Canada’s Asylum and Immigration Policies: A Threat to National Security?

Mystery migrants

In the spring of 2024, a friend called to tell me about a meeting he had with his City of Ottawa councillor. She had told him that, at the time, three community centres in her ward that had been completely given over to housing asylum seekers. Although her constituents had lost access to their recreational facilities, she was given no information about the newcomers. She did not know who they were or where they were coming from, other than the Ottawa airport or on a bus from Montreal. Nevertheless, she was unwilling to object or demand more information. Accommodations were being sought elsewhere, she said.

Where is elsewhere? The destination cities of asylum seekers arriving by their thousands, such as Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, are spending millions of dollars to contend with an influx that they are poorly equipped to handle. And so Ottawa conceived the idea of using “sprung structures,” already being used as homeless shelters in Toronto, to accommodate asylum seekers. The planning for erecting these sprung structures was done with little transparency or consultation with the affected communities. When word got out, many residents were decidedly unenthusiastic about the idea.

Barrhaven says “no”

Barrhaven, in the southwest of Ottawa, was one such community. A sprung structure to house 150 asylum seekers, mostly single males, was to be set up in a field at the northeast corner of the intersection of Greenbank Road and Highbury Park Drive. Local residents expressed their dismay by holding a demonstration at the proposed location on Sunday, November 3, 2024. A friend learned about a second demonstration that was to be held in the afternoon of November 5, so we decided to check it out.

We arrived at about 4 p.m., when preparations for the rally were just beginning. A small platform for speakers was set up, and posters were planted along the streets at the  perimeter of the field. Within an hour, people started to arrive, and their numbers swelled as the afternoon light faded. By the time the speaking started some two hours after we arrived, there were hundreds of people. City councillor Wilson Lo estimated the peak number to be between 2,500 and 3,000.

Among the speakers were Jason MacDonald, who heads Barrhaven’s Business Improvement Area, a woman called Sandy who was a prime organizer of the rally, a woman called Heather who said she had lived in Barrhaven for 29 years, during which time it increased from about 29,000 to 110,000, city councillors Wilson Lo and David Hill, and longtime Nepean MPP Lisa MacLeod.

These speakers and others brought up many valid points, including the adequacy of sprung structures as a place to live during an Ottawa winter, the capacity of local infrastructure to serve the additional load of residents, the facilities available to the people being housed and their access to social services including for drug addiction and mental health, employment opportunities for the newcomers and the impact they might have on the safety of the community, including in local parks where children play.

Protesters listen to speakers at Barrhaven protest. Picture by Madeline Weld

Barrhaven’s show of force was successful, and it was dropped as a proposed site for sprung structures. Many residents near the location next in line, on Woodroffe Ave. close to the Nepean Sportsplex, were equally unenthusiastic about having hundreds of asylum seekers become their immediate new neighbours, and held a demonstration that Saturday, November 9. However, plans to locate the structure there are moving forward, and the cost is expected to be $15 million. Protests notwithstanding, part of the Eagleson Park and Ride located in Kanata (40 Hearst Way) is in line to become another “newcomer welcoming centre” should it be required.

Who’s in control?

Interestingly, regarding the sprung structures, there seems to have been a reversal in decision-making authority. In November 2023, city councillors tasked city staff with finding accommodation for the homeless, either on bunk beds in community centres or inside big military-style tents (i.e., sprung structures).  When, in the autumn of 2024, Wilson Lo, councillor of Ward 24 Barrhaven East, wanted to find out about “the scoring criteria, how the sites were shortlisted, and all the sites that were considered”, he had to resort to an access to information request to get information from city staff. At the time he was interviewed on November 5, one week away from the required response time of 30 days, Councillor Lo had not yet received the information. So who is giving guidance to city staff?

The obvious questions that no one is asking

Throughout the speeches at the November 5 rally, I was struck by the fact that not one speaker was raising what I considered to be the most pertinent questions. It was almost as though no one dared to.

