Canadians pay out $115 MILLION to house illegal immigrants in Niagara Falls hotels

Canadian taxpayers have shelled out more than $115 million for illegal immigrants to be housed in hotels throughout Niagara Falls within the past year.

A report from Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada shows that the annual cost to provide living accommodations to so-called "asylum seekers" amounts to approximately $115 million, per True North.

Data from the report disclosed that between Feb. 2023 and Feb. 2024, the tourist city accommodated nearly 5,000 asylum seekers at the cost of $208 per day for each individual. All of them were provided taxpayer-funded accommodations for at least 113 days.

The majority of these refugee claimants are from Venezuela, Kenya, Nigeria, Colombia, and Turkey, according to the report.

The numbers were disclosed after Conservative MP Tony Baldinelli raised a query about the issue in the House of Commons last month.

The expenses that were reported included costs for food, accommodation, services, and security measures.

However, comprehensive monitoring of such expenditures was lacking in early 2023, according to the immigration department, which classified these figures as a conservative approximation of the full costs.

Furthermore, complete accounting for expenses incurred as of January 1, 2024, is still pending on account of outstanding invoices, according to the outlet.

Tom Kmiec, a conservative immigration critic, told True North that these numbers show Canadian immigration policies have been "broken" under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's leadership.

"Our system was once the envy of the world but is now filled with fraud, chaos, backlogs, and delays, disadvantaging genuine immigrants," said Kmiec. "On top of that, Trudeau’s housing crisis has forced refugees to live under bridges or in hotels indefinitely, all at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars at the expense of the taxpayer."

In order to relieve service demands in Quebec, the Niagara Falls lodging arrangement was first put into place in July 2022, redirecting migrants coming into Quebec to Niagara Falls.

However, because both Ontario and Quebec have pointed to these housing provisions as causes of their ongoing housing issues, this has raised questions about federal immigration policies.