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Mustafa Sharawi, who with his wife and six children fled the rebel-occupied Syrian city of Idlib four years ago, expressed it succinctly.

“You ask me what I know about Canada and my answer is that I cannot even tell you what Syria is like any more.”

Their responses give a hint of the limited awareness of Canada that the 25,000 Syrians who will soon be on their way are likely to possess, not to mention the vastly different life experiences.

Imagine that you were a Syrian day labourer or a cigarette vendor with a wife and six children. Such a person would have lived his life until now by the rules of a deeply conservative patriarchal society that puts family honour above all else and would have been ruled by a dictator before being ruled by his equally ruthless son.

The typical family of the refugees that Canada is considering have mostly lived out in a desert where temperatures dwell in the high forties for months at a time.

Having run from the most savage conflict yet in a region notorious for them, the refugees who have found sanctuary in Lebanon have been safe but have not been made to feel terribly welcome. They have been living six or 8 or 10 of them crammed into one or two rooms. They scrape by doing menial work for which they get paid about one-third of what locals get.

Canada’s “refugees” will be nothing the like the million or so generally far more worldly Syrians who bolted for Europe this year. Many of the so-called Syrian refugees that I met last spring and summer in Spain, Morocco, Greece and Sweden clearly had money and made no secret that they were country shopping for the best asylum deal they could find. Not for them a life in exile in what they regarded as second-tier countries such as Hungary, Italy, Poland or even France, which almost none of them thought worthy of them.