Reality Check: Can Canada bring in 10,000 refugees by end of year?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has set a goal of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees in Canada by the end of the year, mostly through private sponsorships. This would be followed by another 15,000 refugees arriving in the first two months of 2016.

The first full plane of refugees is scheduled to land in Toronto Thursday night, arriving from Beirut, Lebanon with 164 refugees on board. Another flight of refugees will arrive in Montreal on Saturday.

Already, 464 refugees have arrived in Canada, mostly through private sponsorships, since the Liberal government was sworn in on November 4.

So is it still possible for the government to meet their goal of resettling 10,000 refugees in Canada before the end of the year?

Well, it depends.

READ MORE: Trudeau to greet first planeload of Syrian refugees in Toronto on Thursday

At a press conference Wednesday, Immigration Minister John McCallum said that the application processing centres in Amman, Jordan and Beirut, Lebanon are currently each processing 400 refugees per day, for a total of 800 per day.

At that rate, it would take 12 days to process enough people to meet the goal of 10,000. But how fast the refugees can actually be flown to Canada after their processing is another question.

The government is planning to use a mix of chartered flights and military planes to bring the refugees to Canada. The first flight arriving in Toronto is a military plane.

With three weeks left before the end of the year, Canada needs to have nearly 450 refugees arriving per day in order to meet the government’s goal.

WATCH: Ontario sponsors cheer arrival of Syrian refugee families at Toronto airport

“I think they’re giving it the good old college try, and they have a couple of practical issues they have to deal with,” said Ron Atkey, the former Immigration Minister who served in Joe Clark’s government during the Vietnamese mass refugee migration in 1979.

Atkey said that Trudeau’s government didn’t count on the refugees needing to get exit permits in order to leave Jordan and Lebanon. He also pointed out the difficulty of trying to arrange for commercial flights to be available to transport refugees during the pre-Christmas season.

When Atkey was the Immigration Minister during the Vietnamese refugee crisis, it was a much simpler process, he said. No exit visas were required for the Vietnamese refugees, who came to Canada fleeing communist governments in 1979 and 1980.

“I have every reason to believe they’ll make (the deadline), but if they don’t quite make it, so what?” said Atkey. “I think the Canadian people expect the government just to do their best on this.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "I have every reason to believe they'll make (the deadline), but if they don't quite make it, so what?" said Atkey. "I think the Canadian people expect the government just to do their best on this."

It may be possible for the target to be met before the end of the year, but it will depend on a lot of factors which are outside of the government’s control, said Louisa Taylor from Refugee613, an Ottawa refugee relief organization.

It will require enough Syrian refugees deciding that they want to come to Canada, then being processed quickly enough, receiving exit permits, and flights being available. Due to all of these outside factors, Taylor said it’s impossible to predict if the deadline will be met or not.

“I would say yes it’s possible. Is it probable? I’m less confident that it’s probable, but it sure wouldn’t be for lack of trying,” Taylor said. “Really good people are working flat-out and applying all their expertise to a very fluid situation, and there are so many aspects that are not up to us.”

According to Taylor, the targets are artificial. They just give the government a goal to work towards. Currently, there is a lot of goodwill and commitment to this effort, she said. If the exact numbers are not met by the end of December, she said she won’t be disappointed.

“We have confidence that ultimately Canada will live up to its promise to resettle these large numbers,” Taylor said.

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But if the deadline is to be met, refugees will need to begin arriving in larger numbers, or more frequently. Taylor said that typically during mass refugee migrations, the uptake is slow at the beginning but it does increase.

“When word gets out that Canada is a welcoming place, that you can be safe and make a life here, word will get back very quickly and people will start to come,” Taylor said.