This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun

While accusing the opposition of fear-mongering about illegal immigration, top Trudeau government officials have stepped up their own fear-mongering campaign against the opposition.

The 2019 federal election may be nine months away, but the campaign has already begun. The latest comes from Trudeau’s immigration minister Ahmed Hussen, who accused the Conservative Party of wanting to “militarize the border.”

Last week, Conservative MP and immigration critic Michelle Rempel held a news conference where she called on the government to study the issue of how Canada screens and vets migrants who illegally cross into Canada. Rempel’s proposal was mild, and well within reason.

Canada is experiencing an unprecedented and ongoing surge in illegal border crossings, which has been accompanied by stories of alleged terrorists and migrants with national security red flags slipping into Canada.

Rempel noted in her news conference that the Conservatives have been asking for a review of Canada’s immigration screening policy since the border crisis escalated in 2017.

Responding to Rempel’s proposal, Hussen dismissed the Tory position on immigration and bizarrely seemed to invent a new position for them.

“I haven’t seen anything from the Conservatives. They don’t have a plan,” said Hussen, before quickly changing his tune. “Do you know what their plan is? To militarize the border and place a CBSA official or RCMP official every 100 metres,” said Hussen.

In the same breath, Hussen claimed both that the Conservatives didn’t have a plan and that their plan includes militarizing the border.

Of course, there is no evidence that the Conservatives — or any sane person for that matter — has ever called for officials to be stationed every hundred meters along the border.

The shared Canada-U.S. border, after all, spans 8,891 kilometres. With border officials ever 100 metres — ten per kilometer — that would mean staffing the border with about 90,000 border stations, and asking our American neighbours to do the same.

If the mainstream media bothered to fact-check Liberal politicians like they do the opposition, Hussen’s wild allegation would surely fail the test.

In reality, the problem is mostly contained to one small section of the border.

In 2018, 19,419 migrants illegally entered Canada in between official ports of entry, 18,518 of them crossed into Quebec. This is in line with the Trudeau government’s claim that 95% of all illegal crossings occur along Roxham Road.

The problem does not span Canada’s nearly 9,000-kilometre border. It’s isolated to a very small location — making it much easier to tackle.

Canada could drastically reduce the flow of illegal migration by taking a simple step: closing the border at Roxham Road and stopping migrants from crossing there. Instead, the Trudeau government has done the opposite.

First, they built a land bridge so migrants wouldn’t have to walk through a ditch.

Second, they permanently stationed RCMP officers at this unofficial crossing point (which is less than five kilometres from the official crossing at Champlain, NY) to register incoming migrants.

Third, they set up makeshift refugee camps so that asylum seekers could start their paperwork and quickly become eligible for government handouts.

Finally, they began shuttling migrants to Montreal or Toronto — their choice — and setting them up in government-funded housing.

Not only has the Liberal government helped to facilitate illegal immigration, they’re normalizing it and thereby encouraging more of it.

Perhaps that is where Minister Hussen is coming from. When you believe in open borders, everything else begins to look like “militarization.”

Candice Malcolm is the Founder of the True North

THE CLAIM:

Canada’s Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen recently stated that, if elected, the Conservatives intend on militarizing the Canada-US border.

In a news conference on Tuesday, Hussen first stated that the Conservatives “have no plan” when it comes to addressing the border crisis, then changed his tune to allege that they do have a plan: “to militarize the border.”

“I haven’t seen anything from the Conservatives, they don’t have a plan. You know what their plan is? To militarize the border and place a CBSA official or a RCMP official every 100 meters” said Hussen.

“We don’t have the resources for that kind of half-baked, impractical plan,” he continued.

Indeed, stationing a Canadian border official at 100m intervals across Canada’s 9,000km border would be an “impractical plan.”

But did the Conservative Party propose anything like this? True North puts on its fact-checking hat to find the truth.

BACKGROUND:

Last week, Conservative MP and immigration critic Michelle Rempel held a news conference in British Columbia where she encouraged the government to study the issue of Canada’s immigration screening techniques.

Rempel mentioned three examples (one, two, three) of instances where our national security procedures failed and the government allowed dangerous criminals and an individual deemed a threat to national security to enter Canada.  

During her seven-and-a-half minute speech, Rempel did not once mention adding extra border guards or calling on the military to help secure the border.

Her comments were directed entirely at strengthening Canada’s immigration security screening process and calling for a Parliamentary committee to further study the issue. She also criticized the cost of the current approach and bureaucrat overlaps that leads to holes in the system.

THE CONSERVATIVE POSITION ON BORDER SECURITY

What the Conservatives have called for in the past is to close the loophole that allows illegal migrants to circumvent the Safe Third Country Agreement by bypassing official border stations and making their asylum claims inside Canada.

The Tories propose doing this by designating the entire border an “official crossing.”

