Article content continued

“This situation is having a serious impact on our city resources,” Tory said, insisting the city desperately needs immediate financial and staff support from their senior government “partners” resettling these refugees to regions outside of the Toronto shelter system.

He said they are in “active discussions” with both levels of government but nothing has been committed — and they don’t have the “facilities” to deal with this.

Tory conceded, after being questioned, that many (of African descent) are finding their way to Toronto after coming across the border (likely illegally) rather than through Pearson airport — all that courtesy of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s shoddy handling of the refugee situation (the latter being my words, not Tory’s).

Photo by Craig Robertson / Craig Robertson/Toronto Sun

But some of the fault for this crisis must be borne by Tory and his band of leftist councillors who, in a splashy press conference just 18 months ago, reaffirmed Toronto’s status as a sanctuary city — an attempted political slap at President Donald Trump for his immigration policies banning new refugees from seven countries where terrorism is rampant.

NDP Andrea Horwath has also pledged in her platform to make Ontario a Sanctuary Province, for heaven’s sake.

When I suggested that perhaps Tory should have been more careful what he wished for, he got testy with me, insisting that what has created Toronto’s shelter crisis are “unbelievable circumstances way outside the borders of our own country” that all of us can’t imagine.

“We represent part of the solution,” he said.

He added that being a Sanctuary City means when people are here and walk into a shelter as “human beings” asking for services or health care, their paperwork is not examined.

That said, this whole crisis and the steadily rising deficit from shelter services just reinforces what I’ve been predicting for the past year about the fiscal toll Toronto’s open borders to refugees would take on the city’s budgets.

Surely to goodness the Mayor and his merry band of magnanimous councillors weren’t that blind to the fallout.

SLevy@postmedia.com