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LILLEY: To fix Toronto's shelter problem, fix the asylum system

More than half of the beds in Toronto's vastly expanded shelter system are asylum seekers and that is the real problem.

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The main sense you get from reading the latest city report on homelessness is that this is an industry. As with any industry, the last thing it wants to do is go out of business which is why the “solutions” offered up are about perpetuating the problem, not solving it.

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It’s probably appropriate since the report is actually a “Stakeholder Engagement Report” titled, “What We Heard: 2025-2030 Strategic Plan to Address Homelessness.”

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On Sunday night, Toronto housed 9,801 people in various shelters, motels and hotels. The system was at 99% capacity over the weekend and of course that doesn’t include the many people sleeping rough on the sidewalks, in our parks and ravines.

A decade ago, we had just over 4,000 shelter beds, meaning that over the last 10 years, we have more than doubled the number of beds and the problem appears to only be getting worse.

Meanwhile, more than half of those shelter beds are taken up, not by people who can’t handle the high cost of living, the out-of-control rents or who are struggling with unemployment or addictions – they are taken up by asylum seekers, refugee claimants. Toronto’s shelter system is a stop gap measure for the broken immigration and refugee programs run by the Liberal government in Ottawa.

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We had more than 42,000 people arrive at our international airports — the majority in Toronto and Montreal– and then declare asylum last year. Across all border crossings and ports of entry last year, we had 58,000 people show up to declare asylum.

Most of these people are not real refugees, they aren’t fleeing war or oppression, they are economic migrants who have figured out a way to jump to the front of the line. Once here, they are putting increased pressure on the shelter system and other social services.

These numbers dwarf what we were seeing at Roxham Rd., the illegal border crossing point in Quebec that the Trudeau Liberals allowed to operate freely for five years. Roxham Rd. was shut down in 2023, and the traffic shifted to direct flights.

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If we want to fix the shelter system in Toronto, as well as in Montreal and other major centres, then we need to deal with the root problem. Instead, all the discussion in this report, and among the mayor and councillors at City Hall, is about getting more funding from the federal and provincial governments to pay for these asylum seekers taking up more than half the beds.

How about we shut down the people abusing both the asylum system and our shelter system?

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It didn’t use to be this way: Before the Trudeau Liberals came to power and broke the immigration and refugee system, there were comparatively few claimants like this. In 2013, there were just 4,240 people who showed up at an airport or land border crossing and declared asylum.

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These days you can see that many in a month and, in fact, for most of last year we did.

We need to fix this before it gets worse.

Just released government data shows that in the month of April, there were 2,733 asylum claims at the St-Bernard-de-Lacolle border crossing in Quebec, that’s the legal crossing, near Roxham Rd. This compares with 1,356 claims in March and 755 in February, according to data released to Postmedia by the Canada Border Services Agency.

This is part of the feared surge of people looking to cross into Canada, legally and illegally, to declare asylum due to the return of Donald Trump. Many of these people have no legal right to be in the United States and they will have no legal right to be in Canada.

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Still, there will be pressure to open up our borders.

The answer needs to be no. The shelters are full. Our housing supply can’t keep up with those who are here already.

Until we are willing to take on and address the abuse of our asylum system, we won’t fix the shelter system. We could double it tomorrow and it would be full again.

The answer to most of the shelter problem in Toronto can only be fixed with a policy change in Ottawa.

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