Juno News - August 05, 2025


Candice Malcolm and Alexander Brown report a staggering 227% increase in asylum claims

Topics
fraudulent asylum claims
Mentioned
Cosman
Why Canada’s EV mandate won’t work + CBC stacked with six-figure bureaucrats Majority of immigrants not making payments on gov loans

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

191.89

Word count

478

Sentence count

13


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Quebec border crossing sees a 277% surge in asylum claims, according to a new report from the Globe and Mail's Alex Blumberg. We talk to reporter and former True North editor-in-chief of the Toronto Sun's Peter Berardelli about the surge, and why we have to do something about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Here is a story. Quebec border crossing sees a 277% surge in asylum claims. Data from CBSA shows
00:00:08.800 over 10,000 asylum claims at one port of entry as of July 27th, more than double in the same
00:00:15.900 period in 2024. So I thought this problem was solved. Turns out it hasn't. It's worse than
00:00:21.360 ever. What do you think? Yeah, it just wasn't, you know, it wasn't covered the way it should
00:00:26.700 of by the, the legacy press where it's, you know, the independents have been a massive
00:00:31.380 Juno news has always done great reporting on this and formerly true North and a friend
00:00:36.200 of mine, Cosman, who, who does great work with you is, is always on that beat, but even
00:00:41.380 more troubling in, in that number, in that asylum claim number.
00:00:46.120 And I've got another stat for you just off the top of my head, just from covering this
00:00:49.180 stuff, which is like one in 88 of all people in Canada now are, are considered like asylum
00:00:55.940 seekers are like through asylum of the last few years is that inland asylum claims have jumped.
00:01:02.860 So you have these 3 million temporary residents now, and we wonder why rent has gone up and
00:01:10.180 healthcare is overstretched, but their visa is expiring and they're turning around and going
00:01:16.540 like, oh wait, actually, the family farm back home, I'm being persecuted back there. Even though
00:01:23.340 like my parents sent me over here with money to go to what is largely considered a fake school to
00:01:27.980 like cut like a cut the corner to a pr and look there's some really great people who've come
00:01:32.620 there's no way around that but there's also been a scam network and and a scam network predominantly
00:01:37.040 run through these really dodgy institutions that have popped up across the country but now we have
00:01:42.680 hundreds of thousands of of what look like fraudulent asylum claims coming from inside the
00:01:49.320 country from people on expiring visas and like we have to start saying no to that stuff and the fact
00:01:55.080 that that number even coming across the Quebec border is that bad you know put all those together
00:01:59.780 and we have a recipe for disaster if we're not going to take our border seriously and a country
00:02:05.020 if it is to be a country has to take its border seriously well it's wild that people come to
00:02:10.940 Canada on a temporary visa and then rather than leaving they just pretend to be an asylum claimant
00:02:15.960 And there's so many ridiculous rules, like I was reading about this the other day, that while people have pending asylum claims saying that they're persecuted in their country of origin, sometimes they go back.
00:02:24.460 They're allowed to go back and visit family and go and vacation.
00:02:26.420 Yeah, they go back for Christmas.
00:02:27.840 And so how persecuted are you?