When a former major league baseball stadium has to be expropriated to handle the influx of illegals entering Canada from the United States, the crisis is no longer pending.

It has arrived.

Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, built when the city hosted the money-losing summer games in 1976 — hence the double entendre nickname of the Big Owe — has been transformed into a shelter to house the growing hundreds, now mostly Haitians, who are slipping across an unmanned border crossing in Quebec. Many likely are trying to get to Canada before U.S. President Donald Trump orders them deported once the deadline ending temporary protection ends in January.

Getting out while the getting is good.

Border security agents estimate upwards of 500 migrants a day are now breaching Canada’s border by walking along a dirt crossing into the Quebec town of Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle.

Once there, they get what they want.

They get arrested, thereby opening the door to claiming refugee status, safe haven, and welfare benefits that will be paid through the property taxes of whatever municipality becomes their home.

This is no small matter.

Back in March, for example, Toronto Mayor John Tory, knowing his city would be a magnet for refugees, wrote the federal government asking for funding to ease what was already a growing burden.

It was a good ask.

It was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, after all, who tweeted to the world that all refugees were welcome in Canada after Trump issued a no-way order for refugees coming from six Muslim-dominated countries.

Tory’s letter to federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen called for the feds to provide immediate and ongoing funding for Toronto’s shelter and welfare system to “ensure existing services are not further strained.”

The Haitians now flooding into Canada, however, are a different matter altogether. They are not fleeing persecution. They are not being hunted down by ISIS or any other terror group.

They are economic refugees, and they should not be given the benefit of being equal to, say, a refugee from war-torn Syria.

They simply do not qualify as legitimate refugees.

The Government of Canada agrees. “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.”

It was Barack Obama who, following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, gave those fleeing its aftermath temporary protection in the United States. It is estimated some 58,000 Haitians fled their ravaged country for the United States.

For a perspective, when the Expos were playing baseball at the Big Owe, the stadium had a seating capacity of 45,000.

With the Trump administration now poised to end Obama’s temporary protection agreement, it is either go back to Haiti where life is far from returning to normal, or get out of the United States the easiest way possible.

And that’s to breach our border by jumping the queue, thereby avoiding legitimate border crossings where they would be immediately turned back under the U.S.-Canada Safe Third Country agreement.

There is no question Montreal is a draw for Haitians. It is currently the permanent home to 100,000 Haitians, and therefore has an established community base.

Go on social media, and numerous sites can be found, many written in Creole, that tell Haitians wanting to flee the United States exactly how to game the Canadian system.

This week, therefore, they began arriving in droves at the border just south of Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle — in taxis, private cars, and even buses driven by profiteers.

As they say in Creole, “Byenveni nan Kanada, gen yon jou bèl.”

Translation: “Welcome to Canada, have a nice day.”

markbonokoski@gmail.com