Last year, as you are all aware, Canada experienced a significant increase in the number of people who were seeking asylum who presented themselves irregularly at our borders, not at a regular border point but at various crossings. The issue impacted a number of communities but I think was most significantly impactful in the area of Lacolle, Quebec.
The government and the agencies responsible began very quickly to develop and increase their capacity to ensure that for people who were crossing at the border our Canadian safety was maintained. So the RCMP—and I would commend them for their excellent work; I've been to Lacolle and I've watched—ensure that anyone coming across the border at any place is subject to a vigorous security background check to ensure that there is no criminality or threat to national security.
They've been working very closely with the officers and agents of the CBSA and the IRCC in order to ensure that those people are properly processed.
We have also recognized that in the processing of those individuals there's a significant backlog because of the surge and the capacity of the IRB, the Immigration and Refugee Board, and the capacity of the agencies and departments responsible had been significantly limited by, quite frankly, a decade of underfunding. We have been restoring that funding. Some $173 million has been invested into improving the efficiency of the process by which we are now conducting these hearings to which people are lawfully entitled to determine their admissibility. We are also, after nearly $400 million in cuts at CBSA, restoring their capacity by investments of nearly $72 million to increase their ability to remove individuals who have been deemed inadmissible as quickly as possible.
Now we remain absolutely committed to upholding Canadian law and Canadian humanitarian principles, and we are starting to see some success.
We've also made significant efforts in reaching out to the United States, reaching out to NGOs and community groups that have been working with the people who present themselves at our borders, and we've seen some success.
For example, I had a conversation with our colleague, the member representing Emerson, Manitoba. I asked him about their experience, because in the winter of 2017 many people were irregularly crossing at a border near his community. I asked him what the current experience was, and he advised me that after the Minister of Immigration went to Minneapolis, met with the community groups down there, explained to them that presenting yourself at the border and seeking asylum is not a free ticket to permanent residency and that they were going to be subject to legal processes and subject to removal if they were deemed ineligible, that flow significantly reduced.
We've seen progress in these other areas, and so far in the last four or five months of the summer that has just immediately passed, we've seen a significant reduction of up to 70% fewer people who are presenting themselves at our border than was the case last year.