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Since taking over as Canada’s immigration minister last week, John McCallum has reiterated the Liberal government’s intention to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the year.

He hasn’t said how, but experts agree it will be by military or chartered flights, or a combination of the two, from Lebanon, Turkey or Jordan, which together have taken in more than 4 million refugees.

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It is hardly an impossible task — Montreal’s Trudeau airport, Canada’s fourth busiest, handles more than 44,000 passengers every day.

But what happens when they get here?

That is the question facing Quebec’s network of organizations tasked with housing, feeding, clothing, teaching and healing often traumatized refugees as they arrive in a foreign land at the beginning of winter with no fixed address.

If Quebec takes in 23 per cent of the 25,000 over the next eight weeks — or about 5,700, to match its proportion of the population in Canada — it will have to go into overdrive, says Stéphane Reichhold of the Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes (TCRI), an umbrella group for 140 community organizations in Quebec.