Mayors in Canada’s largest cities, as well as some who run smaller ones, complain about the financial burdens of asylum seekers and refugees on their budgets and physical facilities. Provinces correctly blame Ottawa for increased numbers of new arrivals and demand money for their care. A surge of migration has produced predictable results: ad hoc sheltering arrangements, additional homelessness, stressed social services.
The Immigration and Refugee Board, the agency charged with authenticating refugee claims, is overwhelmed. It has 200,000 claims on its docket but can process only about 140,000 of them per year, which means that if refugee flows continue apace, the backlog will get worse. Inevitably, some asylum seekers disappear into the underground economy or into the protection of friends or family members, while officials charged with tracking them down struggle to do so.
Canada is not alone among Western democracies in facing the immense challenges of...
Jeffrey Simpson was the Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist for thirty-two years.
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