Canada Today: Next Step for Refugees, a Big Coin and Trade

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/world/canada/canada-today-refugees-big-coin-nafta-trade.html

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Each week, Canada Today mixes the Times’s recent Canada-related coverage with back stories and analysis from our reporters along with opinions from our readers.

While the 2015 election of the Liberal government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau certainly attracted global attention, its program to dramatically accelerate Canada’s acceptance of Syrian refugees has sustained that spotlight.

Early on in that process, The New York Times assigned Jodi Kantor and Catrin Einhorn to develop in-depth reporting on the story and the effects of the government’s decision both on Canada and Syria.

They’ve now produced the fourth, and final, installment of their deep look into Canada and refugees. As most Canadians know by now, Canada is unusual in that it allows individuals or groups to privately sponsor refugees. That commitment officially lasts only a year. Many refugee families are now in what’s come to be known as “month 13,” the point when they have to stand on their own.

As in their earlier stories, Ms. Kantor and Ms. Einhorn have produced an emotionally charged account with their look at the lives of Mouhamad and Wissam al-Hajj, a former farmer and his wife, and the Canadians who gave them a hand.

While the Hajj children are prospering in Canada, the parents have not fully adjusted to new urban lives in Toronto, and their economic situation remains perilous. Their Canadian sponsors, many of whom have been close to the family, must now figure out where to continue providing support and where to pull back.

Ms. Kantor and Ms. Einhorn found that, a year later, many Canadians — experts, politicians and lay people alike — believe that the effort has been a success.

“But there was no common definition of success,” they wrote. “Was it enough that these refugees were not dying in the Mediterranean or languishing in camps? Was working an unskilled job for subsistence pay a positive outcome? Many resettlement veterans argued that it was unrealistic to expect refugees to be self-sufficient after a year, and that the real test would be the fate of their children. In a huge country with a relatively low population, where immigration was seen as necessary fuel, many Canadians were willing to make a generational investment.”

Read: Canadians Adopted Refugee Families for a Year. Then Came ‘Month 13.’

Read the entire series: Refugees Welcome

Negotiations The Trump administration has unveiled its wish list for talks on revising the North American Free Trade Agreement. While its proposals are well short of ending the agreement, the administration is seeking measures that will trouble Canada. President Trump wants to eliminate a process that Canada has used in the past to deal with a perpetual dispute over softwood lumber. And the American administration would like to be able to arbitrarily slap tariffs on Canadian exports it believes are harming American companies. “It’s not ripping up Nafta, but there are a bunch of sticks of dynamite contained in those pages,” said Mark Warner, a Canadian-American trade lawyer based in Toronto.

Read: After Calling Nafta ‘Worst Trade Deal,’ Trump Appears to Soften Stance

Streaming The arrival of a new month means that Watching, the Times’s guide to movies and television, has produced another list of recommended shows coming to Netflix Canada in April.

At the top is “Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie.” My wife and I were fans of the TV series and its champagne- and vodka-soaked characters including Eddy (Jennifer Saunders) and Patsy (Joanna Lumley). So we’re looking forward to the film version. Here’s some of Watching’s take on it: “It barely qualifies as a movie — the plot involves Kate Moss (as herself) falling into the Thames — but Eddy and Patsy’s blinkered response to modern trends is funny in any era.”

One note: Some Canadian readers of Canada Today have written in to say that they have been unable to find some programs on Watching’s Netflix Canada list. The problem is that Netflix sometimes changes its schedule without notice.

Read: The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix Canada in April

Big Money Back in 2007, the Royal Canadian Mint made a 100 kilogram gold coin, about the weight of a refrigerator, with a face value of 1 million Canadian dollars, as a publicity stunt. It then managed to sell five copies. This week some thieves managed to spirit one of those copies out of a museum in Berlin. The Mint told me it’s still prepared to make as many as four more copies of the Big Maple Leaf. If you’re interested, you’ll first need to negotiate a nonrefundable deposit and be willing to wait at least a month. The price is also something you’ll have to work out with the mint, but the gold alone will cost you more than $4.5 million. And because the coin is refined to an exceptionally high level of purity, making one also consumes more than 100 kilos of bullion, adding to the bill.

Read: Thieves Take a Chunk of Change, All 221 Pounds of It, From a Berlin Museum

Homebound Craig Smith looked at two events related to the changes introduced at the American border by the Trump administration. Toronto’s schools have now joined other boards of education in ending field trips to the United States. At the same time, many Canadian universities are seeing a significant rise in applications from American students. That has several causes, many unrelated to Mr. Trump and his policies. Among other things, top-level Canadian schools are dramatically less costly than their American counterparts. At the University of Toronto, which has seen American applications soar by 80 percent, Ted Sargent, its international vice president, said the university’s reputation and the job prospects of its graduates were the two top attractions for Americans. But they are followed by the university’s “inclusive environment”.

“A lot of students are attracted by that ethos,” Mr. Sargent said.

Read: Toronto Schools to Cease Field Trips to U.S.

Chilling Last week, I told you about Mr. Smith’s story about the Inuit who go under the Arctic sea ice to harvest mussels. He has since written an account of how he and photographer Aaron Vincent Elkaim covered the story, an assignment just the thought of which brings out all of my claustrophobic nightmares.

Read: Reporting and Filming in an Ice Cave

Upcoming We received a large number of interesting and lively emails from across the country in response to our call last week for restaurant suggestions. The replies were so numerous and so good that we’re using them to create a separate article on Canadian dining, which will appear in a few days.

Here are some other articles from The Times over the last week, not necessarily related to Canada and perhaps overlooked, that I found interesting:

— Catherine Leroy may be the greatest war photographer you’ve never heard of.

— Fusion is either our era’s perpetual motion machine or the world’s great hope for clean, abundant power. Henry Fountain visited a vast and expensive project in France that hopes to make its promise a reality.

— What’s best for your brain: walking, stretching or dancing?