The safe third country agreement is what is causing irregular crossings between entry points on the Canada-U.S. border. There is no other factor. If people could present themselves at a legal crossing point for an asylum claim, they would do so. As I've said before, people are not crossing at irregular points because it's an easy way into Canada; they're crossing in the hardest and most expensive way into Canada because it's the only way under the safe third country.
I think there's a belief in government that it would be dangerous to suspend the safe third country agreement, not just because it involves suspending an agreement with the United States at a moment when we're trying to get some agreements with the United States, but because there's a fear that it would cause an increase in numbers, that if you suddenly eliminated it, you would have a rush to the border and numbers would increase.
I would suggest that in the medium term, that may not be the case, because of what I was speaking about earlier, the market demand for migration pathways. Doing so would shift an irregular crossing that is a gamble but is known and relies upon the delays in the system to allow people to stay in Canada for a long time into a legal pathway with known probabilities of acceptance and so on. The fact is that a lot of this crisis, aside from being caused by these policies, is caused by a lack of information among the migrants and putative migrants themselves.
Some correct information, some mythology that circulates among them.... There has been a track record, including in Canada, that making information about legal pathways known can reduce demand for illegal pathways.
I should say that some of the reduction in demand for irregular crossings among some populations.... Haitians were highly dominant in the first year of this problem, and now they've been reduced to something like 5% of the numbers. I think that's partly because the information has been circulated among those communities that there are legal pathways that are less risky and expensive that they can take.
This leads me to suggest that suspending the safe third country agreement would not necessarily cause a rush to the border, and in fact, it could be part of a managed solution that could reduce the numbers.