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OTTAWA — The federal government has paid nearly $2.3 million to house asylum seekers in Toronto hotels from August to the end of October, after the city complained earlier this year that its shelter system was overflowing from the influx of refugee claimants.

Ottawa will continue to rent some hotel rooms until Jan. 4 for asylum seekers for whom longer-term housing hasn’t yet been found, despite an initial plan to pay for accommodations only until the end of September. However, the number of refugee claimants on the federal government’s tab is far lower than it was in August, when Ottawa said it would rent rooms for about 450 irregular asylum seekers who had been staying in two college dormitories.

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According to numbers tabled in the House of Commons this week, the immigration department extended reservations for 64 hotel rooms from Sept. 30 to Oct. 15, and for 37 rooms until Oct. 29. A spokesperson for Border Security Minister Bill Blair told the Post that only 10 rooms remain occupied as of Nov. 21. “There has been a decrease of over 90 per cent in the number of irregular migrants living in hotels being financed by the federal government,” Marie-Emmanuelle Cadieux told the Post in an email.