Ottawa could announce the closure of Roxham Road on the Canada-US border, according to several high-level sources. The Canadian government is said to have agreed with the Americans to accept a certain number of migrants through official channels.
The exact details of the deal are not yet known, but according to information from the Los Angeles Times, which was confirmed by a government source at Radio-Canada, Canada would have agreed to take in 15,000 migrants through the channels, according to officials.
It is not yet known whether this agreement will be announced during the visit of the President of the United States, Joe Biden, or a little later. Authorities need to iron out operational details surrounding the closure announcement as it could lead to a spike in arrivals of irregular migrants.
However, a source familiar with the matter told Radio-Canada that the agreement should go into effect in the coming days.
According to Radio-Canada, Secretary of State Mélanie Joly and Secretary of Immigration Sean Fraser have been working behind the scenes with their US counterparts for the past few weeks to achieve this outcome.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent the appropriate signal on Wednesday. In a press crowd, he explained: We have been working closely with the Americans for several months to restore the situation at Roxham Road and look at the Safe Third Country Agreement. We will continue our work, then we may have something to announce.
A line of Haitian asylum seekers wait to enter Canada from Champlain, New York, in August 2017.
Photo: Portal/Christinne Muschi
The pressure on the Trudeau government from Quebec and the opposition parties in Ottawa is strong. Yesterday, leaders of the NDP and the Bloc Québécois reiterated their call for the government to suspend the application of the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States.
Ahead of Question Time in the National Assembly this morning, Quebec Premier François Legault reiterated that Roxham Road must be closed. In March, we reached 58% of Roxham Road arrivals sent outside of Quebec, he pointed out in an impromptu meeting with the parliamentary press. It’s still not enough. Quebec, he added, has exceeded capacity.
Almost 40,000 asylum seekers crossed the border from Roxham Road in 2022. These migrants were mainly from Haiti, Turkey, Colombia, Chile, Pakistan and Venezuela.
The Trudeau government has invested in the construction of a complex there. The federal government had already spent almost half a billion dollars before the historic immigration of 2022, be it for housing, infrastructure or land leases.
Contracts consulted by Radio-Canada, which provide a summary of sums paid by Canada’s Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship between 2021 and October 2022, show that more than a third of new federal spending, or about $61 million, was on hotel room rentals and office buildings.