Liberal loopholes have brought too many want-to-be refugees to the country, but Alberta, B.C., New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are at capacity
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked for an asylum-seeker surge in 2017, and boy did he get it. Well, Ontario and Quebec got most of it. And now, as those provinces struggle to support the weight, the federal government has floated a new solution: just spread it around.
A federal plan under consideration would send about 28,000 asylum seekers to Alberta, 32,500 to British Columbia, 5,000 to Nova Scotia and 4,600 to New Brunswick. The idea is to distribute the burden across the country in proportion to provincial populations. Only, we don’t have any room.
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The provinces poised to have more asylum seekers dumped in their laps have already experienced painful rent hikes and doctor shortages. The obscene cost of living in Ontario and B.C. has pushed Canadians into Alberta; and in May, Alberta rents rose 17.5 per cent year-over-year. In the Atlantic provinces, capacity isn’t much better: Nova Scotia’s family doctor wait list was at 160,000 in June, or 16 per cent of the population; rents in New Brunswick are skyrocketing.
There is simply no room for all the people the Liberal government is trying to cram in: international students, temporary workers, permanent residents, refugees … and especially asylum seekers, who use up limited state benefits as they wait for their claims to be processed — claims that many Canadians would find spurious. More capacity can be built, but only so........