The Immigration Department spent the equivalent of over $130 per day on hotels in Niagara Falls for illegal immigrants seeking asylum in Canada, according to an Inquiry of Ministry recently tabled in the House of Commons.
The department wrote in the Inquiry that some of the illegal immigrants spent up to three or four months in the Niagara Falls hotels paid for by the federal government, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
It said a total of over 2,400 illegal immigrants and asylum seekers were bused from Quebec to Niagara Falls beginning in July 2022.
The Immigration Department neither disclosed total costs of the hotels nor specified which hotels the immigrants were housed in, but the Department of Public Works
said in an Inquiry tabled in January that Niagara hotel costs for asylum seekers previously reached a total of over $5.3 million at taxpayers’ expense.
The Public Works Department also specified in the previous Inquiry that it contracted Niagara Falls Ramada, Wyndham Garden, and Four Points by Sheraton hotels to house asylum seekers.
The recent Inquiry with details from the Immigration Department was tabled in the House after Conservative MP Tony Baldinelli, whose riding is Niagara Falls, requested the figures.
The Inquiry said the migrants arriving in Niagara Falls were mostly from Turkey, Colombia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.
It added that the federal government gave no grants to municipal authorities or local charities to help manage the influx of refugees coming to the area.
Asylum Seekers
Cabinet’s revelation of Niagara hotel costs for refugees comes amid a flurry of calls from opposition parties for the federal government to close the unofficial border at Roxham Road, through which thousands of migrants seeking asylum have crossed into Quebec.Federal statistics show that, in 2022, over 39,000 people claimed asylum in Canada after being intercepted by police while crossing the border into Quebec, which compares to just 369 asylum seekers crossing the border into all the other provinces combined during the same year.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre
previously called on the government to close the Roxham Road crossing by March 23, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
responded by saying the action would simply cause asylum seekers to enter Canada at other unofficial entry points.
Trudeau said his government would instead
work on renegotiating the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) with the United States, which requires refugee claimants to request protection in the first safe country they arrive in after crossing the Canada-U.S. land border unless they qualify for an exception.
Forbes reported on March 24 that Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden have come to an agreement to “modify” the STCA in order to curb illegal border crossings, as part of Biden’s two-day visit to Canada.
