MONTREAL — Some Ontario communities that have seen a surge in arrivals of asylum seekers say they have been caught off guard by the numbers of migrants the federal government is sending from Quebec.
A community group in Ontario's Niagara region says it was already dealing with a tripling of requests for assistance from asylum seekers before Ottawa recently began increasing transfers from Quebec. Quebec has said it is unable to absorb the numbers of people arriving at the unofficial Roxham Road border crossing on its southern border.
Deanna D'Elia, the general manager of employment and immigrant services at the YMCA of Niagara, said her organization provides language assessments and helps new arrivals register their children in school and access other community resources. It began seeing a rise in demand around seven months ago.
"It was an unexpected surge. It's hundreds in Niagara right now," she said.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada says it began transferring migrants arriving in Quebec to Ontario in July as Quebec's shelter system — and hotels rented by IRCC — reached capacity.
Since the weekend, the transfers have increased. Quebec's immigration minister said this week that of the 505 migrants who entered the country through Roxham Road on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, 475 had been transferred to other provinces.
Adrienne Jugley, commissioner of community services with the Regional Municipality of Niagara, said the number of asylum seekers staying in local hotels rented by the federal government increased progressively toward the end of the year. Before Christmas, IRCC was renting more than 600 rooms in the region, she said, and last weekend she was notified that the federal agency plans to increase that to more than 1,500 rooms "imminently."
That "dramatic increase ... has certainly raised our concerns about our local resources' ability to respond," she said in an interview Thursday.
Jugley, who believes Niagara Falls was selected because it has a large number of hotels, said her biggest concern is where people will stay once they leave the federally funded hotels, as her region lacks affordable housing.
"We want to support these people. We want them to settle in and be safe. How do we do that? And where do we do that?" she said
IRCC said that since it began transferring asylum claimants entering Quebec to the Ontario cities of Ottawa, Windsor, Cornwall and Niagara Falls in July, 5,557 claimants have been moved to the province.
Cornwall Mayor Justin Towndale, said there has been a lack of communication between the federal government and municipalities.
He said he was "flabbergasted" when he received numbers from IRCC for the first time this week indicating how many migrants had already been transferred to his city. He said 779 asylum seekers are in Cornwall, and the town has seen a total of 1,396 claimants since August.
“I was expecting maybe a couple hundred and to see that high number, and to get a report saying that another bus is arriving soon, but they don’t tell us when it’s coming or if it’s full ... that is a lot of people,” he said in an interview Friday.
With a population of about 50,000, Cornwall has limited resources to begin with, Towndale said, so having to administer the provincial programs available to asylum seekers has increased the workload and added an economic strain. He said local organizations and charities have also felt the pressure as demand has grown for social services like food banks.
IRCC spokeswoman Isabelle Dubois acknowledged the strain on resources in Quebec and Ontario and said in an email that the department is working with other provinces and municipalities "to identify new destinations that have the capacity to accommodate asylum seekers."
Federal government statistics show that 39,171 asylum seekers were intercepted by the RCMP on Quebec's southern border in 2022, up from 4,095 in 2021. They accounted for more than 99 per cent of all asylum seekers who crossed the Canadian border irregularly in 2022. In total, around 60 per cent of all people claiming asylum in Canada in 2022 arrived through Quebec.
The Quebec government has repeatedly called for the federal government to close the Roxham Road crossing, saying it doesn't have the capacity to accept more migrants.
In Montreal, Jean-Sébastien Patrice, the executive director of community food service MultiCaf, said the demand to help asylum seekers remains high.
Patrice said more than 700 asylum seekers are registered to receive services from his organization, up from 62 three years ago. The increase comes at a time when he's also seeing increased demand for his services from people struggling to keep up with inflation.
"We have a combined tsunami from the wave of asylum seekers and the continuing inflation," he said in an interview Thursday.
Patrice said he thinks transferring asylum seekers who want to go elsewhere to other provinces could allow organizations like his to provide a higher level of assistance to those who remain, but that has to be accompanied by additional funding.
"It's easy to say that people fleeing difficult situations around the world are welcome here, but ... a structure has to be in place to accompany these words," he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 17, 2023.
— With files from Marisela Amador
Jacob Serebrin, The Canadian Press
