Mr. Chair, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship actually started paying his employees to share links on the IRCC's Twitter account and discourage migrants from crossing the border illegally. On May 3, they tweeted this:
There is misinformation online about the grounds for making an asylum claim.... Don't enter Canada illegally [their terms, not the opposition's] based on false information and false promises.
The IRCC has just 163,000 followers on Twitter, but on January 27, 2017, the Prime Minister reached over 4.2 million Twitter followers with the tweet that set off this saga of false information and false promises.
Why did the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship not ask the Prime Minister to retweet the IRCC's tweets advising people against illegal crossings? The Prime Minister could even do that today, this very evening, if he wanted to. It would not cost the Prime Minister a penny to retweet the IRCC's tweets to his 4.2 million followers.