Juno News - March 13, 2023


Sending a strong signal over Roxham Road


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

212.51447

Word Count

857

Sentence Count

53

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

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,
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.