Who are the asylum seekers flooding into Ottawa and other Canadian cities? Why are there so many? How is it that large numbers are arriving by plane and who is paying for their flight? What are the criteria to establish that they are genuinely fleeing persecution? If escaping poverty and corruption sufficed for claiming refugee status, much of the global population would be eligible.

Asylum seekers now make up about 60% of the people housed in Ottawa’s emergency shelters. If there are good reasons for this surge, why is there so little transparency?

The numbers of asylum seekers are soaring

In 2015, the year Justin Trudeau came to power, Canada received about 16,000 asylum applications. In the first nine months of 2024, there were almost 147,000 applications. From 2017 to 2023, there was an average year-to-year increase of 49% in the number of asylum claimants, while the acceptance rate for all refugee claims rose from 64% to 82% between 2018 and 2024. There is currently a backlog of almost 250,000 asylum seekers waiting for their cases to be adjudicated.

Following Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s irresponsible tweet of January 2017, essentially an open invitation to come to Canada, over 100,000 people have been allowed to illegally walk into this country, primarily at the decommissioned border crossing of Roxham Road between the province of Quebec and New York state. Many of these would-be “refugees” legally entered the US at New York’s JFK airport, then took a taxi to the Canadian border, ditching their passports before crossing. Despite such blatant fraud, the flow was allowed to proceed unimpeded for about six years. It is only under pressure that the Canadian government finally arranged an agreement with US President Joe Biden, enacted in March 2023, to close the glaring loophole in the existing “safe third country” agreement prohibiting someone already in a safe country (Canada or US) from seeking asylum in the other. The loophole was that the agreement only applied to designated ports of entry.

Within months of the closure of Roxham Road, the number of asylum claimants arriving by air (over half at Montreal’s Trudeau airport) surged, and by September 2023 was five times the number who had arrived by that route in 2019.

Canada also accepted asylum claims for processing from people who were already in the country, whether as visitors, temporary workers or international students. Many claims should have been rejected out of hand as blatantly fraudulent.

Why are there so many asylum seekers?

Is it only the prime minister’s irresponsible tweeting that enticed people to ask for asylum in Canada?

In 2009, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government imposed visa requirements on Mexican citizens to reduce the number of unfounded refugee claims by Mexican nationals. Mexico had been the top source country for asylum claimants since 2005. The Trudeau government lifted these requirements in December 2016. A government website even informed Mexican nationals that all they needed to come to Canada was a $7 electronic travel authorization, which would usually be approved in minutes, a passport and a credit card to pay the fee. In April 2023, Canada rejected the Biden administration’s request to reimpose visa requirements due to the large number of Mexicans trying to illegally enter the US, which required visas for Mexican visitors, from Canada. However, less than a year later, in February 2024, Canada reimposed visa requirements on Mexicans due to the high number of fraudulent asylum claims from that country.

The international student program also became a path to asylum. In 2015, there were 352,325 study permit holders in Canada, which rose to 807,260 by 2022 and to 1,040,985 in 2023. All the while, the federal and provincial governments turned a blind eye to the rise of “diploma mills” and the fact that some institutions became dependent on international student fees to function. Messages to international students, such as  “Come to study, stay to live” from Formula Canada on Education + Immigration can only be seen as invitations to use the student visa route as a path to permanent residency.

The whole Ponzi scheme came crashing down in January 2024, when the federal government slammed a cap on the number of international student permits issued each year, starting with 360,000 for 2024, a 35% decrease from 2023.  As a result, nearly 13,000 international students claimed asylum in Canada in the first eight months of 2024. Other students are unaccounted for.  Some 20,000 students from India, the top source country for international students, have “disappeared after arriving in Canada.”

At the same time as the number of study permits was soaring, the number of various categories of temporary workers also mushroomed, from 437,000 in 2019 to over 1.2 million in 2023, with little oversight or concern about the impact on wages and employment of citizens or the extent to which it was abused. As with study permits, the government abruptly capped the program as public support for immigration soured in the face of a housing crisis, inflation, and rising poverty and homelessness.

There are 4.9 million people in Canada whose visas will expire by the end of 2025. Canada has no credible way to ensure that they will leave when their visas expire. An August 2023 report by the CIBC estimated that there were 750,000 non-permanent residents in Canada who had overstayed their visas and were not being counted in the census.

