Within the last month or so, 142 asylum seekers who entered Canada illegally via Roxham Road in Quebec have been transferred to British Columbia.
“IRCC [Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada] has asked several provinces, including B.C., to receive a transfer of claimants from Ontario who arrived through Roxham Road,” the BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs told True North.
“B.C. is assisting the federal government, and IRCC has leased 110 hotel rooms in the Metro Vancouver area to provide accommodation to these arrivals… IRCC intends to fill all 110 rooms.”
The 142 asylum seekers have been jetted into BC since mid-June 2023.
“Local settlement organizations, funded through the provincial BC Settlement and Integration Services (BCSIS) program, are supporting claimants with searching for housing, finding employment, and enrolling in provincial services,” said the BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs.
While BCSIS currently has a $6 million annual budget, the BC government is increasing that figure to nearly $26 million in April 2024.
For security and privacy reasons, the provincial government does not offer breakdowns of how many of the asylum seekers are men, women, or children.
The government is also not disclosing which cities and hotels they bring the migrants to.
A House of Commons inquiry by Lambton—Kent—Middlesex Conservative MP Lianne Rood revealed that Surrey is one of the cities where the federal government is renting hotel rooms for asylum seekers.
Since April 1, 2017, the feds have spent $127 million on hotel rooms for illegal border crossers.
All throughout 2022 and until March of this year, thousands of asylum seekers per month were illegally crossing into Quebec from New York via Roxham Road. Quebec, which was spending $20 million per month on asylum seekers’ social benefits, claimed the migrants were straining their resources, so the federal government bussed the new arrivals over to Ontario.
It wasn’t before long that various Ontario mayors were saying they couldn’t handle the influx and asked to transfer the migrants elsewhere.
The Roxham Road loophole closed at the end of March 2023, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a deal with President Joe Biden to accept 15,000 of his “Western Hemisphere” migrants who illegally entered the US from Latin America.
4,875 migrants crossed illegally into Quebec in January 2023, but as of June, that figure dropped to 30.
