Juno News - March 13, 2023


Sending a strong signal over Roxham Road

Topics
Venezuelan migrants in Canada welcome refugees orderly
Mentioned
Niagara Falls Francois Legault Roxham Road Trudeau
Legacy media won’t back off MPs meeting Christine Anderson Serious countries want nothing to do with Canada

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

212.51

Word count

857

Sentence count

50

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about the growing number of migrants crossing the border illegally from Venezuela to Canada, and why the government needs to do more to deal with the problem. I also talk about how the government is handling the situation, and what we need to do about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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 It looks like Canada is set to have a record year when it comes to the number of people who have
00:00:04.800 entered the country through the illegal border crossing of Roxham Road. We are on track to hit
00:00:09.860 about 50,000 people this year based on January's numbers. We'll see if that holds. The record from
00:00:15.340 last year is 40,000. And this is a crossing that before 2017 didn't really exist. Nobody was
00:00:22.060 crossing at this location. And this is a major problem for two reasons. First of all, let's talk
00:00:28.660 about what's currently going on at Roxham Road. A lot of the people crossing over are from
00:00:32.860 Venezuela. They are escaping the government there. The communist government is just collapsing and
00:00:37.680 life there is very difficult for people. So they say, we don't want to be a part of this anymore.
00:00:41.740 There's a major migrant exodus of people leaving Venezuela and going to other countries and
00:00:46.460 crossing at the U.S.-Mexico border, fighting themselves inside the U.S. and looking for
00:00:51.360 things to do there or looking to come to Canada. A number of these individuals, they have been
00:00:56.140 interviewed in newspapers. A lot of them are in Niagara Falls right now. A lot of stories about
00:01:00.220 how a few thousand have been sent to Niagara Falls. And they talk about how they want to find jobs.
00:01:04.900 They want to work. All indications are that these people could fit quite well into the regular mix
00:01:09.800 of refugee claimants and immigrants who come to Canada. In fact, there are people who have been
00:01:14.400 escaping the situation in Venezuela, coming to Canada through legal channels, filing the proper paperwork,
00:01:20.160 doing things the right way. And they are absorbing themselves into society. They are getting
00:01:24.060 employment, starting businesses, and doing all of that. So there's no reason why we shouldn't be
00:01:28.480 able to accommodate some volume of these individuals. But the challenge is things have
00:01:33.020 to be done not according to the crossing of their choosing or the time of their choosing, but according
00:01:38.440 to how we want it to work, simply because that's how an orderly immigration system works. One of the
00:01:44.000 reasons they're being sent to Niagara Falls is because Quebec Premier Francois Legault is complaining
00:01:48.860 about how so many people are going to Quebec. And because you are not planning for those numbers
00:01:53.640 in advance, because you're not able to manage this inflow of individuals, they overwhelm the services
00:01:59.540 and things just get frustrating for everyone. You know, back during the Syrian refugee intake,
00:02:04.820 it was a lot of actual refugee settlement agencies that told the government, hold on, slow down a second,
00:02:09.960 because they were having problems managing the resources. The volume of people coming in was just
00:02:15.080 so fast in such a small amount of time. They said, we can't help accommodate these individuals with
00:02:19.500 their housing concerns and so on. They're clearly pro-refugee, but they were saying, hold on,
00:02:24.080 there are some challenges, there are some caveats. And we're finding ourselves in a very similar
00:02:28.180 situation right now with all of this, just the fact that there are only a certain number of resources
00:02:33.600 at a time that can accommodate individuals. So we need to do this in a more managed way,
00:02:37.340 number one. And number two, it's a major fairness question, because there are many immigrants, 0.99
00:02:42.680 refugees who recently came to Canada through legal challenges. And they see this happening,
00:02:47.380 and they view it quite rightly as cue jumping, because it is. And they're frustrated by that.
00:02:51.940 Like I said, there are Venezuelans who are in a similar situation trying to escape that country,
00:02:56.260 but have come here through the legal ways. And that's why we have to change this. We have to
00:03:00.640 make this a system of fairness. I do think there are people crossing it rocks and road who don't
00:03:04.400 fully understand that you're not supposed to do it that way, because there are a lot of people
00:03:08.240 encouraging them to go that way. And we see that there are various advocates who are sending
00:03:12.460 them literature saying, this is how you do it. This is what you say. And they're not even clearly
00:03:16.960 being told that this isn't a legal process that they're doing via crossing this way. So I think
00:03:21.180 we need to send the message, which in some ways the liberal government hasn't done. Trudeau still
00:03:25.380 hasn't taken down his 2017 tweet saying hashtag welcome to Canada, which spurred a lot of the
00:03:30.720 misconceptions about how these things work. And we have not seen the government put in a greater
00:03:35.580 effort to just close that physical crossing there. Right now, it's been commented on how the RCMP
00:03:40.380 act has bellhops there. So there are things that need to be done for us to, yes, welcome refugees
00:03:46.600 in an orderly fashion in the volume of our choosing and also close down the illegal border crossing
00:03:51.580 so we can make things make much more sense for resettlement agencies, for the people crossing
00:03:56.600 and for everyone. It's just the smarter path forward. And it's something that we got to do pretty soon.