Photo credit: Femmes Et Villes
An outreach organization that supports asylum seekers and immigrants in Alberta, a province in Canada, thinks the systems assisting all newcomers need to be harmonized to better support those coming to Canada.
Global News reports that Anita Umar, the CEO and president of the Centre for Newcomers in Calgary, said, “I think the issue has always been, from time immemorial, that we don’t have our levels of government necessarily speaking to each other when it comes to immigration issues.”
Premier Danielle Smith said on Thursday that the province can only afford to take in asylum seekers if Alberta is already dealing with an influx of newcomers.
University of Alberta political scientist and immigration expert Reza Hasmath said, “I would suggest to you that this is not an ethnic or racial issue.”
Smith was responding to the federal Liberal government’s proposal to alleviate immigration pressure on Quebec and Ontario by resettling asylum seekers more equitably across the country.
“The problem, I think, becomes when we start talking about what types of newcomers and how and supports, we’re getting,” Umar sad. He explained that while Alberta has a labour shortage and migrants moving there for economic or family reasons can help fill that void, asylum seekers fleeing their homeland for safety in Canada are a completely different thing.
“They’re trying to be refugees and permanent residents here. They actually don’t have access to funding. And us as agencies that work with newcomers, as settlement agencies – don’t receive funding to help asylum seekers until they are actually accepted as a refugee,” he said.
Umar and Hasmath noted that asylum seekers typically arrive in major urban centres at land border crossings in Eastern Canada, mostly Ontario and Quebec. But due to several reasons like cost of living, family elsewhere in Canada, as is their human right.
“People start in Toronto, they start in Montreal, they start in Vancouver somewhere else, and then see the cost of living,” Umar said. “So this is where the big issue comes from and this is where the pushback that the premier is giving in terms of saying that, “Wait, you know, we can’t accept more asylum seekers if they are naturally coming to Ontario and coming to Quebec. You can’t ship them over to Alberta when there’s no dollars attached to that.”
The Quebec premier has said that in the last two years, the number of temporary immigrants in Quebec has doubled to 600,000 from 300,000. Ontario has also called on the federal government for help, citing the disproportionate number of would-be refugees in that province.
However, the federal Immigration Minister, Marc Miller, said the information is inconsistent with previous communications. He posted a letter on social media from Smith, in which the Alberta Premier expressed concern about the low number of immigrants allocated to the province for the year. The Province requested 14,000 immigrants in 2024 but was given 9,750, she said in the letter.
