LILLEY: Trudeau not ready to deal with border after Trump win

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Are we ready for a return of Roxham Road but on an even bigger scale?

With the election of Donald Trump on Tuesday, there is no doubt that Canada’s beleaguered immigration system will likely face an influx of people heading north to claim they are refugees fleeing the United States.

Based on their track record, it’s doubtful Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government will be ready or will take the right action – which would be stopping the mass migration north.

“We’re going to have to seal up those borders,” Trump said during his victory speech in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. “We want people to come back in … but they have to come in legally.”

Trump’s election victory was propelled in part on a promise to deal with the estimated 11 million illegal or undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Under President Joe Biden, an average of two million people crossed the southern border each year between 2021 and the end of 2023.

The number of people crossing has dropped over the past several months, but there are now going to be millions who will think about heading north to Canada rather than face deportation. When Trump was first elected in 2016 and talked about deportations, Trudeau encouraged the flood of people we saw come north to cross at Roxham Road.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength,” Trudeau posted to social media days after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.

We saw 20,593 cross into Canada illegally that year, most of them at Roxham Road in Quebec. Over the next three years more than 55,000 crossed into Canada illegally.

The numbers tailed off during the lockdown era of the pandemic before skyrocketing to 39,000 in 2022. The Trudeau government spent millions erecting buildings, renting nearby hotel rooms, and sending border agents and RCMP officers from across the country to Quebec to facilitate what was an illegal crossing that was being exploited.

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Since the crossing was shut down in 2023, the number of people coming to Canada and declaring asylum – many falsely – has not slowed down. Now they simply come through our airports with more than 41,000 doing so in 2023 and over 33,000 between January and the end of August this year.

It’s putting a massive strain on our refugee system, on social services, on schools and our health system. It’s estimated that 60% of all emergency shelter beds in Toronto are taken up by asylum seekers.

Quebec Premier Francois Legault is already calling on the Trudeau government to act before we see an even bigger influx from the United States following Trump’s win.

“We’ll be calling on the federal government to fulfil its responsibility to protect our borders,” Legault said during a news conference on Wednesday.

“The problem isn’t immigrants, it’s the number. We already have too many. So we shouldn’t add to the problem.”

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On Wednesday, Trudeau’s cabinet ministers were making assurances that they take the border issue seriously.

“Our interests are aligned with the U.S. in making sure that we have a northern border that is secure,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government understands that Canadians want them to ensure there is control at the border.

“I do want to assure Canadians that we absolutely recognize the importance of border security and of controlling our own border, of controlling who comes into Canada and who doesn’t, and we’ll do that,” Freeland said.

Words are nice but talk is cheap. What Freeland and Miller have said doesn’t match reality.

We have allowed tens of thousands of people to enter our country illegally for years. We are allowing an influx of people into this country to claim asylum on false pretenses.

There is nothing in the Trudeau government’s record to show that if thousands of people a day started crossing illegally into Canada from the U.S. tomorrow that they would do anything to stop it.