Thank you for the question.
The system in Quebec is a good one, and it's starting to prove that it has the capacity to manage the situation that is present, in particular because of the way in which the border crossing manifests itself between the United States and Quebec.
First of all, Quebec runs its shelter system at 75% capacity, not at 90% capacity, so when you get these irregular surges in any population of homeless individuals, there's capacity to manage and also to shift resources and to model them around the population of homeless people, as opposed to running it at full capacity and not having that flexibility. That's in large part because the Province of Quebec has invested so strategically and so heavily in prevention strategies, but also in permanent housing and supportive housing, which is one of the best ways to deal with depopulating shelters.
The system that's in play in Quebec, which we think would be easily replicated in Ontario because there is the same basic funding relationship between the province, the federal government, and the municipalities, is a federal triage system that has access to provincial mapping of emergency, but also vacant housing across the entire province. It then models people into where the vacancies exist. It redistributes the pressure from major centres into other centres. It then steps up with additional resources around language, immigrant resettlement services, and everything right down to how their hearings are managed and mapped across the entire system. This triage system takes advantage of the existing provincial social service network and simply has it mapped in real time so that when people arrive they can be triaged into the process.
There are two other things that are critical about this. One is that the numbers haven't quite reached the 2008 numbers. I don't know what Stephen Harper tweeted in 2008 to get to the numbers they got to in terms of border crossings, but something happened back in 2008. That surge capacity was also managed with the existing provincial systems. The difference is that right now we have one province that doesn't want to participate. It doesn't want to use its system to help create a triage system in a significant area of pressure.
What is happening is that the system that was built in Quebec has the capacity to manage this. It does require additional federal resources; that's why the $50 million as an initial payment came forward to help with those challenges. It allows you to map the system, migrate the people into the system in an orderly, structured way, with resources attached to the different files, and then process them in an orderly way and make sure that Canadians are kept safe but also that the migrants, immigrants, and refugees are kept safe.
We know we can replicate the system in Quebec because we were on the verge of doing it with the Province of Ontario before the election. We think that, with co-operation, we could get there. If we can't, we will continue to provide the services we need to make sure that children in particular are kept in a safe environment with services that they require.
We won't be doing things like pulling refugee health care away from people and loading onto provinces extraordinary costs but also extraordinary risks to the health care system. Those sorts of approaches to immigration, regular or irregular, legal or illegal, are unacceptable. This government, as a result, has restored that funding to provinces and will continue to engage with provinces in a positive way to be proactive about this and to create a systemic response to what is clearly an irregular surge. Nonetheless, we need to build systems to manage it.