Many tears were shed when Ibrahim Darwish last saw his parents and brother in February 2016 as they left a far-flung refugee town in Turkey for Istanbul airport, heading for a new life in Canada.

Last week, years after fleeing the civil war in Syria, the 40-year-old shed more tears when he arrived at Pearson airport to join his family, but this time, they were tears of joy.

“It feels like a dream,” said Darwish, whose entire family fled Damascus in 2013. Darwish, his wife and two children were left behind in Turkey when his parents, brother and the brother’s family were flown to Toronto as government-sponsored refugees.

Darwish’s journey started two days earlier with a 25-hour bus ride from Batman to Istanbul. It was then followed by a three-hour flight to Frankfurt, where the family stopped over for six hours before a 8.5-hour flight to Toronto.

After three more hours of immigration paperwork, the exhausted travellers finally came through the sliding doors at the arrivals ramp. Darwish had to pinch his cheek to convince himself he wasn’t dreaming before rushing to embrace his parents, brother, nieces and nephews, having waited for this moment for two-and-a-half years.

“My family is my life and I thought I would never see them again,” he added as he clutched his parents, Amina and Mohammad.

Almost three years after Canada launched its massive Syrian refugee resettlement project, Syrian refugees are still trickling in — though at a much slower pace — from the Middle East. Others have continued to wait in the queue after Ottawa stopped prioritizing Syrian applications.

According to the immigration department, Canada has resettled 56,322 Syrian refugees since November 2015 when the first resettlement wave arrived from Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

As of the end of June, officials said there are still 16,736 sponsored Syrians — 12,663 under private sponsorship, 3,626 by the federal government, and the rest supported jointly by both — waiting to be processed. Another 2,779 are in the final stages of getting their permanent resident visas to start a new life here.

Private sponsorships for Syrians can take anywhere from 20 months in the UAE to 38 months in Egypt, while processing times for government-sponsored refugees range from 23 months in Egypt to 29 months in Turkey.

“Processing times are difficult to predict. They vary depending on multiple factors, including the type of application submitted, the number of applications currently being processed, establishing identity and addressing security concerns,” said immigration department spokesperson Beatrice Fenelon.

In the Darwish family’s case, the private sponsorship group was happy to witness the reunion at Pearson, but said the wait was frustrating and members are sad to see the drop in public support for refugees as a result of the backlash against the thousands of people illegally crossing the border from the United States.

“There is a lot of media coverage of these asylum seekers from the U.S. and the support is waning,” noted Jessica Miklos, a member of the group that sponsored the Darwish family. “It’s hard to wait and easy to get discouraged when for a long period of time there’s nothing you can do but wait.”

Miklos said she and other team members began searching for housing for the new family as soon as they learned their arrival date, but so far they have had no luck.

“Unfortunately, the vacancy rate is very low and landlords who have apartments available are operating by very strict rules,” she explained. “We have been told several times that even if we have all of the funds, the occupants of the unit must prove Canadian employment and Canadian credit history to be considered. This is true even with a guarantor.”

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Miklos said the group is now looking at November occupancy and a monthly rent that goes beyond the $2,000 mark, way above what they had planned for two years ago.

Claude Hould, chair of the Rosedale United Church refugee and newcomer program, said the program had 25 sponsorship groups at the peak of Canada’s Syrian resettlement and the number is down to eight. In total, they have brought in 100 refugees with 42 people still in the queue to come to Canada.

To Hould, the problem with the bottleneck is the immigration department’s limited annual quotas allotted to refugee sponsorships and scarce resources invested in processing.

“In some cases, we are still waiting for a spot to submit a sponsorship application. There will be no new file going in until 2020,” he said, adding collecting documentation and security clearances for people from war-torn Syria remains a challenge.

“It can be stressful when you scramble to get everything together for your (sponsored) family but you balance it out with people’s generosity,” said Miklos. “It’s a really good antidote. It doesn’t matter it’s not everybody, but there are enough people out there willing to help.”