A young man from Yemen approaches the U.S.-Canada border into Canada near Hemmingford, Que., in February 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

The province of Ontario will not have a fully operational refugee-triage system in place by the end of September, iPolitics has learned.

Originally, the federal government said it wanted to roll out its triage system throughout the province by Sept. 30 as a way to ease the flow of migrants who are pushing crowded housing in Toronto past capacity.

The system was first announced in May before Ontario’s election. This summer, Ottawa said the project was delayed because Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s administration refused to implement the program provincewide. This forced the federal government to work with individual municipalities to find shelter for irregular migrants.

Nancy Caron, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), said the department will continue developing a provincewide triage system, despite fewer migrants arriving in Canada each month compared to last year.

However, the RCMP apprehended 1,747 irregular migrants between official border crossings in August, a huge jump from 1,634 in July. This is the second consecutive month of increases after a downward trend that began in May.

Still, while 8,800 irregular migrants crossed into Canada in July and August last year, fewer than half that number entered the country this summer.

What the government does have in place is a pilot project in the small municipality of Chatham-Kent, a largely rural part of southwestern Ontario.

Five families were transported to the community from the border town of Lacolle, Que., last week, where they will be living in local hotels for the next two months while the families look for permanent housing. The IRCC’s Caron said the department is paying for the hotel rooms.

The rooms were reserved to “avoid unintended impacts to Chatham-Kent’s emergency housing capacity,” she said, adding that while the federal government is picking up the hotel tab, the municipality got no additional money for the pilot project.

The province and municipalities are still in charge of providing long-term housing and other social services to the families, IRCC confirmed.

Randy Hope, mayor of Chatham-Kent, said municipal and immigration officials met irregular migrants at the border in Lacolle to advertise an array of job opportunities in the area. City officials then worked with the migrants to get them jobs, help with paperwork, and set them up with lawyers once they agreed to move to the municipality.

The community “wants to work out a lot of the bugs” in the pilot project before more irregular migrants are welcomed, Hope continued.

“If we can make the project work with five (families), smaller communities might see this as a comfortable number,” he said.

A 2013 report from the Chatham-Kent Workforce Planning Board found that a shortage of people aged 20 to 45 in their communities would create “severe” labour shortages that would “handicap” employers looking to hire. Their plan at the time did not include refugee resettlement as a way to solve their labour shortage.

The idea of the pilot project, Hope said, is to convince the irregular migrants to set up their lives for the long haul.

“We want them to be a part of our community,” he said. “One thing about a smaller community is it’s easier to pull people together.”

Hope said that, so far, staff have not told him of any problems with the programs.

With files from Canadian Press