The Globe and Mail had a story about a new program to help exiled and refugee journalists learn how to ply their craft in this country.

An excerpt:

The 30 or so people who will take their desks next January in Sheridan College's new Canadian Journalism for Internationally Trained Writers program don't fit the college-student image. Many will be middle-aged, with worry lines. Some will have done prison time. All will speak with accents and carry themselves, well, as the seasoned journalists they were in previous lives -- influential, controversial, feared -- and all want to find out how to add their voices to news-making in Canada.

Last week, Sheridan started the admittance process for the program, offering a place to students such as Luis Alberto Mata, 42, a human-rights writer and professor in Colombia. After unpleasant strangers turned up at his mother-in law's house asking his whereabouts, and men in a taxi made a grab for his son, the Mata family fled to Toronto.

Here, Mr. Mata works part-time cleaning in a Don Mills organic food store. "But of course, of course, I would like to become a journalist again," he says.

Another Sheridan student will be Nikahang Kowsar, 36, once one of Iran's leading political cartoonists. He wasn't intimidated by a stint in Tehran's Evin Prison. But after local imams declared that his drawings insulted Islam, he moved to Toronto. Although Mr. Kowsar's work has appeared in The New York Times and Maclean's, "it's awful trying to get cartoon work here," he says. "I must learn more about being a journalist."

Back in Ethiopia, says Desaleyn Eyob, 35, "I had my own news agency, I was getting good money, I had my own office, my own car, a comfortable life. But government and religious groups were harassing me. Life was not fun." He left in 2000, and now scrapes by in Toronto doing wedding videos. A correspondent for Reuters, he wants to practise journalism here, "but I have no clue what Canadian editors want," Mr. Eyob says. He volunteers on community television but admits "it's very hard to sell a story that connects Canada to Ethiopia."

About 300 people arrive in Canada each year with dreams of pursuing a journalism career; half head for Toronto or Mississauga. But until the launch of the three-semester Sheridan program (unique in Canada, and possibly North America), little has helped these people integrate into the North American media.

When Joyce Wayne, head of journalism at Sheridan, held an information session on the new program last month, more than 50 people turned up. "That night, we could see in a visceral way how desperate people are for this," Ms. Wayne says. "They were at the centre of their worlds; now, they're delivering pizza."

She quotes exiled author and essayist Reza Baraheni on his sense of exclusion: "I was in prison in Iran, then I was in prison in Canada."

It's well worth your while to read the entire story.

A hat tip should go to the Hamilton Spectator for taking some initiative in utilizing the talents of these people.

Furthermore, the article cites a website, http://www.jexcanada.com, where members of the group Journalists in Exile operate an online magazine.