As for his wife, she's wanted too. She did the same thing as he did. She took off, and when she got here, there were international arrest warrants and so on and so forth. You can go through the documents. The Canadian authorities finally were told by Hungary in May 2010 and August 2010 and October 2010 that there were international arrest warrants for her. What was done? Nothing.
Finally, in 2011, we're doing a bail review on her husband, and I saw her walking around the court as a spectator. I went to the officer and say, “What is that? I thought there was an international arrest warrant for that person”. He said that well, there was. I asked why we didn't arrest her? He said, “ We can't. We need an extradition request from Hungary”. We've never had one for any of these people.
I went to Deb Kerr, from CBSA. I asked, how could his wife be walking around in our country with international arrest warrants? She had been convicted of crimes—we think, but we don't know. So Deb Kerr did the check, and if you go to that same document, there it is. Yes, she had been convicted. She was supposed to serve two and a half years. It was the same procedure: Come back in a month to go to jail. Well, she came here.
What is the date of this document? It is November 21, 2011. She was in our country for three years, and we didn't know what her criminal record was.
This is not cheap. We also charged them with welfare fraud.
By the way, she was arrested shortly afterwards. I told Deb Kerr that we had to do something, and she finally found that the wife had, in fact, been convicted. She had made a little tick to say that she had never been convicted of anything, but then she was arrested on an immigration warrant. In addition, she and he were convicted of welfare fraud. He had to pay back $12,000. We'll never see that again. She had to pay back $36,000. We'll never see that again.
That's in fact cheap. More recently, we convicted these other two people. These people are criminals, and they've been on welfare since they got here, and they have been paid $100,000. I had heard all this anecdotal evidence that these people had all kinds of money. They had cash and so on and so forth. So when this guy was fleeing the country the other way, a guy, and his mum, we had paid $100,000 in welfare payments—I don't know how they do it, but these people are in Canada and they get genuine Hungarian passports—he had in his suitcase all these designer clothes. The labels were still on them. There's $100 here and $100 there. They cost us $100,000.
We called evidence. Basically, these Hungarian refugees have a 98% failure rate. When it's all said and done, at that same rate, it costs $500 million for just them. That's $500 million at a time when there's no money for doctors in the hospitals and nurses and what have you.