We were challenged directly by Philippe Mercure’s editorial “Instead of tearing our shirts off at Roxham”. In our opinion, this text contains several statements that deserve clarification and does not take into account all of our proposals. Given the importance and great sensitivity of this subject, we believe it is necessary to respond to it.
First, the idea put forward by the author that closing Roxham Road “is a simplistic solution that has no chance of working” is easily contradicted by the fact that it has been closed for more than a year. , between March 2020 and November 2021.
Also, the federal government has already intervened in similar situations. For example, following the arrival, in much more exceptional circumstances, of two boats of asylum seekers at the port of Vancouver from Sri Lanka, Ottawa modified in 2012 the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to prevent it from happening again. However, originally, we were talking about about 600 asylum seekers. Generally speaking, the reasoning that if you don’t let in a specific place all the people who want to cross the border, they will manage to do so anyway at another place, amounts to abandoning the very concept of a border. How to reconcile the effective abolition of borders with democracy and especially social democracy?
The idea that we do not know “the consequences on the number of migrants who would knock on our doors” in the event of suspension of the Safe Third Country Agreement deserves to be discussed.
The suspension of the Agreement would make Roxham Road obsolete by allowing asylum seekers to go through a regular post. This would allow the country to analyze the requests in the regular process.
On the closure as such, what we know for certain is that when Roxham Road was closed, irregular crossings in Quebec, across the entire border, could be counted at only 3189 in 2020 and to 4,095 for the whole of 2021, only to jump to nearly 40,000 in 2022 after the path is intentionally reopened. The attractiveness of Roxham Road is due to its accessibility and the standardization of irregular passages.
It is important to mention that the Parti Québécois (PQ) has been calling for the suspension of the Safe Third Country Agreement for five years now. However, nothing has changed since. But the renegotiation of the Agreement should in no way prevent us from acting. Article 10.3 of the Agreement is clear, it authorizes its unilateral suspension.
We also note that the author presents the improvement of resources as one of his solutions without associating it with the Parti Québécois. However, it is the PQ which, for months and during the last campaign, has been proposing to increase integration resources by 50% and to massively improve the funding of community organizations. The same goes for the solution to combat the criminal networks of smugglers: the PQ has been calling for it for several months.
One of the solutions put forward by the author is to better distribute the flow of migrants across the provinces. All right. But how do you get there when 99% of irregular crossings in Canada take place in Quebec alone?
Moreover, how can this migratory flow be coordinated if the number of irregular entries, already at nearly 40,000, will increase by several tens of thousands over the next few years?
In closing, we believe it is essential to remember that donors to the Liberal Party of Canada manage the facilities on Roxham Road and that we are potentially facing another sponsorship scandal, at the expense of Quebec.
Mr. Mercure recently wrote an editorial entitled “Go to work, PQ! “. Obviously, we won’t be short of work.
* Paul St-Pierre Plamondon is leader of the PQ; Stéphane Handfield is the PQ’s co-spokesperson on immigration and an immigration lawyer; Pascal Bérubé is the PQ’s co-spokesperson on immigration.