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John McCallum said the government will have identified the 10,000 refugees who will be on Canadian soil in the coming months, but could not provide specific details on exactly when all will actually arrive.

McCallum blamed delays on inclement flying weather, refugees wanting to say goodbye to friends and families, and other circumstances beyond the government’s control.

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Still, up until the last week of November, the Liberals remained defiantly committed to their plainly unfeasible pledge to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees by year’s end, relying ostensibly on power of positive thinking and other mantras to which the public was not privy. Then, Immigration Minister John McCallum conceded that the initial target might have been a bit too ambitious, and he announced in a press conference that the goal would be revised to welcome 10,000 Syrian refugees by year’s end, and another 15,000 by the end of February.

That was then. This is now: on Wednesday McCallum, said that Ottawa might fall short of reaching that revised target, attributing the delay to factors including weather complications and the variability of “human nature.” Though Canada likely wouldn’t see 10,000 refugees by Dec. 31, McCallum said, he was still confident that it would bring in a total of 25,000 people by the end of February. As of December 21, 1,869 Syrian refugees had landed in Canada.

Predictably, this shifting of the goalposts has provoked chiding from Conservative benches, but the fault here isn’t that the Liberals broke another promise, or that they couldn’t make their expedited mass migration plan happen. Rather, it’s that the government insists on setting such silly, quixotic targets in the first place, with seemingly little regard for feasibility, associated costs or reception from ordinary Canadians.