Pastor Judith James chats with a newcomer at Revivaltime Tabernacle church, where shelter and donations where provided to more than 200 asylum refugee claimants in need, in Toronto on July 20.Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail
Here’s a short list of things that Ottawa spends money on but has no constitutional responsibility for: health care, child care, new fridges for big grocery companies, and Gen Y tech consultants for small businesses.
Not on that list, however, is full-fledged support to pay for the rapidly mounting costs of immigration – borders and immigration being, when last we checked, within the ambit of the federal government.
The City of Toronto (and it is far from alone) has been struggling to pay for the most obvious of such costs: finding a place for homeless refugee claimants to sleep. The city’s shelter system has run out of beds, with 300 people – half of them refugees – unable to secure a spot on any given night.
Toronto asked Ottawa for $157-million for the 3,100 spaces it has added to accommodate refugee applicants, as well as additional funds to allow those 300 shut-outs to be given shelter. Ottawa’s response was, in essence: We’re tired of giving, and that’s not really our job.
To be fair, the federal government has provided some funds, including $97-million earlier this month for short-term housing assistance for refugees.
But Toronto needs more, and for that the Liberals say the city should hit up the provincial government. In a letter to Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland wrote, “The Province of Ontario has both the constitutional responsibility and the fiscal capacity to support Toronto. It is our firm expectation that they will do so.”
On one hand, it is somewhat bracing to hear a federal Liberal cabinet minister acknowledge there is a constitutional division of powers in this country and that there are some areas where Ottawa’s spending power need not intrude.
But it is a bit much for Ms. Freeland to draw that line on the question of who should bear the costs of immigration, particularly refugee resettlement. Immigrants have the same freedom of mobility as other people in Canada. As a result, big cities typically bear a disproportionate part of the cost of resettling refugees. The fiscal pain may be local, but the issue is national in scope.
These same Liberals opted to increase immigration of permanent residents to historically high levels. Temporary immigration is growing even faster. And, most pertinent to Toronto, the backlog of refugee applicants is getting worse.
Statistics from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada say that backlog hit 103,987 in June, nearly doubling from June, 2022. Even if Ottawa hit the pause button on new refugee applicants – and it should not – clearing up that backlog would take more than two years at current processing rates.
That growing backlog is symptomatic of the Liberals’ haphazard approach to immigration. Their so-called immigration plan could have been drafted on the back of a napkin – does any serious person believe that careful analysis and projections resulted in the made-for-marketing number of 500,000 immigrants a year?
And what is the goal of this expansion? As we’ve argued before, a credible plan would aim to increase not just the size of the economy but also build the prosperity of Canadian households by increasing productivity. That would entail significant reform of how economic immigrants are selected and a curtailment of temporary immigration that is being used to supply cheap labour to inefficient businesses.
Instead, Ottawa barely gives a nod to economic imperatives in what passes for its immigration plan.
Similarly, the Liberals have failed to come up with a comprehensive plan, in conjunction with the provinces and territories, on how to alleviate the stresses in Canada’s health care system while adding a medium-sized city to the population every year. They have also failed to come up with realistic strategies to help boost housing supply across the country, not just for new arrivals, but for Canadians struggling to find reasonably priced accommodation.
Haphazard may be too generous a description.
A more coherent approach would start with the recognition that it is Ottawa’s responsibility to ensure that the federal civil service can cope with rising levels of immigration and not add to backlogs.
And while Ms. Freeland is not wrong to point out that her government has already offered some support to Toronto and that Ontario has a role to play, it is still up to Ottawa to arrive at an agreement with Ontario that will alleviate the refugee crisis on Toronto’s streets.