Article content continued

By the grace of whatever ineffable forces govern the Internet, our campaign for more humanitarian funding and higher resettlement commitments went viral: it got shares, it got write-ups, it got shares of write-ups. That surprised us.

But the Syrians remain alone. That surprises no one.

Efforts to mobilize international actors during a humanitarian crisis rest on two simple beliefs: that people can sometimes be inspired to give a damn about what other people are going through, and that governments can sometimes be convinced to act upon what their own people give a damn about.

First, people need to empathize with people they’ve never met, who live in places they’ve never been to, who suffer in ways they haven’t—and who may be systematically portrayed as dangerous. They need to be given a way to imagine the trauma of strangers.

This, we managed. If We Were Syrian shows what the Syrian death and displacement numbers would look like in each G7 country. Around 10.5 million Syrians have now been displaced, and 200,000 have died. So if Canada were Syria, every person in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and P.E.I would have fled their homes. Every person in Regina would be dead.

If these comparisons shock you, that’s because the carnage and exodus are shocking. And millions of people were shocked by If We Were Syrian. As were Buzzfeed, CTV, Le Monde, Der Speigel and dozens of other foreign news outlets. There was support from World Vision and CARE. There were random offers to translate letters to politicians. There were website crashes from too much traffic. There were tweets.