Trickle of Illegal Immigrants into Canada Could Become Deluge in the Spring

Vbeacher said:

Trudeau isn't the only one. Think on some of the polls published recently which show 49% of Canadians think there are too many immigrants coming into the country, or where 2/3rds said they didn't think immigrants were doing enough to assimilate, and the same numbers wanted Quebec's anti-burka law to be implemented in their province. Not one single federal politician would dare to say any of those things, and if one did the mainstream media would be aghast. They'd be fluttering hysterically around like a bunch of headless chickens, demanding that politician be driven out of office. Look what happened to Bernier when he had the TEMERITY to question diversity! Even while saying he supported diversity! But he suggested there could possibly be too much focus on it and there could be too much, causing a threat to national unity! Wow! Get him out of there! How dare he!?

Such things are not to be spoken of in Canada.

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10larry said:

As commodities go poor folk rate super low on bay street thus also on parliament hill, taking care of bu$iness is not only bay streets fav song lib hq hums along also. One of govs' job is to ensure a hungry labour force for businesses and illegal immigrants really come in handy.
This game plan is working well beyond expectations, fewer and fewer hands hold more and more of the wealth, sadly same cannot be said for the game plan [war] on poverty even after years of politicians valiantly battling it.
I do wonder where our wealth goes, america too has plenty of poor folk but they build weapon$ galore, just a couple of aircraft carriers or a small flock of f-15s could help pull lots out of the gutter. I can see where the u.s. burns its wealth but where do we burn ours?

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Some rich foreigners seeking Canadian residency under a special Quebec program for wealthy investors couldn't point to the province on a map, while others submitted fake documents or disguised their assets — yet many of them were still accepted for immigration, former civil servants say.
The officials, charged with administering the Quebec Immigrant Investor Program (QIIP), say they were sometimes pressured into ignoring signs that applicants' fortunes were founded on corruption or other ill-gotten gains.
"It's a program that has lots of gaps, that permits people with dubious or even illicit business to launder money through the program and to buy themselves citizenship inexpensively," said one former immigration officer.
Numerous current and former civil servants in Quebec spoke to Radio-Canada's investigative program Enquête on condition of anonymity, revealing what they see as major flaws in an immigration program that has granted permanent residency to tens of thousands of people since it began in 1986.
QIIP applicants must have at least $2 million in assets and agree to loan $1.2 million of that to the Quebec government interest-free for five years. The government invests the money and uses the interest to provide grants to small- and medium-sized businesses.
"We were under a lot of pressure to approve applicants in order to meet annual financial targets," said one ex-bureaucrat.

Staff were overwhelmed

The federal government used to have a similar immigration track for rich investors seeking to settle in Canada, but shut it down in 2014 due to concerns about its effectiveness.
The Quebec version still accepts 1,900 people a year, plus their family members, with two-thirds coming from mainland China. Last year alone, more than 5,000 people obtained their permanent residency through the program.
All of the applications from China would've pass through Quebec's immigration office in Hong Kong, until it closed last year. The office was overwhelmed by the workload, with staff working 60 to 70 hours a week to keep up, according to the former officials who spoke to Enquête.
The provincial government allotted seven hours to screen each application — including verifying that applicants had come by their fortunes honestly. But as one former immigration officer said: "It takes time to do proper due diligence, and we didn't have it."
Officials' suspicions could be raised by any number of things, including copycat submissions.
"The applicants were all heads of sales, then became assistant managers," the ex-bureaucrat said. "The first time you have an applicant like that, you tell yourself, 'Why not.' Then you get 10, 20, 30 more from the same immigration consultant. It raises serious doubts about their back story."
In the early 2000s, the Quebec government hired an outside firm to help vet applications. It was found that more than 65 per cent of them contained forged documentation.
And according to data obtained under Quebec's access-to-information law, from 2013 to 2017, a total of 1,783 immigrant investor applications were rejected by the province's officers in Hong Kong due to faked documents.

'Really shocked me'

But even as dodgy candidates were flagged, immigration officers say they felt pressure to overlook many applications with apparent shortcomings.
One former bureaucrat recalled rejecting a candidate on suspicions their assets were corruptly obtained. His boss instructed him to be more lenient next time because corruption existed in Quebec too.
Around the same time, the Charbonneau Commission was investigating corruption and collusion in Quebec's construction industry. "It really shocked me to hear that," he said.
Another civil servant said they were told by a senior official at Quebec's Immigration Ministry not to dig too deep into each applicant's background. Some immigration staff bowed to those pressures and accepted more applicants, the people interviewed by Enquête said, while others refused.

Government claims credit for job creation

In a statement, Quebec's Immigration Ministry said its vetting process is effective at maintaining the integrity of the immigrant-investor program. It said applicants and their assets are examined multiple times: by financial institutions that help recruit them, by governmental financial analysts, and by immigration personnel. Finally, FINTRAC, the federal financial intelligence agency, verifies the funds that successful applicants lend to the Quebec government.
The province also says the program has had important economic benefits, allowing for $695 million in grants to small- and medium-sized businesses since 2000 — which it says has translated into tens of thousands of jobs.
But those numbers may be overly rosy.
Grants from the Quebec Immigrant Investor Program are limited to a maximum of 10 per cent of a business's expansion or modernization project. Nevertheless, Investment Quebec, the provincial agency that administers the grants, counts all the jobs created or saved by the expansion projects it supports — meaning the employment gains seem to be inflated by a factor of 10.
Investment Quebec maintains it's a standard method of calculating and it doesn't deem every one of those jobs to stem from its grants.

