Mayor Rob Ford says he will ask the prime minister to look at using “immigration laws” to banish people convicted of gun crimes from Toronto.

Ford first made the unusual banishment proposal in a CP24 interview on Wednesday afternoon. In that interview, he did not make it clear whether he was seeking legislative reform or merely asking convicts to voluntarily leave town.

In a second interview on Wednesday evening, he indicated that he wants changes in federal law. Asked by AM640’s Arlene Bynon how convicts could be kept from living here, he said: “I don't know, and that's what I’m going to sit down with the prime minister and find out, how our immigration laws work. Obviously I have an idea, but whatever I can do to get ’em out of the city I’m going to. Regardless of if they have family or friends, I don’t want these people, if they’re convicted of a gun crime, to have anything to do with the city of Toronto.”

The police have not publicly said that the shooting Monday in Scarborough was perpetrated by immigrants. Ford did not explain what he meant, and his comments puzzled community advocates.

“What exactly is he looking for? Getting rid of people who were born here and socialized here because their parents are from somewhere else?” said Sharon Shelton, executive director of Tropicana Community Services, which works with the black community. “I think we need to find that out before I can comment. Because I have no idea what he’s saying.”

Shelton said most Toronto gang crimes are perpetrated by people born here. Scot Wortley, a University of Toronto criminologist and gang expert, concurred. He said Toronto’s gang problem is a “homegrown problem, not a problem that’s been exported from other countries.”

“Studies across North America now are demonstrating that immigrant communities actually have lower levels of criminality and lower levels of gang membership than people born in North America,” Wortley said.

“I think the comments are perplexing on a number of levels. One, because it assumes that immigrants are responsible for most of the gang crimes. Which they’re not. So therefore it would be limited, at best, in its effectiveness. And secondly, these types of comments could have a lot of collateral damage. Perhaps we need to sit back and let the mayor clarify.”

Ford appeared in Scarborough on Thursday to meet with residents whose basements were flooded this weekend. He ignored a reporter who twice asked him to clarify whether he wants convicts deported or sent to other Canadian municipalities.

Non-citizen criminals can already be deported, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government proposed legislation in June aimed at expediting the process. The “Removal of Foreign Criminals Act” would prevent non-citizen permanent residents who have served jail sentences of six months or more from appealing deportation orders. At present, they can appeal if their sentence was less than two years.

The suggestion of exiling Toronto gang members to other municipalities is nearly certain to be a non-starter, in part because of its questionable constitutionality.

“We don’t generally restrict people’s physical liberty once they’ve served their sentence. And restrictions on their freedom of movement have to be closely tailored to the objective of the law,” said Bruce Ryder, a constitutional law expert who teaches at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School.

Ryder twice broke into laughter when discussing Ford’s proposal. He said its objective is hard to ascertain — and that the proposal raises a “whole series of cascading questions” about who would be banished, for how long, for what offences, what cities they would be prohibited from, and what would be accomplished by sending them elsewhere.

“If there is a significant risk, aren’t we just shifting it to other places? Will gangs just decide to no longer engage in criminal activity if they can’t be in certain places, or will they just shift to smaller centres? I mean, is this a kind of urban NIMBYism on a grand scale?” He added that it would be “extraordinary” for the Criminal Code to contain a provision that applies only to Toronto.

Ford was the lone member of council to vote against $16 million in community grants last week. He told Bynon that such social spending is not effective as a solution to youth violence.

“It’s a proven fact that when we had the most murders in the city, it was the same time that we had the most grants. I think we handed out over $50 million that year in grants. Throwing money at the problem, and having these, I call ‘hug-a-thug programs,’ they just do not work,” he said.

Ford’s stated “fact” is incorrect. Homicides peaked in post-amalgamation Toronto in 2007, with 86. The Community Partnership and Investment Program, which handles grants, had a budget of about $42 million that year. CPIP’s budget rose in future years as homicides dropped steadily; it gave out a high of $47 million in grants in 2011, when the city recorded 48 homicides, the fewest since amalgamation.

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Ford is meeting with Premier Dalton McGuinty on Monday. He said he will ask for money to hire additional officers for the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) police teams that target high-crime neighbourhoods. The province last year announced a further $10 million for TAVIS, bringing the total to about $35 million since 2006.

In a meeting with Harper, which has not yet been arranged, Ford said he would also press for tougher gun sentences. On CP24, he called the three-year mandatory minimum for possession of a loaded gun, which came into effect in 2008, “nonsense.”

With files from Nicholas Keung and Paul Moloney