(Ottawa) The onset of cold weather hasn’t slowed the speed at which asylum seekers are crossing Roxham Road. In November, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers intercepted 3,731 people, slightly fewer than October (3,901 people).
Posted at 3:14pm
In the first 11 months of the year, federal authorities arrested a record 34,478 asylum seekers who crossed the Canada-US border irregularly, according to the latest data released on the department’s website: Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. If the trend continues we could address the 40,000 asylum seekers who have chosen to cross the border via Roxham Road.
Since the beginning of the year, we have also noticed an increase in the number of asylum seekers after disembarking from planes at Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau International Airport. In fact, federal authorities say nearly 10,200 people made such an application at that airport between January and November.
Result: According to the federal government, almost 50,000 people are expected to have applied for asylum after arriving in Quebec via a land or air port of entry.
This data was released 24 hours after Quebec Premier François Legault raised the sensitive issue during a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Montreal.
At the end of that meeting, Mr Legault said he hoped Ottawa would expedite the processing of files on migrants crossing Roxham Road who are not political refugees. “We could bring them back to their homes,” he said at a news conference.
Mr Legault also indicated that he would like some of these asylum seekers to be “relocated to other provinces”. He also argued to Mr Trudeau that there was a need to stop “the massive influx of immigrants” via Roxham Road. According to Premier Legault, it can currently take two years for an asylum seeker’s case to be judged in Ottawa.
“I would prefer that we aim for two months than two years,” he said, but lamented not having received a specific “goal” from Justin Trudeau Tuesday morning.
“We still have a good percentage of these people arriving via Roxham who are not real political refugees within the meaning of the law: their lives are not at risk in their country,” Prime Minister Legault told Point Press.
“We could bring people who are not political refugees back to their homeland. It would take the pressure off the services and franking.
However, François Legault says he sensed “an openness” on the part of the President to allow some of these arrivals “to be transferred to other provinces”.
“There is a certain urgency to act,” added Mr Legault, who recalled the “challenge” of providing health, education and housing services to the 36,000 people who transited Roxham Road this year .
In an afternoon report of the meeting, Prime Minister Trudeau’s office wrote “that the Government of Canada is proceeding[ait] to assist Quebec” in managing “the arrival of irregular asylum seekers entering via Roxham Road”.
With Marie-Eve Morasse, La Presse