‘Daddy, let’s go to Canada’
The fearful Haitian march from Trump to Canada
Their lives changed in an instant that July day when the government letter arrived telling them that her work permit was not being renewed.
For five years, Sheila Francois lived, worked and paid her taxes in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to help support her three teenaged children. When she and husband, Frank, read that letter — no renewal and no explanation — they knew their life in the United States was over.
“If you have status and you see that immigration stops it, right away you think one thing - deportations,” says 44-year-old Frank Francois. “The minute we saw that happen and as we are watching the news, we saw Canada taking people, we said, ‘we might as well take a chance.’”
The Francois family are among nearly 7,000 asylum seekers — most of them Haitian — who have flooded across the QuebecNew York state border since mid-July when the Trump administration announced it might end their “temporary protected status” which was granted following Haiti’s massive 2010 earthquake. They are among the first few hundred the government has relocated to this eastern Ontario processing centre.
Few here have heard of Justin Trudeau and no one says they saw his now controversial January Twitter message welcoming immigrants facing persecution. The tweet was heavily criticized by the Conservative opposition for sparking the American exodus.
But many here say they uprooted their new American lives because of something more primal: they were driven by fear of the anti-immigration politics of President Donald Trump.
“I decided to come to Canada because the politics of migration in the United States changed,” says Haitian-born Justin Remy Napoleon, 39. “I was scared. I came here to continue my life.”
Like Frank Francois, Napoleon says he feared deportation over Trump’s policy shift, so he left his adopted home in San Diego, flew to the eastern seaboard and boarded a bus for the northern border. It wasn’t the first time he decided to start over in another Justin Remy Napoleon, stands outside Cornwall’s Nav Centre, which is temporarily housing U.S. asylum seekers. Napoleon says he feared deportation over Trump’s policy shift, so he left his adopted home in San Diego, flew to the eastern seaboard and boarded a bus for the northern border.
country. He left Haiti in 2006 for the Dominican Republic and then went to Brazil.
Napoleon says he dreamed of coming to Canada from as far back as his time in Haiti. When he crossed the border earlier this month, “I thought I was entering a paradise.”
Jean-Pierre Kidmage, 43, took a three-day bus ride from Miami to New York before taking a taxi across the border. He says he doesn’t know much about Canada but he’s heard good things. He hit the road because he was worried the Trump administration would deport him.
He’s been here less than two weeks, but he wants to stay. “I sleep well here. Better here than in the U.S.”
Lingering unease is palpable outside Cornwall’s Nav Centre, where they are being temporarily housed. Young men and women, some with children, pace the grounds, their eyes trained on mobile phones. More than a dozen adults politely decline interviews.
Some await taxis to take them into town to shop. A few roll suitcases toward a handful of cars and minivans bearing Quebec licence plates that periodically arrive during the day. The new arrivals here are free to go once
they have registered their claims and officials say most are headed to Montreal.
Now, more than a month and 2,550 kilometres after leaving his most recent home, Frank Francois sits on a bench in warm sunshine. He won’t be photographed, but he’s happy to discuss what has been a life of epic migration. It has been a life of running - from his native Haiti in 1997 to the Bahamas and from America to Canada.
He grew up on a farm in Portde-Paix, the oldest of three brothers and four sisters. He yearned to become a doctor after high school, but there was no way his family could afford the $13,000 in tuition, so he got a visa to the Bahamas.
Soon, he began working construction jobs, sending some of his earnings home.
“Once you make money to pay your bills, you can help the people that you left behind in Haiti.”
He built his own family in the Bahamas. That’s where his three teenagers were born. His family spent a decade and a half there until more bad news arrived in the mail: the government informed him of a new law that called for the immediate expulsion of anyone who’d been in the country as a visitor for more than 10 years.
“Hard! Everywhere,” he laughs. His family re-established itself in Fort Lauderdale, near Miami, where Sheila had relatives. She went first with the three children, got visas, her work permit and set the kids up in school. Her husband got a visa and joined them in 2012.
He stayed after it expired and periodically found under-thetable work in construction, but it wasn’t easy. “It’s hard when you don’t have a legal status, to survive and work for your families.”
The children went to school, made friends and the family got on with life in a rented apartment. Now, aged 13, 14 and 15, the Francois children have become extremely aware of the changing political climate in the U.S.
“Every day, they say, ‘Daddy, every time we watch the news we don’t see any policy that the president (has) that’s in our favour.’ They were afraid to face deportations.”
Then, when their mother’s rejection letter came, the kids weighed in again.
“My children said, ‘Daddy, we were born in the Bahamas’ — this is their words — ‘we think Canada can help us.’
“They said, ‘Daddy, let’s go to Canada — find our way out’.”
OTTAWA
A major effort is underway to collect the most detailed data yet on the state of the country’s roads, bridges, water pipes and transit systems.
Statistics Canada quietly launched a national survey late last month to get an unprecedented level of granular detail on the state of infrastructure at the provincial and municipal level.
Urban and rural municipalities will have until November to respond to the questionnaire, and Statistics Canada officials say they expect to have the first results ready by next summer.
Collecting the information is imperative for the Liberal government’s economic agenda.
It wants to ensure that $186.7 billion in planned federal infrastructure spending over the next 12 years targets large projects that drive growth regionally or nationally and not smaller, local projects with no widespread impact.
Statistics Canada plans to use the data from the survey, and expand the national information it currently collects about infrastructure value and spending to determine the effects on the economy, productivity and jobs and the government’s fiscal outlook.
The Liberals have set a series of goals for the spending, including boosting economic growth, lowering greenhouse gas emissions, making it easier to get around in Canada’s busiest cities, and reducing homelessness.
Pages of briefing notes and presentations obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act lay out how these efforts have taken shape in the last year, and outline the challenge in obtaining data commensurate with the overall size of the federal investment.
A briefing note for Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi for a Feb. 14 meeting says that achieving federal goals will depend on provinces, territories and cities putting forward projects for funding that meet the stated goals. The meeting was with Michael Barber, the “deliverology” expert hired to help the Liberals on their promise for evidencebased policy making.
Cities, provinces and territories own about 95 per cent of the public infrastructure in Canada and account for about 90 per cent of all public infrastructure spending in Canada. The Liberals have vowed to give as much flexibility to cities and provinces in how they use federal funds, causing a point of friction between national interests and local demands.
“Infrastructure is not an area of ‘shared’ jurisdiction like immigration; in this case, the government can influence by using its convening power and by enforcing its authority through program requirements,” the briefing note says. “The latter can be challenging because it can leave provinces, territories and municipalities with little flexibility and risk unintended consequences.”
A month later, a group of deputy ministers met with the country’s chief statistician to map out ways to “fill some large infrastructure data gaps.”
The survey was not designed to be exhaustive, says an April 7 briefing note for a meeting between Infrastructure Canada’s deputy minister and the chief statistician said. Instead, it will capture a representative sample of municipalities as well as Indigenous communities.
Survey response rates on-reserve are typically low, but Statistics Canada has started outreach efforts to band councils and Indigenous organizations on the new survey.
The government has budgeted $1 million for the survey, although the documents suggest that figure will change. Brook Simpson, a spokesman for Sohi, said any additional costs will be absorbed by Infrastructure Canada’s operating budget. Canadian governments are expected to spend as much as $750 billion over the next 10 years on infrastructure.