Juno News - November 30, 2018


Trudeau didn't budget for cost of illegal border crossing

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Yves Giroux
The True North Report： Justin Trudeau's Franco-virtue signalling The True North Report： The UN Compact on Migration is a radical proposal

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

126.54

Word count

360

Sentence count

19


Summary

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

A new report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer details the cost of the asylum claims process across Canada's southern border. And it's not good news for Justin Trudeau's government, who are running out of money to cover the costs of dealing with the influx of asylum seekers crossing the border.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I've long said that the federal government's mishandling of the illegal border crossing file has been unsustainable.
00:00:06.240 Canadians now have some very detailed numbers proving exactly that.
00:00:11.080 The parliamentary budget officer did an investigation on the cost of what's happening at our borders in Quebec and Ontario and Emerson, Manitoba and all of these other places.
00:00:20.900 The report, Costing Irregular Migration Across Canada's Southern Border, found that the total cost for the asylum claims process in 2017-2018 was about $340 million.
00:00:34.740 In the 2019-2020 year, it's expected to balloon to just shy of $400 million.
00:00:41.440 That is something that is nearing half a billion dollars, all because the Prime Minister of Canada doesn't seem to care that our border is being treated like a welcome mat for people who are breaking the law.
00:00:54.740 Now, the government earmarked over the next two years $173 million.
00:01:00.840 $173 million over two years.
00:01:03.100 Two years where, according to the PBO, the cost is nearing $750 million.
00:01:09.940 And Justin Trudeau thinks this is sound fiscal management.
00:01:15.220 The cost per irregular border cross, or if we use the liberal lingo on this, is about $14,000 a person.
00:01:22.120 But this number has not reached a natural cap because the influx is still going on, which means therefore the numbers are still going to go up and the cost will continue to rise.
00:01:32.320 And what Yves Giroux said in his report was that the government simply didn't prepare for what's happening.
00:01:39.060 Our estimate suggests that they have not budgeted enough, which will result in increased backlog at the Immigration and Refugee Board, he said.
00:01:47.540 So that $173 million number was based on a gross underestimation of how many people were actually crossing the border in this way.
00:01:56.580 And the government has actually tried to obscure the details here by not tracking specific numbers of those who cross illegally or irregularly and speaking more in general terms about those claiming asylum.
00:02:09.340 But now the independent and non-partisan investigator of the federal government's books is calling nonsense on what Justin Trudeau is doing.
00:02:18.420 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lutton.
00:02:20.720 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lutton.