Community workers want more money and structures to help people who are trying to leave
A community group in the Niagara area of Ontario says that the number of asylum seekers asking for help had already tripled before Ottawa started sending more people from Quebec to the province.
The general manager of employment and immigrant services at the YMCA of Niagara, Deanna D’Elia, said that her organization helps newcomers test their language skills, sign up their kids for school, and find other community resources. About seven months ago, it started getting more requests.
“It came out of nowhere.” “There are a lot of people in Niagara right now,” she told me.
Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada says it started moving people from Quebec to Ottawa and Niagara Falls in July, when shelters in Quebec and hotels rented by IRCC were full.
Since the weekend, there have been more transfers. This week, Quebec’s immigration minister said that 475 of the 505 people who entered the country through an unofficial border crossing at Roxham Road on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were sent to other provinces.
Officials from the Niagara region say that the federal government is doubling the number of hotel rooms for asylum seekers in the area, which worries them about their ability to provide services.
The commissioner of community services for the area, Adrienne Jugley, said that as the year went on, the number of asylum seekers staying in hotels rented by the federal government kept going up.
Before Christmas, IRCC was renting out more than 600 rooms in the area, and she said that the federal agency told her last weekend that it plans to rent out more than 1,500 rooms “imminently.”
In an interview on Thursday, she said that this “dramatic increase” has made them worry about how well their local resources can help.
Jugley thinks Niagara Falls was chosen because it has a lot of hotels. She said her biggest worry is where people will stay after they leave the hotels paid for by the federal government because there isn’t enough affordable housing in her area.
“We would like to help these people.” We want them to feel comfortable and safe. What should we do? “And where does that happen?” she said
Since July, when IRCC started moving asylum seekers from Quebec to the Ontario cities of Ottawa, Windsor, Cornwall, and Niagara Falls, 5,557 asylum seekers have been moved to Ontario.
“But as the strain on resources in Quebec and Ontario continues, IRCC is now working with other provinces and municipalities to find new places that can house asylum seekers,” spokeswoman Isabelle Dubois said in an email.
D’Elia said that the education system, food banks, and housing help centers need to work together and plan strategically so that they can handle an increase in demand.
Statistics from the federal government show that the RCMP stopped 39,171 asylum seekers at Quebec’s southern border in 2022. This is up from 4,095 in 2021. In 2022, they made up more than 99 percent of all illegal asylum seekers who crossed the Canadian border. In 2022, about 60% of the people who asked for asylum in Canada did so through Quebec.
The Quebec government has asked the federal government many times to close the Roxham Road crossing, saying that it can’t handle any more immigrants.
In Montreal, Jean-Sébastien Patrice, who is in charge of the community food service MultiCaf, said that there is still a lot of interest in helping asylum seekers.
Patrice said that more than 700 people have signed up to get help from his organization, which is up from 62 people three years ago. People who are having trouble keeping up with inflation are also using his services more, which is why he is having to raise his prices.
“The wave of asylum seekers and the continuing inflation are like a combined tsunami,” he said in an interview on Thursday.
Patrice said that he thinks sending asylum seekers who want to go to other provinces to other provinces could help organizations like his help the people who are still there more, but this would require more money.
“It’s easy to say that people fleeing hard situations around the world are welcome here, but these words need to be backed up by a plan,” he said.
He said that federal officials don’t care where asylum seekers go after they leave hotels rented by the government as temporary housing.
“We have situations of great insecurity in different substandard housing in our area, where a dozen asylum seekers end up in small [one-bedroom] apartments,” some of which don’t even have refrigerators, he said.