Our prime minister went to great pains this past week, with the best serious-looking face he could muster, to spin us the line that the refugee system is working.

He must be wearing blinkers.

There is a tent city at the Quebec-U.S. border set up by the military. Frost warnings are just around the corner. Then winter gears up.

Upwards of 10,000 queue-jumpers seeking refugee status have already waltzed into Canada via unofficial border points.

Sieves are less porous.

The Big Owe — Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, erected at a huge loss in 1976, hence the nickname — has become a hostel for hundreds of asylum seekers who would not be given the time of day if they had tried to enter Canada at legitimate border entry points.

Nav Canada’s convention centre in Cornwall, Ont., never meant to be a motel let alone a refugee camp, has been seconded to accommodate an overflow of the intentionally displaced.

This is what Justin Trudeau calls “working?”

This is what Transport Minister Marc Garneau calls “under control?”

One tweet by the PM set this entire mess into motion. When U.S. President Donald Trump threw down his vow back in January to ban immigration from six Muslim-dominated countries, Trudeau could not resist tweeting his open-armed progressiveness.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” he tweeted. “Diversity is our strength. #WelcomeToCanada.”

There was no Part II. There was no, “hold on a minute, folks.” There was no “go through proper channels.” There was no “we’ll ship you back to wherever you came from if you’re pulling a fast one.”

No, until this week, he let his original tweet dangle like a carrot.

The latest influx, of course, are Haitians who were allowed temporary sanctuary in the United States until their home country had time to overcome the earthquake that devastated it in 2010.

With no extension coming from the Trump administration, Haitians began arriving here in droves, even if they do not come close to qualifying for Canada’s official definition of refugee.

The Government of Canada’s definition reads as follows. “Refugees,” it says, “are people who have fled their countries because of a well-founded fear of persecution. They are not able to return home. They have seen or experienced many horrors.”

No one can blame the Haitians, of course. Social media, with many of the missives written in Creole, told would-be illegals exactly how to play it.

Canada would not be totally foreign to them.

One of their own, Michaelle Jean, came to Canada as a legitimate refugee during the vicious Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier regime in which her father was arrested and tortured in the mid-Sixties. She became famous as a Quebec broadcaster, and then even more famous when Prime Minister Paul Martin’s recommendation had her become Canada’s governor general.

But Jean and her family were simply one of thousands to have fled successive Duvalier regimes, and who found a home in Quebec, one of the few jurisdictions in North America that shares their French language.

Fleeing brutality is one thing, however, but arriving illegitimately through a back door to get an economic leg up and taxpayer handouts is quite another.

As Trudeau admitted last week, “I can understand the concerns that Canadians have about whether this (migration) is a shortcut, whether somehow this is uncontrolled immigration.”

He said it wasn’t, and that screening of queue-jumpers would be just as intense as with those who arrived here through proper channels.

In the meantime, however, they keep on coming.

No one has tried to stop them, and no plans are in place to do so.

markbonokoski@gmail.com