Majid Tounarti, his wife Fadoua El Mamouny, their daughter Ghita, 2 years old, and their young boy Riyadh, barely 8 months old, have been stranded since January in Morocco because of the coronavirus.
This Moroccan-Canadian family travelled to Morocco on January 31 to visit family, but was never able to return to Canada because their financial situation did not allow them to take the two planes chartered by Canada. “At $1300 per person, we didn’t have enough money saved,” says Majid Tounarti.
“I didn’t think it was possible that the government could be so indifferent to our situation, to our distress,” Majid, 42, a resident of Saint-Apollinaire, told the Journal du Québec on Saturday.
“They’re offering us impossible solutions. A flight to London, the hotel, taxis, the Covid-19 cases, then a flight to Toronto the next day and finally another flight to Montreal, with two babies? It’s simply abandoning us,” laments the man who has been living in Quebec for 20 years.
Majid Tounarti has even lost his job of the last 12 years in the computer field because of the crisis. “Meanwhile, the payments continue. We’ve done everything we were supposed to do and it’s still not enough for the government, which is abandoning us here,” he denounces again.
The Canadian government has set up an emergency loan program that allows Canadians stranded abroad to obtain up to $5,000 to cover their basic needs until they are able to return to the country, writes Radio Canada.
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