Liberals balk at expanding refugee pact
Minister calls proposed action on asylum seekers unrealistic, unfeasible
The Liberal government says it is unrealistic and unfeasible to expand the scope of a bilateral agreement that bans refugees from the United States from seeking asylum in Canada.
At a parliamentary committee meeting Tuesday, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale balked at an opposition demand that Ottawa apply the ban beyond official checkpoints to the entire border in order to stem the flow of asylum seekers from south of the border since Donald Trump was elected president.
In the first six months of this year, RCMP intercepted 10,744 people who circumvented the so-called Safe Third Country Agreement — and official Canadian ports of entry — by crossing through unguarded border areas on foot. The pact requires migrants to seek asylum in the first country of arrival and allows Canada and the U.S. to de- ny entry to refugees from the other country.
“First of all, if you’re declaring (the entire border) a port of entry, it would need to be populated with the necessary border officers to be able to administer all of the responsibilities of CBSA (the Canada Border Services Agency),” Goodale told the immigration committee emergency meeting studying the impact of irregular crossings of Canada’s southern border.
That “would involve the hiring of quite literally thousands of border officers to provide any credible administration of a port of entry that ran for 9,000 kilometres. That’s a practical problem,” he added. “You would need to have American counterparts on the other side of the border for that whole expanse. If your purpose is to turn back at the border, you’d need someone to turn them back to.”
For months, the city of Toronto has been struggling to shelter thousands of asylum seekers from the U.S. via Quebec and has made funding pleas to Ottawa.
The newly elected Ontario government, under Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford, has refused to help in coordinating a response.
Lisa MacLeod, the Ontario minister responsible for immigration, told the committee the province’s estimated cost of supporting the refugees is now at $200 million, including $90 million in welfare, $86 million for shelter services in Toronto and Ottawa, $3 million for Red Cross support and $20 million for education for migrant children. So far, Ottawa has already committed $11 million in direct aid to Toronto.
“Managing border-crossing is a federal responsibility,” said MacLeod. “The problems seem to be spreading without any light at the end of the tunnel.” Asylum seeker Seidu Mohammed lost his fingers after suffering severe frostbite in December 2016 while crossing into Manitoba in the dead of winter. He told the committee of the treacherous journey, involving nine countries, he took to seek freedom from persecu- tion as a gay man in Ghana. He spent several months in detention in the U.S. before his brother paid a bond for his release.
“Many Canadians have helped us. I want people to know immigrants and refugees are not criminals or economic migrants. (Canada’s) refugee system is not an easy process,” said Mohammed, who was granted asylum and is now a permanent resident in Canada.
He said the current Safe Third Country Agreement causes a lot of problems for refugees and “that’s why we sneak in from the U.S.”
Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada, who testified before the committee, said Canada needs to take the “urgent” step to suspend the bilateral agreement.
“It is a fiction to continue to assert that the United States is safe,” he said.
“Lifting the agreement would also take away the incentive for refugee claimants to cross into Canada through irregular avenues, avoiding official border posts, and would bring back a sense of greater order and oversight to who is crossing our southern frontier.”