excellence. “If we run away, what happens to our neighbours? We don’t think it’s right.”

They decided to remain in place as long as the border skirmishes are contained to the border without spreading north as they did in 2006.

She and her family have long prepared for this day, maintaining bank accounts and other assets in Canada. “We would not be going to Canada because we need help,” she said. “We would go to Canada because we have money and we would boost the economy as taxpayers immediately.”

In 2006, she said her family rented a home north of Beirut to escape the worst of the Israeli bombing. But cultural and religious differences between north and south soured the experience, she said. “Not all Lebanese are welcoming of people from other religions,” she said. “We would rather go to Canada. In Canada we feel welcome all the time.”

Her school opened its doors shortly after the 2006 war ended. It now has 300 students from preschool through Grade 12, 75 per cent of whom are Canadian. She won’t leave unless the government shuts it down.

“I have students, teachers, bus drivers, cleaning ladies under my care,” she said. “It’s not easy for me to decide whether to stay or to go. It’s a big responsibility.”

With a report from Colin Freeze