'Surge' in demand for services as Quebec migrants transferred to Ontario

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 transferring more migrants to the province from Quebec.

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 Ottawa and Niagara Falls 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 an unofficial border crossing at Roxham Road on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, 475 were transferred to other provinces.

Officials from the Niagara region say the federal government is doubling the number of hotel rooms for asylum seekers in the area, which has officials worried about their ability to provide services.

Adrienne Jugley, the commissioner of community services for the region, said the number of asylum seekers staying in 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 and she said 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 transferred to the province.

"However, as the strain on resources in Quebec and Ontario continues, IRCC is now in the process of working with other provinces and municipalities to identify new destinations that have the capacity to accommodate asylum seekers,'' spokesperson Isabelle Dubois said in an email.

D'Elia said collaboration and strategic planning are needed so that the education system, food banks and housing help centres have the ability to respond to an increase in demand.

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 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.

Once asylum seekers leave temporary housing in hotels rented by the government, he said there's no concern from federal officials about where they end up.

"We have situations of great insecurity in different substandard dwellings in our area where a dozen asylum seekers end up in small [one-bedroom] apartments," some of which don't even have refrigerators, he said.