The Wyndham Garden Tower B hotel in Niagara Falls, Ont., is one of the places the federal government houses asylum seekers – in some cases for up to a year – while they apply for more permanent status.
Some hotels in Niagara Falls, Ont., are unusually full for the middle of the winter off-season, when many visitors stay home. Normally that would make the mayor of a tourist city happy – but not Jim Diodati.
His community, which says it has more asylum seekers per capita than any other municipality in the country, is ground-zero in Canada’s efforts to house thousands of refugee claimants in hotels while they wait for their claims to be processed. The mayor, who can see the United States from his perch at city hall, is worried it’s about to get a lot worse.
Mr. Diodati is concerned that if more asylum seekers start coming to Canada because of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, his city will be unable to handle it – and he’s not alone. While the federal and provincial governments are trying to demonstrate to Mr. Trump that they’re serious about stopping the flow of migrants going south, mayors of the country’s border towns say there’s not enough talk about these implications of Mr. Trump’s policies.
Mayor Jim Diodati worries that public services Niagara Falls will be strained further by a Trump-era surge in asylum applications in Canada.
In Niagara Falls, a city of around 95,000 people where tourism drives the economy, the influx of refugees is pushing local emergency rooms, schools, shelters, food banks and housing supply to the brink, Mr. Diodati said.
At its peak more than a year ago, there were nearly 5,000 asylum seekers housed in 11 hotels in the city’s downtown core, dotted with souvenir shops, arcades, amusement rides, indoor water parks and a casino.
“We’re already bursting at the seams,” the mayor said. “Trump is talking about deporting 11 million people. If they show up on our borders, we can’t handle that.”
More than 54,000 asylum seekers arrived in Canada last year, according to federal data.
Many of them are coming through airports such as Toronto Pearson International, where they are often put on buses by federal immigration officials and taken to border cities with more hotel space available.
The federal government says it’s now spending tens of millions of dollars housing and feeding asylum seekers in Niagara Falls alone – sometimes for as long as a year. The total cost across the country was not available.
“They said this was supposed to be a temporary solution,” Mr. Diodati said. “This feels pretty permanent now.”
The tourist hot spots of Niagara Falls, such as Clifton Hill, are not that busy on a chilly January day. When spring comes, demand for hotels will rise.
Tourists on the Ontario side can peer across the water at New York state, where, as in the rest of the United States, laws around immigration status and refugee settlement are tightening.
Once their refugee claims are accepted, asylum seekers have to leave the federally funded hotels and find jobs and their own housing.
Multiple asylum seekers told The Globe and Mail that’s proving more difficult than they expected. Some have turned to local homeless shelters or churches for help.
“They told us to look for housing,” said Vanessa Kasega, a 25-year-old Ugandan refugee who flew to Canada in August and has been living at a hotel in Niagara Falls ever since. “But it’s been very difficult. I need a job first so I can pay for it.”
Pastor Wally Hong, a retired Presbyterian minister who has worked with asylum seekers for decades, says there is an upside for the city. Refugees have provided its hospitality industry with a glut of available, entry-level labour when the tourist season begins. And there have been many success stories of asylum seekers who have come here and built a new life, he said.
But even he concedes the potential of an increase in newcomers may be too much for his city. His church does what it can to help – offering language classes, employment courses and help finding housing – but it had to draw the line when asylum seekers started showing up late at night asking for a place to sleep.
“As a country, we’re not prepared,” he said. “But I don’t know how we can be prepared. Most countries aren’t ready for massive influxes of refugees.”
'I don't know how we can be prepared' for more asylum seekers coming to Canada, says Wally Hong, a now-retired minister in Niagara Falls.
Signs at Drummond Hill Presbyterian Church translate 'welcome' and 'love' into myriad languages. The church does what it can to help newcomers in the city.
Border towns, who formed an alliance to voice their concerns over Mr. Trump’s tariffs, are pushing back. In Windsor, across the river from Detroit, city council recently voted against participating in a federal program intended to split the cost of housing asylum seekers between the three levels of government.
Mayor Drew Dilkens says the Interim Housing Assistance Program puts too much of the cost on cities, and they simply can’t afford it. He’s worried about Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s plans to evict 840 refugees who have been processed from Windsor hotels by the end of March, as the city deals with a housing crisis. There’s already 9,000 people on a waitlist for social or affordable housing, Mr. Dilkens said.
“When you’re evicting that many people, the system just can’t handle it. There’s nowhere for them to go,” Mr. Dilkens said. “Communities like ours have always tried to be welcoming hosts. This is not about being anti-newcomer. We just cannot afford this. And we’re not being heard at the federal level.”
Mary Rose Sabater, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, did not directly respond to questions from The Globe and Mail about the criticism from the border towns. But she said that as of Jan. 29, the department was housing approximately 1,500 claimants in 600 rooms at three Niagara Falls hotels.
It’s a problem across the country. Jack O’Halloran, chief executive of Surrey Urban Mission in B.C., said he expects demand for shelter services to rise by as much as 15 per cent in the coming months – much of that driven by growing numbers of asylum seekers coming from the U.S. His shelter and others along the border with Washington State are worried about the broader impact of an influx of migrants.
“It’s going to impact our emergency rooms, all across the medical system,” Mr. O’Halloran said. “People are going to need food, they’re going to need jobs. And how do you get a job with no address? You can’t even open a bank account. It’s going to put a strain on a whole lot more than just the shelter system.”
Wyndham Garden Tower B was once one of 11 hotels housing asylum seekers in downtown Niagara Falls, though numbers have gone down somewhat since their peak a year ago.
Hotels in Ontario and Quebec saw dramatic growth in the number of asylum seekers in 2022, when tens of thousands of people entered Canada illegally through Roxham Road. While the rural, unmanned border crossing between Quebec and New York State crossing was permanently closed in 2023, the federal government is still using many of those hotels to house refugee claimants coming through other points of entry.
The Safe Third Country Agreement signed between Canada and the U.S. in 2022 bars most people crossing into either country by land from seeking refugee protection. Groups such as Amnesty International say the agreement is forcing migrants to attempt dangerous border crossings and have called on Canada to withdraw from it.
Federal data suggest the agreement is changing the way asylum seekers are entering Canada, however. In 2022, 46,340 migrants entered Canada at land crossings to claim asylum while 17,155 asylum seekers came by air, according to the federal government. Last year, those numbers were almost reversed. More than 40,000 asylum seekers arrived at Canadian airports, and13,990 crossed into Canada by land.
Across the country, meanwhile, Canadian officials are trying to show Washington they’re working to stem the flow of migrants entering the U.S. from Canada. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have created their own border patrol units to monitor vast stretches of land between the two countries.
On Thursday, the RCMP unveiled one of two recently chartered Black Hawk helicopters it plans to use in the fight against cross-border human and drug smuggling. The national force has spent $5.3-million renting the helicopters, which will be based in Quebec and Manitoba until the end of March.
“We want to send the message to the Americans that we take this very seriously,” Sergeant Charles Poirier said, at news conference held in St-Antoine-Abbé, Que.
With a report from Frédérik-Xavier D. Plante in Montreal
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