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Photo by The Canadian Press/John Woods

By any measure, the backlog is out of control

Well before the first day of summer, the number of asylum seekers who entered Canada illegally will surpass the 25,000 Syrian refugees accepted into the country in 2016. These border crossings — coupled with rising rates of refugee claims across the board — are putting an unsustainable strain on the country’s refugee system. At the beginning of 2017, the Immigration and Refugee Board counted a total queue of 18,644 refugee claimants. As of March 31, this has more than doubled to 48,974.

Even if refugee claims stopped tomorrow, this would be a daunting number, given that the Immigration and Refugee Board can only process about 1000 to 2,000 cases per month. And the claims keep coming. In March, the board was able to finalize a then-record 2,587 claims, but this was dwarfed by the 4,078 new refugee claims that piled up in the same month.

The backlog is complicated even further by the fact that illegal border crossers are already in the country when they file refugee claims. If Canada rejects an overseas immigrant, the decision is final. For a refugee claimant on Canadian soil, meanwhile, rejections are subject to a lengthy process of appeals, removal orders and, in extreme cases, Canada-wide arrest warrants.

https://twitter.com/CanBorder/status/925738057868902401?tfw_site=cbc&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2Fcanada-migration-haiti-united-states-trump-1.4392219

The Conservatives claim that a single Trudeau tweet started this (and they might have a point)

In January last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted, “to those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith.” It was a direct response to U.S. president Donald Trump’s so-called “travel ban,” an executive order banning all travel from seven countries with large Muslim populations. Trudeau’s post has received 412,000 retweets to date, making it one of the most circulated tweets of 2017. In a recent House of Commons speech, Conservative public safety critic Pierre Paul-Hus called the tweet “the root of” illegal border crossings. And the data seems to back him up. The month before the Tweet, the RCMP intercepted 315 illegal border-crossers. The next month that doubled to 678 — and kept climbing until it reached a peak of 5,712 by August, 2017.

Emails obtained by the National Post also revealed that the tweet caused widespread confusion among Canadian diplomatic officials as they were deluged with inquiries. “We are receiving an increasing number of enquiries from the public about requesting refugee status in Canada, and a number clearly having links with our Prime Minister’s tweet this weekend,” wrote one diplomat stationed at Canada’s Mexican embassy.