One can anticipate that many people who see no other prospect of obtaining residency in Canada will apply for asylum. As things now stand, their prospects of success are quite good. However, many have no way of supporting themselves and some will inevitably join Canada’s rising homeless population and will be seeking accommodation in community centres and sprung structures, imposing financial burdens on municipalities that can’t afford it.

 Is there any method behind this madness?

Until it slammed on the brakes in 2024 in response to the Conservatives taking a two-digit lead in opinion polls, the Liberal government was intransigent about retaining a high target for immigrants (permanent residents) and lax about controlling who entered as a temporary worker or foreign student or vetting the validity of asylum claims. Why were such policies pursued even as the evidence for a housing crisis and economic hardship was becoming overwhelming?

I can think of only two reasons. The first would be to bring about Trudeau’s vision of a “postnational” Canada by flooding the country with such a high volume of people from different cultures, religions, and ethnicities that it no longer had any “core identity” or “mainstream.” The second would be to implement the objective of the Century Initiative for a Canadian population of 100 million by 2100. I have previously discussed the absurdity of pursuing this objective.

This policy may also provide an advantage for a government seeking more power: the unrest that results from clashing values makes the citizens more dependent on the government for their safety and more inclined to accept infringements on their freedom and fearful of expressing differing views.

Trump is mad, and we should be too

The advent of the second Trump administration, with its threats of tariffs and not-really jokes about making Canada the 51^st state, has put the security of Canada’s immigration policy into sharp relief.  Trump believes that Canada’s immigration policies pose a national security threat to the United States and fentanyl trafficking is a major concern. One of Trump’s demands to dodge universal tariffs is to secure our border, something we should be doing anyway without threats from our neighbour.

Among the inadequately screened people who entered Canada was Muhammad Shahzeb Khan from Pakistan, who obtained a student visa in 2023 and was charged in September 2024 with plotting to attack Jewish Centers in New York City for ISIS. Even permanent residents are not always adequately scrutinized. Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi from Egypt became a permanent resident in 2021 and a citizen in 2024 despite the existence of a video from 2015 of him dismembering a prisoner with a sword. Eldidi was arrested along with his son Mostafa in July 2024 for planning a terrorist attack in Toronto. The US border patrol had 198,929 encounters along its northern border in fiscal 2024 (Oct. 2023 – Sept. 2024). Of these, 19,000 were arrested, more than in the 17 previous years combined. Multiple transnational criminal organizations are involved with moving people, says US border guard Eric Lavallee.

The greatest number of known or suspected terrorists (KSTs) attempted to enter the US during the Biden administration. Of the 1,903 arrested during that time, 1,216, or 64%, were apprehended at the northern border coming from Canada between fiscal 2021 to 2024. Most of these, 1,209, were arrested at ports of entry and only 7 between ports of entry. How did these people even come to be living in Canada? Were they asylum seekers, students, temporary workers or even immigrants?

Canadian investigative journalist Sam Cooper has reported that Chinese organized crime is running western hemisphere money-laundering organizations from Vancouver and Toronto and that these are underwriting the Mexican cartels that are running fentanyl into American cities. Money-laundering is done mainly through casinos and real estate. In addition to a fentanyl crisis, one consequence is a runaway housing market that has devastated middle-income earners. Cooper’s 2021 book, Wilful Blindness, exposes the infiltration of western countries by Chinese, Russian and Iranian agents and how Canada has become a node in global systems of corruption and crime that neither Canadian laws nor law enforcement are adequate to deal with.

Canada’s immigration system needs much more than a bit of tinkering, as the government is now doing. It has become a liability for Canada’s security and that of its most important ally and trading partner. Trump is forcefully bringing this fact to our attention. Ordinary Canadians should be protesting about much more than not being consulted about sprung structures in their community.

Madeline Weld, Ph.D.
President, Population Institute Canada
Tel: (613) 833-3668
Email: [email protected]
www.populationinstitutecanada.ca