Quebec asks for federal help with border crossings
Province says projections have up to 400 refugees a day coming from U.S.
MONTREAL— Ottawa must do more and pay more to help Quebec handle the flow of asylum seekers coming into Canada at a time when the numbers of people crossing the border could grow to as many as 400 a day, Quebec’s immigration minister said.
David Heurtel said that the province’s 1,850-bed shelter system, its health system and its schools are being swamped by the rising number of refugee claimants that have arrived in the province since early 2017.
He gave notice to federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen that, on April 24, Quebec will begin turning away newcomers in need of a place to stay when shelter occupancy hits 85 per cent.
“Last year, we peaked at about 250 a day and that was considered massive,” Heurtel said. “Right now, there are projections on the table saying that we could go in the neighbourhood of 400 people per day.”
A federal official, speaking on background, said they had no information about the origins of Heurtel’s projected increase in the number of asylum seekers.
The official noted that Quebec receives $490 million from Ottawa under a special accord to manage its own immigration system. Quebec recently demanded reimbursement from Ottawa for additional expenses estimated at $146 million, but has yet to provide a breakdown of those costs.
Since last fall, about 1,500 people each month have been crossing from the United States into Canada to make refugee claims. But over the Easter long weekend, there was an unexplained uptick in which 600 people requested asylum.
Provincial officials suspect an organized trafficking network may be helping the new arrivals — most of them Nigerian — to travel to the United States and sneak across the border into Canada at Roxham Rd., where a muddy ditch, surveillance cam- eras and a few warning signs are all that separate New York state from Quebec.
Quebec also says that the federal government should consider immediately sending refugee claimants to the city or province where they hope to eventually settle rather than leaving them in the Montreal area, where there is already a heavy demand on service providers. “We’ve had certain days where we’ve had people come to our centres, sometimes upwards of 40 per cent of the people are saying well, our intent is to go elsewhere in Canada,” Heurtel said.
“If an asylum seeker already represents that their final destination is somewhere else in Canada, maybe the federal government should take notice of that and act on it.”
A regular meeting of the special task force on asylum seekers, which brings together the federal and provincial governments, as well as non-governmental organizations, is set to meet on Wednesday.
Between Jan. 1 and April 14 of this year, 6,074 asylum seekers have arrived in Quebec, three times more than during the same period last year.
In 2017, the province took in 25,000 asylum seekers, 18,000 of whom arrived through Roxham Rd. rather than making their claim at an official border post.
The phenomenon of refugee claimants crossing into Canada from the United States via Roxham Rd. began in late 2016, but became a matter of national attention in mid-2017 when thousands of Haitian nationals began streaming through the border hole.
Most were prompted to leave after receiving warnings that their special immigration designation in the U.S., known as a Temporary Protected Status (TPS), would soon expire, meaning they would be forced to return to Haiti.
Heurtel said that most of those arriving in Quebec recently do not come from countries that have a protected immigration status in the U.S.
“We can’t take this situation lightly. The new reality with migrants demands a new way of doing things. We are ready to work with the federal government to develop a new solution. The status quo is not acceptable,” he said.