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Published Jul 17, 2023 • 3 minute read
The Terminal 1 international arrivals area at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Monday, Sept. 26, 2022. Photo by ERNEST DOROSZUK /TORONTO SUN The number of people seeking asylum at Canada’s airports saw a massive spike in June with 4,350 people declaring themselves refugees upon arrival last month. That compares to just 2,750 seeking asylum in May of this year but even that is up dramatically from the 1,195 seeking asylum in the same time period a year earlier.
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Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. A total of 13,840 people have declared themselves refugees at airports across the country in the first six months of 2023. The total for all of 2022 was 17,170 and apart from last year, no year on record going back to 2011 has seen more than the 8,120 recorded in 2019.
The influx this year spiked in April with a 43% jump over March. That coincided with the Trudeau government’s decision to close the illegal land border crossing at Roxham Road in Quebec.
That entry point had seen 3-4,000 people cross into Canada illegally each month over the last year and more than 100,000 cross between 2017 and when it was closed. Traffic of refugee claimants at land border crossings has fallen to a trickle with just 30 people intercepted by the RCMP last month.
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Airports, though, are seeing a traffic spike.
Nationally, the number of people claiming asylum jumped 58% between May and June. Montreal’s Trudeau airport saw a 51% increase from 1,765 to 2,670 while Toronto’s Pearson airport jumped by 75% from 900 to 1,575. Across the rest of the country, there have been just 410 people claim asylum at international airports in Canada, 10 in Nova Scotia, 155 in Alberta and 245 in British Columbia.
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With numbers like this, it’s no wonder that shelter systems in Ontario and Quebec are strained.
In Toronto, a downtown city facility on Peter St. has become an urban tent city with people camping out on sidewalks hoping for a chance to get into a shelter. People have stayed on the sidewalk with their belongings for two weeks or more, waiting for a shelter space, in a system that is already crumbling.
Olivia Chow, the city’s newly elected mayor, has pointed out that people claiming refugee status already take up at least 30% of Toronto’s shelter spaces. That means the federal government is responsible for them but, according to Chow, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau isn’t footing the bill for these asylum seekers, Toronto taxpayers are.
EDITORIAL: Closing Roxham Rd. is largely symbolic EDITORIAL: Close the loophole at Roxham crossing WARMINGTON: Federal government books 500 more hotel rooms despite ‘closing’ Roxham Road At her swearing-in ceremony last week, Chow called on the federal government to pay for the $160 million it already owed the city, mostly for housing and dealing with refugees that came via Roxham Road. Those costs were incurred before the spike in people arriving through the airports.
On Friday, officials from all three levels of government met to discuss this issue, among many others. In a statement issued Friday, Chow said that all levels “understand the urgent need to address the immediate crisis, and to develop and implement longer-term solutions.”
One of those longer term solutions needs to be stopping the spike in people arriving at Canada’s airports and declaring themselves refugees. While many are going to be legitimate refugee cases, experience and data show that at best, only about half will be accepted as bona fide refugees.
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A report issued late last year showed the acceptance rate over all at Roxham Rd. to be 52% with people claiming asylum from Turkey having a 91% approval and those from Columbia having a 67% approval. Meanwhile, those coming from Haiti only had 34% of claims approved falling to 32% of those from Mexico.
While Ontario Premier Doug Ford has called on the federal government to pay their share of the bill to Toronto and other municipalities housing refugees under federal protection, he’s also gone one step further. Last week, Ford called for those already here to be given work permits to help ease the worker shortage Ontario is experiencing.
It’s a radical solution to a perplexing problem, but it’s also one that if adopted would effectively say, it’s time to scrap our immigration system and adopt an open border strategy.
The Trudeau Liberals may be adopting that policy already by stealth, but if we are headed down that road, it’s one that Canadians should have a full and open debate on.