What’s the plan to deal with illegal migrants?

People have been pouring into Canada, primarily across unguarded stretches of our border in Manitoba and Quebec, due to immigration crackdowns — or at least the fear of them — in the United States.

The City of Toronto called Thursday for the federal and provincial governments to help cover an unforeseen expense of some $65 million due to the costs of a sudden surge in migrants and refugee claimants, which has swamped the city’s homeless shelter system. In 2016, officials said, there were 459 asylum seekers in city shelters — 11 per cent of the total. This month, the number was approaching 2,400, and 40 per cent of the system.

Quebec, its own services overloaded, recently reached an agreement with the federal government to disperse the thousands of arrivals across the country. Toronto will receive many.

Spreading the burden might work as a stopgap. Maybe. But if Canada had figured out how to handle the influx in the first place, we wouldn’t need to be shuffling human beings around from city to city as the best solution to a growing illegal immigration problem.

The answer isn’t complicated, just difficult: Canada must dramatically cut the time it takes to process a refugee application, which is currently estimated to be an astonishing 20 months. The delay is itself an inducement to enter Canada, as is Canada’s often poor record of effectively tracking those awaiting a ruling and deporting those who are rejected. Only by reducing, enormously, the processing time and stepping up the enforcement of removal orders can Canada address the problem at the source: the border.

There are other approaches worth considering, including amending the Safe Third Country Agreement that creates the bizarre legal loophole that lets us refuse refugee claimants who have already found safety in the U.S. (and the U.S. to refuse claimants already safe here), but applies only at official border stations and not to illegal crossings.

Pending major progress there, this is a problem we have to deal with right now by ourselves. Given the estimates of 400 arrivals per day once the warm weather arrives, the Trudeau government has to come up with a plan, since it appears to have none at all.