The Internal Picture of Immigration/Refugee Process Inadequacy

"Without changes to improve efficiency and productivity of the asylum process, wait times and backlogs will only continue to grow."
"This situation is not sustainable, nor is it fair to the people who need Canada's protection."
"While the department has carefully analyzed the findings and recommendations of the report, [recommending a major overhaul of the Immigration and Refugee Board], it would be premature to speculate on any future changes to the asylum system."
Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, August 14

"[Hussen's letter to the Canadian Bar Association represents] an admission of failure ... by the Liberal government."
"I honestly do not understand how it is that the federal government can look the people of Canada in the eye and say that the system works. Because the system has collapsed."
Sergio Karas, immigration lawyer and analyst

A Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer informs a migrant couple of the location of a legal border station, shortly before they illegally crossed from Champlain, N.Y., to Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., using Roxham Road on Aug. 7, 2017. (AP / Charles Krupa)

This from a letter addressed to Barbara Jo Caruso, chair of the immigration law section of the Canadian Bar Association, belying the language that Immigration Minister Hussen usually employs when it is pointed out to him by the premiers of Quebec and Ontario that the number of illegal refugee claimants pouring over the border into Quebec from New York State is straining the capacity of the provinces to serve their needs while awaiting processing of their refugee claims and status, when his response usually is praise for the "strict and efficient immigration and border control system".

Not only is the border control and immigration system not to be questioned for its streamlined efficiency and adherence to Canada's rule of law respecting immigration, but the fact that tens of thousands of economic migrants deliberately flouting the law bypassing legal points of entry to portray themselves on apprehension as 'refugees' is unassailable, sacrosanct as a ploy to take advantage of this government's laxity in defending Canadian values and laws. Any protest of the government's accommodation of illegal entrants is identified as 'racist', unbecoming Canada.

The prime minister's snarling reaction to a Quebec woman's insistence that it is the federal government's responsibility to repay her province for the outlay of millions in sustaining Justin Trudeau's cloying narcissism as the defender of desperate 'refugees' seeking haven, being denied by heartless racists like her, concerned with her tax dollars' disposition. Sneeringly claiming that the racist bigotry of the Conservatives against refugees and immigrants is similarly un-Canadian.

Under all Canadian governments of the past 40 to 50 years the numbers of immigrants that Canada has welcomed for the purpose of adding to the economic well-being of a country whose population is not reproducing itself in needed numbers while at the same time offering opportunity to those who qualify and whose presence is clearly in both the interests of the individual and the country they are joining, has been in the neighbourhood of a quarter-million immigrants and refugees.

Trudeau is so engrossed in his personal vendetta against Stephen Harper, his predecessor as prime minister, he attributes mean-mindedness to the latter while he himself is a textbook case in nasty slander. The Conservatives were careful stewards of Canada's needs, not the least bit the mendacious xenophobic racist bigots, wholesale insults Trudeau likes to attribute to them.

In his zeal to 'prove' he is so much more generous to the needy of the world, regardless of what it can cost Canada in dollars and security, he has increased the intake of immigrants to 340,000 annually by 2020. With good fortune, Canada will be rid of him and his style of governance by then. A sizeable 49 percent of ordinary Canadians polled feel there should be a decrease, not an increase.

"We inherited a massive backlog of asylum claims after a decade of short-sighted and damaging policies under the Harper Conservatives", claims a spokesman for Hussen, Mathieu Genest. "This situation has only been exacerbated by the increase in asylum seekers, which has been growing sine 2013", but it has only been under the Liberal Trudeau government that we can overlook as an irritating trifle the entrance to Canada last year of an unauthorized (read illegal) over 20,000 "irregular" asylum seekers, and an additional 12,000 so far this year.

Immigration and Refugee Board data indicate over 55,000 refugee claims pending as of 30 June. The review of the IRB recommended a number of reforms, creation of a new refugee protection agency among them, to report directly to the immigration minister. That would be compellingly interesting, since at the current rate Minister Hussen who was instructed in his mandate of 2017 to 'improve' Canada's asylum system, has so far proven inadequate to the task.

Of course, he is rather constrained by Justin Trudeau's insistence that no illegals be turned away, as they should be, with instructions to proceed, if they wish, using legal channels.