François Legault was informed in the spring that the idea of forcibly moving 80,000 asylum seekers did not respect constitutional obligations, reports Ottawa. The office of the Prime Minister of Quebec responds that it has no memory of such a conversation.
“We cannot legally force a person to move to another province. […] The person must go there of their own free will. It has always been made very clear with Quebec,” said a source in the federal government who spoke on condition of anonymity on Friday.
And Ottawa says it communicated this to Quebec at the beginning of the summer, before the June meeting between Mr. Legault and the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, which aimed to deal with immigration issues, maintained this same source.
Mr. Legault, who is on the fourth day of his visit to France, has maintained since Wednesday that half of the asylum seekers already established in Quebec must be forcibly moved to other provinces, but he refuses to say how he ‘would take it.
“Out of the question”
At a certain point in the discussions, the Legault government would have asked itself: “Can’t we just force them? Why should we accept them? »said the source.
“We didn’t think he would go as far as saying that, because we thought we had done the work we needed to do to make them understand that ultimately it’s not possible,” we explain to Ottawa.
Called to react, Mr. Legault’s press secretary, Ewan Sauves, affirmed that “no one has any memory of such a conversation in the Prime Minister’s team.”
“Mr. Trudeau’s government prefers to distract from the real problem: it has no solution to reduce the number of asylum seekers in Quebec,” he added.
Already, in a document dating from July, Ottawa indicated in black and white that “the resettlement of asylum seekers” must be done on a “voluntary basis”, because “there is no legislative power to force [leur] transfer […] to another province.
To be clear, The Canadian Press’s government source maintains that it is “out of the question” to force the compulsory movement of asylum seekers by invoking the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
As for the “waiting zones” for asylum seekers as is done in France mentioned by Mr. Legault, Tuesday, the source declared that the idea “of creating a certain format of center or camp” does not is “never involved in any political discussion meeting with him”.
Questions of numbers and fields of competence
Generally speaking, Ottawa wants the Legault government to put its energies into resolving immigration problems in the areas it controls, for example in terms of study permits that are issued.
According to data provided by the federal government, four Quebec institutions are in the top 10 of those in Canada where, between January and August, there are the most people who returned on student visas and who then applied asylum.
These are the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (305), Ellis College, Trois-Rivières campus (255), Laval University (225) and the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières (215 ).
According to a table prepared by the federal government, there are 96,021 asylum seekers present in Quebec at the moment, and not around 160,000 as the Legault government claims.
On this subject, the Premier of Quebec’s team indicated that its figure corresponds to the number of asylum applications processed in Quebec over the last three years, according to Statistics Canada data.
The will of the other provinces
Ottawa also wants Mr. Legault to work to “sensitize” the premiers of other provinces to welcoming more asylum seekers. “We do our part […]but we need to have a collaborative approach,” said the source.
She even believes that the Legault government is slowing down efforts on immigration through its declarations, because otherwise we could observe “a clear improvement” in terms of asylum seekers.
However, Mr. Legault’s entourage criticizes Ottawa for having an approach that relies solely “on the will of the provinces and asylum seekers”, which has in fact produced “no results”.
The Prime Minister of Quebec is in France to take part in the Francophonie Summit, but he began his visit with a three-day economic mission that led him to meet numerous business leaders and politicians, including the Prime Minister Frenchman, Michel Barnier, and his predecessor Gabriel Attal. His stay, however, was largely colored by his statements on the subject of immigration.