This would give the RCMP already stationed at major “unofficial crossings” the power to turn away migrants trying to cross the border illegally, as CBSA officers do when asylum seekers arrive at official crossings.

So, when the Conservatives say “designate the entire border an official crossing” does that mean building some 90,000 new border stations to be spaced 100 metres apart along the nearly 9,000km Canada-U.S. border? Hardly.

According to the feds, the overwhelming majority of all illegal crossings occur at just two locations: Roxham Road, Quebec and Emerson, Manitoba.

Canada could address the problem by declaring the border an “official crossing” and placing CBSA officers in these two locations. This would allow Canada to enforce the Safe Third Country Agreement — which demands that asylum seekers file their claims in the first safe country they visit.

According to a recent statement from Rempel, the Conservatives have “called for the loophole in the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement to be closed, suggested repealing Section 159.4 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), and called for the asylum claim backlog to be cleared.”

Section 159.4 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act contradicts Canada’s border laws and enables the loophole that allows migrants to file refugee claims if they enter Canada illegally.

MILITARIZATION?

Does the Conservative proposal include a plan to “militarize the border”?

During the 2017 Conservative leadership race, then-candidate Maxime Bernier suggested that Canada deploy members of the Canadian Forces to help secure the border.

“We’re using the Canadian Forces when we have natural disasters in this country,” Bernier said in an interview with CBC News. “Let’s use them on a temporary basis in places where these people are crossing the border.”

Maxime Bernier is no longer a member of the Conservative Party of Canada. He announced in August that he quit to start his own political party, the People’s Party of Canada.

No other Conservative MP or spokesperson has echoed or seconded Bernier’s suggestion to use members of the military to help enforce Canada’s border laws.

Alleging that Bernier speaks for the Conservative Party is equivalent to suggesting that Ontario MP Leona Alleslev — the latest MP to cross the floor and leave the Liberal Party to join the Conservatives — still speaks for the Liberal Party.

THE VERDICT:

Hussen’s claim is false.

Candice Malcolm & Graeme Gordon

After the Trudeau government changed Canada’s visa rules, the number of Mexican refugee claimants in Canada skyrocketed.

2,445 Mexican visitors to Canada failed to leave and instead applied for refugee status in Canada during the first ten months of 2018, according to new data from Immigration Refugee Citizenship Canada (IRCC) .

The number of Mexican asylum claimants to Canada in on track to rise almost 75% above the previous year’s total, or an 840% increase from 2016’s total.

In July 2016, the Trudeau government removed the visitor visa for Mexicans travelling to Canada —  a visa imposed by the Harper government back in 2009 to end a surge of Mexicans claiming refugee status — despite the fact that the visa significantly reduced the number of asylum claims.

In 2016, the number of Mexican asylum seekers jumped to 260 from 111 the previous year, then surged to 1,515 in 2017, and continued to climb dramatically in 2018, rising to 2,445 claims in the first 10 months.

Number of Annual Asylum Claims from Mexican Nationals

Source: Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada

“Our Government took a pivotal step towards rebuilding and strengthening our relationship with Mexico, which was damaged considerably under the previous government,” said Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen’s spokesperson Mathieu Genest in an email.

“The visa lift has helped expand trade and business opportunities, increase investment and tourism, and strengthen people-to-people ties that benefit both countries. In 2017 alone, the increase in business travellers and tourists generated more than $600 million in economic benefits for Canada.”

Not everyone shares the Trudeau government’s optimism.

Toronto Immigration lawyer Guidy Mamann pointed out that, “the decision was definitely not consistent with traditional immigration policy.”

“This was completely anticipated by anyone who knows anything about it. It was done for purely political reasons. Mexico is a full participant in NAFTA and didn’t want to feel like the poor cousin of the trio. The cost was anticipated and was undertaken as the ‘cost of doing (international) business,’” said Mamann in an email.

“I would bet that any report by the CBSA (Canadian Border Services Agency) or CIC (the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, now know as Immigration Refugee Citizenship Canada or IRCC) that was requested by the government at that time would have warned of a significant increase in refugees claims,” he said.

Prior to the Harper government’s policy that made it mandatory for Mexicans travelling to Canada to get a travel visa, only a small fraction of the thousands of Mexicans asking for refugee status were deemed by the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada to be legitimate claimants. In 2008, for instance, Mexico comprised 26% of all asylum claims in Canada.

About 90% of those claims were eventually either rejected or abandoned.

“It would be inappropriate to speculate on asylum claims before the IRB,” said Genest about the low success rate of past Mexican refugee claimants being a concern with the latest spike in claims.

“The IRB is an independent, quasi-judicial tribunal that operates at arms-length from the government to assess and make decisions on all refugee claims. Each case is evaluated on its own merits, and those with a well-founded fear of persecution are permitted to stay and those who are found to not have a legitimate claim are removed.”

Canada’s asylum system costs taxpayers billions of dollars every year.