A place for refugee claimants

As the Aug. 16 deadline approaches for the removal of Toronto’s immigrant refugees from college dorm rooms into other housing, I might offer a temporary solution for this supposed “crisis.”

Every church basement that I’ve ever been in has “meet-and-greet” rooms with plenty of space for people to sleep in. Such rooms could be used for temporary shelter provided that a small amount of funding was set aside for people to temporarily supervise the sleepers. Perhaps an additional small amount of funding could be set aside for temporary supervision of (evening) showers that could conceivably take place in the facilities found at school gymnasiums. It is likely that the money required would be relatively paltry.

Certainly, this possibility should at least be suggested to Toronto’s churches and schools since a number of churches would likely be very willing to provide such shelter. (It is clear that this proposal would fall squarely within the Christian mandate to help the marginalized.)

It is true that a permanent solution would still need to be found, but I might note that last year Canada took in over 300,000 immigrants, while Ontario took in 98,000. Surely, Ontario could spend three per cent more in order to create such a permanent solution (or reduce what it spends on its current immigrants by three per cent in order to allocate enough for the 3,000-odd immigrants that are supposedly creating our current immigration “crisis”).

It would therefore seem that there is no actual crisis. To my mind, the only real problem that Ontario has would be in its present Ford government.

Jordan Moar

Waterloo