Roundup: Toronto’s asylum-seeker problem

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There is a bit of an issue happening right now around asylum seekers in Toronto and other parts of the GTA unable to find shelter spaces and some of them sleeping on the streets, and everyone wants to blame the federal government, because of course they do. Reality is, of course, far more complicated and you’d better believe that there is plenty of blame to go around.

To start: the federal government is responsible for refugees, meaning those who have had a status determination, most of whom came over with sponsorship and under some formal programme or structure, and that usually comes with supports, either provided by government or communities. What is the bigger problem in Toronto are those asylum seekers who don’t have a status determination, and may have entered the country in an irregular manner, and because they don’t have status, they also can’t get work permits until they do. And this largely is the responsibility of provinces and municipalities until they get that status determination. But this isn’t to say that the federal government isn’t helping with this situation, because they are, operating certain resettlement services including hotels for some claimants, and they have sent hundreds of millions of dollars to help provinces and municipalities most affected offset their costs. But of course, this money it’s not enough, in part because there are bigger challenges that cities like Toronto haven’t overcome.

In a very real sense, this is a culmination of how broken things have become, particularly under decades of austerity measures by conservative governments and city councils. Provinces are under-funding social services and affordable housing, driving more people to shelters, while the city resists building housing in order to please NIMBY residents clutching their pearls about their property values, so that keeps people in shelters who shouldn’t be there, including these asylum claimants. And because both Toronto and the Ford government have decided the solution to these deep-seated problems is to simply demand more money from Ottawa rather than accepting responsibility for their share of the problem and, oh, doing something about it, it’s leaving the federal government in the position of trying to push back and say things like they need all levels of government to work together, which is also true. I suspect we’ll see some additional federal funds in the next few days as yet another stopgap measure, but this shouldn’t let cities or the province off the hook, as they need to properly step up and start fixing the underlying problems that have led them to this point.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian launched an overnight drone attack against president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, and sixteen of the seventeen were shot down, but the last drone and falling debris caused damaged and injured one woman. Progress in the counter-offensive remains slow as Zelenskyy says that the Russians are throwing everything they have at it. Here is a profile of Kyrylo Budanov, Russia’s spy chief. Meanwhile, it sounds like Zelenskyy’s pressure tactics at the NATO summit riled people in the White House, and there was much fighting over the language of the communiqué around Ukraine’s eventual membership in NATO.

Good reads:

  • Bill Blair says that military resources are being deployed to help with wildfires in BC, following a request from the provincial government.
  • Steven Guilbeault said the government is publishing their policy guidelines that will purportedly end subsidies to fossil fuel industries (with limited exceptions).
  • Here is a look at the politics of increasing defence spending, and they Conservatives aren’t likely to live up to their promise to meet the NATO two percent target.
  • There have been long delays with the process to replace Wilfrid Laurier on the $5 banknote, with the usual wailing and rending of clothes around these decisions.
  • The Supreme Court of Canada ordered a new trial in a case where they felt the trial judge didn’t properly instruct the jury on a charge around a criminal organisation.
  • Here is a deeper look at the premiers’ meeting and the lack of consensus they had on a number of files, preferring yet more meetings in the future.
  • A former Saskatchewan MLA is badmouthing Scott Moe after realising that that they haven’t actually done anything meaningful in all the years they’ve been in power.
  • BC is the latest provincial government to drop their Facebook and Instagram ads after Facebook’s tantrum about Bill C-18.
  • John Michael McGrath calls out Ahmed Hussen for trying to score points on his op-ed defending municipalities when the data shows they’re the problem with housing.

Odds and ends:

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