The last time CityNews spoke to Francis Vézina, the Quebecer and his girlfriend Geneviève Beaudoin were stuck in Doha, Qatar, as war broke out in Iran.
“We could disappear in an explosion,” Vézina told CityNews on March 3, just three days after tensions in the Middle East boiled over between the U.S., Israel and Iran.
The unexpected escalation left airports closed, flights cancelled and travellers stranded in an increasingly uncertain and hostile situation.
Among those stranded travellers was Boucherville’s Vézina, who at the time was waiting for guidance from the Canadian government on whether he could safely cross into Saudi Arabia in order to take a flight home.
Nine days later and now back home, Vézina reports that guidance from Ottawa never came.
“We never did get any confirmation from the Canadian government, so we had to take an executive decision and take matters into our own hands,” he said. “So we ended up buying a driver from Doha to Riyadh.”
BACKGROUND: Quebecers stranded abroad left in the dark as Iran war escalates
That taxi ride from Qatar to Saudi Arabia took 10 hours. The next stop was Germany, then France, and finally Montreal.
“Honestly I couldn’t stop being scared until we had left the Middle East airspace entirely,” said Vézina.
He says the forced deviations in their plan cost them more than $5,000.
“We were ready to spend what it would cost us to come back home, no matter what it was,” he said.
All that headache and cost followed what was supposed to be just a short layover in Doha after a trip to Thailand. It turned ugly when U.S.-Israeli bombs began striking Iran on Feb. 28, grounding all flights in Qatar in the process.
“We heard tons of missiles being intercepted over the hotel. We felt detonations on the ground when the U.S. base was hit,” the Quebecer recounted.
Though Canada has promised it would never involve itself in the war, Vézina says he was hours into his journey across Qatar when he received news that Prime Minister Carney was “not ruling out” the country’s involvement.
“The fact that he would involve himself in that conflict without moving the civilians first didn’t make sense to me,” the Boucherville man said.
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Shortly after Vézina and Beaudoin left, Canada began organizing flights and buses for citizens stuck in the region as calls for help reached over 3,000.
“I’m 100 per cent confident that we took the right decision for a couple of reasons,” Vézina said. “The Canadian government ended up moving the rest of the people from Doha to Riyadh, so they took the exact same route that we did.”
Global Affairs Canada said Thursday that a total of 8,000 Canadians have fled the region since the start of the war – 1,000 of those departures were facilitated by the government.
“It was a one-way communication. It should have been a two-way communication throughout the entire operation,” said Vézina.
Despite the effort it took to get back home, Vézina knows he and his girlfriend were among the lucky ones, as not everyone stranded in the region had the same opportunity to leave.
“We know for a fact there were people there, families there, that did not have that option enabled for them,” he said.
