Article content continued

That’s because the federal plan that was support to address this issue by September 30, hasn’t been completed yet.

Meanwhile, almost 40% of the spaces in Toronto’s emergency shelter system are now occupied by border crossers, while those who were temporarily housed in college dorms over the summer have now been transferred to hotels.

To date, the Trudeau government has only given Ontario $11 million to care for thousands of border crossers ending up in Toronto and other cities.

The city of Toronto alone says its costs to date are $64.5-million, with 15 to 20 new border crossers showing up at Toronto’s emergency shelters every day.

The province-wide cost so far is $200 million, according to Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government.

And as the Toronto Sun’s Sue-Ann Levy reported Wednesday, living conditions in at least one of the Toronto hotels being used to house these border crossers, according to paying hotel customers complaining to the TripAdvisor website, are a “zoo, filthy, noisy and dangerous”.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are directly responsible for these problems due to their abysmal handling of the border crossing issue from the beginning and their inability, or unwillingness, to deal with it in a coherent way.

It’s past time they got their act together, before border crossers become an expensive and permanent problem Toronto has to deal with because of federal inaction.