Every time I look in this thread, I realize how much I hate our federal politics. It's so tiresome, I'm tired of our tax dollars being wasted on programs that I don't benefit from.
This, with respect, is a very dangerous line of thinking.
Why should you pay for someone else's healthcare if you're not sick? Why should you pay for roads if you don't drive? Why should you pay for schools if you don't have kids?
Governments absolutely must invest in things that will never benefit every person, and often, you ought to be grateful that its so ( do you really want to need the fire department?)
Governments will also invest in things you don't need right now; but may later.
My tax dollars were being used to pay a hotel to keep refugees, and did it make my life better? No.
You do understand that Canada has legal obligations as it pertains to asylum seekers under international law.
Are we specifically required to put them up in a hotel? No.
But we are required to let them stay until we can adjudicate whether they have a legitimate claim. Now that they're here, what alternatives to hotels would seem reasonable? I hear a detention centre coming on...... But you know those are paid for w/taxes too, and they're typically more expensive too.
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To be clear, we have an issue w/people seeking asylum who frankly do not have, at first blush, legitimate claims, the sheer volume has slowed our adjudication process to the point where someone may wait not just weeks or months but well over a year for a hearing/disposition of their case.
That is absolutely untenable, and there are options we can and should look at.
These include:
reinstating VISA requirements for travel from certain countries.
clarifying eligibility/ineligibility and empowering initial contact border staff to reject people w/o a hearing who have no reasonable prospect of admission.
expediting hearings (more staff), and removing those whose claims have been rejected forthwith.
Turfing people out into street or turning them around at the border w/o any due process is not really reasonable.
I don't hate refugees, I hate how the federal government is letting all these people in, and my money is being wasted on them, when we have more urgent issues affecting native born canadian citizens.
Um, the bolded looks really bad. 51% of all Toronto residents were born outside of Canada; 23% of Canada's population overall.
Perhaps you might have meant, that you would like to see more attention paid to the concerns of citizens and permanent residents of Canada (native born or not)
I might add, purely on a budgetary basis, asylum seekers are costing 1.5 - 3B per year to all levels of gov't depending on how one totals the math.
That is a lot of money......but in the grand scheme of a 300B federal budget, its well less than 1% of spending. If it went down 75% tomorrow, its unlikely the reallocation of dollars would make a massive change to anyone's life in terms of dramatic new or enhanced services.