Don’t burden the rest of Canada with asylum seekers. Change the rules

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked for an asylum-seeker surge in 2017, and boy did he get it. Well, Ontario and Quebec got most of it. And now, as those provinces struggle to support the weight, the federal government has floated a new solution: just spread it around.

A federal plan under consideration would send about 28,000 asylum seekers to Alberta, 32,500 to British Columbia, 5,000 to Nova Scotia and 4,600 to New Brunswick. The idea is to distribute the burden across the country in proportion to provincial populations. Only, we don’t have any room.

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The provinces poised to have more asylum seekers dumped in their laps have already experienced painful rent hikes and doctor shortages. The obscene cost of living in Ontario and B.C. has pushed Canadians into Alberta; and in May, Alberta rents rose 17.5 per cent year-over-year. In the Atlantic provinces, capacity isn’t much better: Nova Scotia’s family doctor wait list was at 160,000 in June, or 16 per cent of the population; rents in New Brunswick are skyrocketing.

There is simply no room for all the people the Liberal government is trying to cram in: international students, temporary workers, permanent residents, refugees … and especially asylum seekers, who use up limited state benefits as they wait for their claims to be processed — claims that many Canadians would find spurious. More capacity can be built, but only so fast.

Canada currently has 236,000 asylum seekers, a factor of a drastic incline. In just 2016, only 24,000 refugee claims were made; that number sextupled to 145,000 in 2023. The approval rate is an incredibly high 78 per cent, but this is in part a factor of wide admissions criteria. A suspicious majority of Nigerian claimants base their claims on sexual orientation, which is difficult to disprove. False and inadequately screened claims from unstable countries, such as Somalia and Syria, are also a concern.

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Part of the incline might be traced to the prime minister jubilantly bellowing to the world that “Canadians will welcome you” in 2017 in response to President Donald Trump’s temporary pause on immigration from high-risk countries, primarily in Africa and the Middle East. This was often mischaracterized in the news as a “Muslim ban,” and Trudeau received international praise for playing the foil.

More significantly, Trudeau made a number of procedural changes to increase asylum claimant flow. In 2016, the government expanded the list of visa-exempt countries and required travellers from them to obtain an Electronic Travel Authorization (eTA); only 3,500 eTA holders made refugee claims in 2017, but in 2023, that number rose to just over 27,000 — an increase of 672 per cent. Evidently, Canada granted visa-free travel to far too many countries that should never have been given the privilege.

The feds also dramatically loosened visitor visa eligibility in February 2023, axing the requirement for travellers to prove that they had a plan to leave and enough money to cover their stay. This was an apparent bid to reduce the volume of visa applications inundating the federal immigration department — a foolish one, because the government was also warned in a memo that this move would lead to more asylum claims.

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Most notorious was Trudeau’s decision to roll out the welcome mat at the illegal Roxham Road border crossing into Quebec, allowing more than 100,000 migrants and asylum claimants of questionable provenance to capitalize on Canada’s undefended underbelly. In 2017, the Canadian military was actually made to construct a tent city for the border-crossers, instead of, you know, guarding the border, and by 2018, the feds were paying out locals for the inconvenience of the migrant highway.

In 2022, Trudeau defended his decision to leave Roxham Road open, ignoring the pleas of Quebecers. It took until March 2023 for him to officially close the crossing.

Many large source countries have no business sending us refugees. Mexico, which is the top exporter of asylum claimants to Canada, is not at war and, though unsafe in many places, is safe in many others. The same can be said for India, which ranks just below Mexico. Nigeria, in third, does suffer regional unrest, but not the kind of all-out war seen in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Legitimate refugees or claimants of convenience, they all cost dearly in dollars and state capacity. They’re provided health-care coverage, legal assistance and housing. Lodging alone cost the government $557 million last year; claimants received an average of $224 per day for accommodation and food, which equates to $82,000 per year (a realistic annual haul, considering that it usually takes two years to process a claim).

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For context, the average salary in Canada is just $55,630.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller defends his proposal to spread asylum seekers around the country by calling it “fair” as if a fair solution is remotely possible. It isn’t. It may have been, if the gates weren’t swung wide open and held there, if Canadians weren’t made to watch their economy stagnate for a decade. Now, we’re at the point where every outcome leaves provinces overwhelmed with people who wouldn’t have been able to stake refugee claims in Canada under 2014 rules. Canadians are giving up doctors’ appointment slots, paying more in taxes, watching demand for housing soar, just to see the system exploited.

We aren’t the world’s charity shack. We should be proud to accept an absorbable number of refugees who are genuinely fleeing war, but we can’t be granting generous state benefits to every happily-married-to-a-woman man from a developing country who claims to be bisexual.

Miller can limit the damage to Ontario and Quebec, deport who he needs to, plug the gaping loopholes and pray that voters forget the Liberals’ grievous mismanagement of the refugees file. It’s not up to Alberta, B.C., Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to pay for his government’s mistakes.

National Post

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