The Feds Found Money to Buy Votes -- Underfund Greater Toronto Enforcement Centre & Infrastructure

Editorial: End immigration chaos

The federal government has routinely failed to fulfill its responsibility to remove those who do not qualify for asylum under the UN convention on refugees. And now we have evidence of the degree to which it has failed even to deal with foreign nationals who are the subject of criminal arrest warrants.

[. . . . ] Of 22,027 warrants issued through the Greater Toronto Enforcement Centre -- the country's largest -- only 146 were assigned to active investigation. The largest component of the backlog involves people whose refugee claims were rejected. But some of the unassigned warrants were for criminal matters, and some of those even involve cases of "serious criminality" -- that means cases potentially punishable by a prison term of 10 or more years.

In explaining the failure, the Citizenship and Immigration Canada internal report notes "the loss of investigative resources" and the inability of already heavily burdened officers to take on new cases.

You will notice there was money to buy votes.



A public-private fix -- Ontario's $100B infrastructure needs are too rich for the public purse. Happily, private-sector investment is being recruited Don Drummond and Derek Burleton, Financial Post, May 20, 05

Private sector funding is needed for public infrastructure because governments simply have not been able to allocate sufficient funds to keep up with the needs. In Ontario, as in most Canadian jurisdictions, one of the reasons is that a rising share of revenues is being allocated to health care costs. Furthermore, with about 12 cents of each Ontario revenue dollar being directed at servicing the province's lofty debt load, infrastructure has been losing out.