Toronto Pearson airport to re-open terminal for Syrian refugees

Toronto Pearson International Airport is re-opening its rarely used Infield terminal to process Syrian refugees that will arrive at the airport next week.

The first planeloads of refugees will arrive in Toronto next Thursday according to a federalsolicitation document posted on Monday. The document says that the flights will continue till the end of March.

• Flights to Canada for Syrian refugees to start Dec. 10, document says

• City of Sanctuary: How ready are we?

• More than 100 communities to house privately sponsored Syrian refugees, new map shows

The federal governmentplans on bringing 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of February,with 10,000 of them arriving in Toronto and Montreal by the end of this month.

In Toronto, Pearson airport is prepping the currently closedInfield terminal to deal specifically with welcoming and processing Syrian refugees.

The terminal islocated between the two major runways and wasinitiallybuilt to handle overflow traffic during the construction of the current Terminal 1 in the early 2000s. Since the terminalshut down, it hasfrequently been used as a film location for movies and TV shows.

The first group will be made uplargely of privately sponsored refugees, many of whose files have been in the works for months as churches and other community groups moved to assist some of the most vulnerable people fleeing the Syrian civil war.

The plan is bring those refugees into Canada on commercial flights, with military airplanes available every 48 hours if necessary in case commercial jets aren't available.

More than 500 officials have been assigned to work on the massive resettlement program, one of the largest of its kind in the world as it relates to the Syrian refugee crisis.

Since the outbreak of the war there in 2011, the UN estimates some 4.2 million people have been displaced.