The City of Windsor announced that it will no longer be continuing to fund a program for asylum claimants, telling the Trudeau government that it “messed up” Canada’s immigration system.
Windsor’s housing assistance program provides food and shelter for claimants and is financed under the federal government’s funding model.
However, the federal government recently announced it would be offloading its financial responsibility to municipalities and provinces.
“Right now, the federal government is funding the full share of its programs to support asylum claimants, as they should be. But they’re looking to stop doing that, and expecting municipalities and the province to start paying, and that is unconscionable,” said Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens in a statement released Wednesday.
“The current federal government has messed up the immigration system. What we see right now with respect to housing and health care is brought on by so many people being allowed in at one time that the system could not absorb it.”
According to a report compiled by Windsor City Council, at the height of the city’s asylum claimant program, three local hotels were accommodating over 2,300 people across a total of 439 rooms from Jan. 2023 to Dec. 2024.
The report was presented to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which has been responsible for the program’s funding as well as its contracting of hotels and food providers.
The City of Windsor and other community organizations also helped to facilitate support when it came to claimants’ immediate needs.
After the IRCC recently issued departure notices for at least 840 asylum claimants slated to take effect within the first quarter of this year, many locals fear it will lead to an increase in homelessness and the subsequent impacts that will have on the city’s shelter system as well as Windsor’s rental market.
Human and Health Services Commissioner Andrew Daher said the latest developments in the program were given with “such short-term notice and limited options” that many are likely to wind up on the streets.
“The situation places significant additional pressure on the city’s emergency shelter system,” he said, adding that “it would be extremely difficult within an already strained system to address the broader challenges of accommodating asylum claimants while also dealing with the large number of households experiencing homelessness in our community.”
As many as 902 households are currently experiencing homelessness in Windsor, an increase of 26% from 2023.
The city’s emergency shelters have also seen an 8% jump in people and a 43% increase in the length of stay.
From January to October of last year, emergency shelters were operating at a 95% capacity rate nightly.
The City of Windsor received $106,000 in funding from the IRCC under the federal Interim Housing Assistance Program to reimburse expenses incurred by housing claimants.
The funding will apply again by the end of the month to recover 2024 expenses.
However, going forward the federal government will require both provinces and municipalities to continue shouldering the costs.
While the IHAP program set aside $1.1 billion nationwide to supplement some of the costs from 2024-2027, after that provinces and municipalities will be required to cover the full cost of the program
“The new IHAP directives make it clear that the federal government is looking to download costs associated with the asylum claimant portfolio to Windsor taxpayers, and we’re not willing to accept that,” said Wilkens.
“The IHAP program should not require any municipal cost-sharing and should include long-term financial commitments from the federal government to support asylum claimants in communities across Canada, including here in Windsor. We’re certainly going to advocate for that, and to ensure that our voices are heard loudly up in Ottawa.”