Westward bound

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of QIIP is that while it's meant to draw wealthy investors to la belle province, the vast majority who have taken up residency in Canada under the program settle in other provinces.
As part of the process, applicants have to sign two forms declaring their intention to reside in Quebec.
But once in Canada, the law allows anyone to move freely. Data reported earlier this year by Global News shows that 85 per cent of Quebec's immigrant investors — since the program began in 1986 — have ended up in British Columbia and Ontario. Only 10 per cent remained in Quebec.
"We're way off our immigration targets under this program," said Suzanne Ethier, who served as Quebec's associate deputy minister of immigration from 2005 to 2006.
"We knew they weren't coming to Quebec and we also knew they weren't going to learn French," said one of the former bureaucrats who helped run the program.
Quebec Immigration Minister David Heurtel told reporters in March that he wasn't fazed by this tendency. "Even if an immigrant investor goes elsewhere in Canada, their money stays here," he said.
Other provinces aren't so keen to welcome Quebec's immigrants, though, and to bear the costs of providing health care and education. Freedom-of-information records obtained by Enquête show the B.C. government complained to Quebec several times in 2015 and 2016
Former federal immigration minister Chris Alexander, who served in Stephen Harper's last government, said he brought up the issue with his Quebec counterparts, and while they "recognized there were problems, they weren't ready to move forward with any changes."
Quebec has since taken steps to retain more of its immigrant investors, Heurtel said, including prioritizing applicants from francophone countries and sending out videos and brochures promoting living in Quebec.
But that hasn't been enough to alter how the program's critics see things.
"The Quebec Immigrant Investor Program is a scam from start to finish. I think that everyone who's involved in the program knows that," said Ian Young, the Vancouver correspondent for Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper and a seasoned observer of immigration patterns from China to Canada.
"I think that includes policy-makers, the people who facilitate it and the immigrants themselves."

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10larry said:

Money talks n' political nincompoops listen.

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EagleSmack said:

Deluge

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OTTAWA - Irregular border crossers being housed temporarily in hotels in Toronto will have their stays extended by four weeks while officials continue to search for a longer-term solution.
The hotel rooms were reserved in August as a temporary solution that was supposed to last until as late as Sept. 30, with a more detailed, long-term approach for temporary housing of irregular migrants to be released in the interim.
Those plans, it seems, are still being worked out.
"The hotel rooms in Toronto were reserved to allow city officials time to assist these asylum seekers to find housing solutions as they normally do for those who use municipal shelters," said Jordan Crosby, issues manager for Border Security Minister Bill Blair.
"We are now in the process of extending the hotel rooms in the GTA for an additional 4 weeks while we continue to work with the city of Toronto to determine the next steps."
The federal government announced in August that it would the rent hotel rooms for about 450 irregular migrants who had been staying college dormitories in the Greater Toronto Area. The colleges needed the dorm rooms for their incoming fall students and there was no room in the city's shelters.
The shelters have continued to be inundated.
Approximately 40 per cent of shelter occupants in the GTA are refugees and the City of Toronto says 15 to 20 new asylum seekers continue to arrive at shelters every day.
"With the city's shelter system at capacity, accommodating these new arrivals continues to put even more pressure on the system and the city has exhausted all facilities, personnel and financial resources available to meet the current needs," City of Toronto official Cheryl San Juan said Monday.
"The city continues to work with the provincial and federal governments and seeks the establishment of a co-ordinated, regional response to this issue."
The government of Ontario says other communities such as Ottawa are also affected.
Ontario has asked the federal government to work with municipalities and provide "full funding" for temporary housing and for the "growing cost of social services," according to a statement from the province.
Ontario has asked for $200 million to recoup costs it says its has incurred from irregular border crossers. The Quebec government has also asked for $146 million in asylum costs.
The federal government did commit $50 million to the three provinces most directly impacted by the refugee claimant influx for temporary housing — $36 million for Quebec, $11 million for Ontario and $3 million for Manitoba. The feds say they will continue to "assist provinces and municipalities in managing further challenges related to asylum seekers" but Crosby noted Monday that "the provision of housing to asylum seekers is a provincial responsibility."
Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel said the problems facing Quebec and Ontario have been caused by federal actions and policies, so it's the federal government's responsibility to fix it.
"How is it right that the government is off-loading responsibility for essentially a new immigration process to the provinces with no discussion about this?" Rempel said.
"We have to ask the question, especially in the context that there are a lot of Canadians that are struggling to make ends meet and then the provinces have to answer tough questions about who is being prioritized for subsidized housing or shelter systems."
NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said she does not understand how four cabinet ministers are now involved in managing the irregular migrant issue and yet no real plan for housing — including who will pay for it — has yet been worked out.
"Bringing forward a national affordable housing program and then holding back the vast majority of the funding until after the next election is not going to help with this challenge," Kwan added.
The government had promised to implement a "triage" system, which would identify asylum seekers willing settle in towns and cities outside of Montreal and Toronto. The hope was to have this ready to roll out at the end of Sept. 30, but so far only five families have taken part in a pilot of this program in Chatham-Kent.
Those families are staying in hotel rooms rented by the federal Immigration Department in Chatham-Kent until they can find more long-term housing as they await the outcome of their asylum claims.
The government says it will study the effectiveness of this pilot, but it remains unclear whether it will be expanded.
"While we have seen a decrease in the number of irregular asylum seekers compared to the same time period last year, the lessons learned from this initial pilot project would inform the implementation of a similar triage system, if needed, in the future," Crosby said.

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Twin_Moose said:

Asylum seekers staying longer in hotels



The plan isn't working very well thinking the Irregulars would go out and find their own place and get a job, instead just sitting on handouts, Hmmmm I think it is time to rethink this.

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Curious Cdn said:

DELUGE!!!!

Idiot Yank.

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