This week, Farida, an Iranian asylum seeker, and her daughter walked through our doorstep at Foyer du Monde, one of the only medium-term shelters for families seeking asylum in Montreal. She is coming for an admissions meeting since one of our 13 rooms has become free.
Posted yesterday at 3:00 p.m.
Farida is a nurse and feminist activist. After receiving death threats, she left everything and left her country in extremis with barely enough money for the first few days. She tells us that, three weeks after her arrival, with nowhere to sleep, she spent two nights on a park bench in Montreal with her daughter, ready to give up everything. Farida never thought it would come to this. Beyond the humiliation, it is also a feeling of deep abandonment that inhabits him. Unfortunately, since the pandemic, his story is not foreign to us…
Upon their arrival in Quebec, asylum seekers like Farida are entitled to two weeks of accommodation in government centers after which they are shown the door.
Without speaking the language, without knowing the system, without the right to work, with a list of Kijiji housing advertisements and a welfare check in hand, the approximately 25,0001 asylum seekers who came to Quebec this year must embark on an impossible quest.
Unsurprisingly, very few asylum-seeking migrants actually find an apartment. Some will stay with extended family members or, if they are lucky, friends. Just over 500 privileged people will have a place in one of the few temporary accommodations for migrant families in Montreal, such as Foyer du Monde.2, accommodations operating without government funding. While other migrants will be forced to accept unsanitary and exploitative situations or, worse, will have to sleep on the streets for lack of a better solution…
This new reality is flying under the radar. The Refuge des jeunes de Montréal, like others, is concerned that this clientele now represents 10% of the people served3. Homeless organizations are not trained for this clientele, which increases their workload, and they do not constitute an environment suited to a migrant family.
Direction Ontario
Fortunately (!), for a few weeks, Quebec has found a new solution: putting migrant families who have not managed to provide an address in Quebec on buses heading for Ontario. Above all, Quebec should not have makeshift camps for migrants.
Yet we know how to support these migrants. The problem is that the provincial government does not want to “manage” a clientele that comes under federal jurisdiction. The question becomes political.
Quebec closes its eyes, repeating “it’s going to be fine”. Worse still, the Quebec government is reducing its services to families seeking asylum by appealing access to daycare for these parents.
With the reopening of the borders, it is insinuated that the real problem is the migrants who cross, and not the reception we reserve for them. However, seeking asylum is a human right recognized in Canada as in all member countries of the United Nations. It’s not illegal. The Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms stipulates that everyone, even passing through Quebec, has the right to dignity.
Coming home from school today, Karim, a little Afghan who has been living at the Foyer du Monde for a few months with his sister and parents, arrives proudly with an inflated balloon. When I tell him: “Oh wow! your ball is beautiful! Karim takes me back: “It’s a balloon, not a balloon!” »! I burst out laughing… Fortunately, where the system abandons some people, there is always a community that repairs broken pots. But until when?
1. 25,085 requests from January to July 2022
2. The accommodations for families seeking asylum and without status in Montreal that we know of are the Pont (35-40 places) and the Center Latraverse (25 places).
3. Telephone conversation with Philippe Lacerte, coordinator of the Refuge des jeunes de Montréal, August 8, 2022