Yes, Trudeau needs to own up on refugee costs

Managing asylum seekers is clearly federal responsibility

The mayors of Ottawa and Toronto, as well as the premier of Ontario, all think the federal government should be paying far more than it is toward the costs of looking after the country’s recent influx of refugees. It’s tough to disagree.

Mayor Jim Watson said Ottawa had a $5.7-million deficit in its shelter budget last year because of the unexpected number of refugees and they continue to come. By the end of this year, Toronto Mayor John Tory said his city will have spent about $65 million housing refugees. So far, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has offered Ontario $11 million and a free lecture on how the refugee system works.

Managing refugees is a federal responsibility. There is simply no argument for dumping the cost of looking after them on municipalities. The province’s responsibility isn’t quite so clear. Refugee claimants will use schools and social services. It would be nice if the federal government paid for that, but not entirely unreasonable if it didn’t.

Some people see a dark, xenophobic subplot in the dispute between Trudeau and Premier Doug Ford. In reality, Ford is cranking up the pressure on Trudeau to do something substantial to deal with this federal issue. Tory, meanwhile, has been asking for federal help for months in his polite way and the results have been scant.

From the municipal perspective, there are two elements to the refugee housing problem. One is capacity and the other is cost. The shelter systems in both Ottawa and Toronto are clearly inadequate to handle the unexpected increase in refugees, but it wouldn’t have been rational to create a much larger shelter capacity just in case. Even had that been done, the issue of who pays for refugees remains.

The refugee situation is, at its heart, a series of practical problems. How can we quickly process refugee claims? How can we house them? Who should pay? These are issues our federal government should be able to solve.

It’s disturbing to see Ahmed Hussen, the federal minister of immigration, trying to turn the refugee situation into an opportunity to imply that conservative politicians are against people coming from other countries. He chastised Ford for calling the would-be refugees “illegal border crossers” instead of the preferred euphemism of “irregular migrants.”

In fact, crossing the border except at official points of entry is illegal, but once a person makes a refugee claim, the charge is stayed until the claim is adjudicated.

Simply stating the facts does not make conservatives anti-refugee and it certainly doesn’t make them anti-immigrant. Canada plans to admit nearly one million immigrants between now and 2020. This is not a point of popular contention.

When it comes to refugees, the issue is not whether we welcome them, but whether we can handle the numbers and the way they are entering the country. The Liberals used to get that. Only two months ago, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said, “Coming across the border in a way that tries to circumvent the law or defy proper procedure is no free ticket to Canada.” Then he added, “Seeking asylum is not a shortcut to get around normal immigration rules and procedures.”

While Canadians might feel a broad sympathy for refugees, hard questions need to be asked about those coming across our border now. While the U.S. political situation is often blamed for the refugee spike, Hussen himself has said that recent border crossers are predominantly Nigerians who entered the U.S. on tourist visas with the goal of coming to Canada to seek asylum.

Hussen and Goodale predicted that 90 per cent of this latest group of would-be refugees will be rejected. In the meantime, Canadians will support them and legitimate refugees will remain caught in the queue.

This is a mess. It’s not fair to blame it all on a tweet from Trudeau, but he owns it now. It’s time to stop having negative interactions with other politicians and fix the problem.