Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly is coming to Ottawa on Friday to meet with his Canadian counterpart Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale.
They will be talking about the raging refugee crisis at the Canada-U.S. border and the new temporary travel ban issued by President Donald Trump this week. Kelly also plans to meet with Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and Transport Minister Marc Garneau.
An emergency meeting of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet on Tuesday did nothing to resolve the mounting refugee crisis nor prompt the Liberal government to propose any new initiatives to with deal with it.
Goodale expressed concern for the safety of the illegals but continued to insist that the law was being enforced.
Just after the cabinet meeting closed, and Goodale told Parliamentary reporters that the government had the situation well in hand, 19 more “asylum seekers” crossed the U.S.-Canada border at Emerson, Manitoba in a severe winter storm.
According to the local municipal authority, Reeve Greg Janzen, the group included one pregnant woman and a toddler.
RCMP Sgt. Cory Meyers, head of border enforcement for Manitoba, suggested it wasn’t a good idea to sneak across Canadian border in a prairie blizzard.
“The concern, I think, relates to why people are putting themselves into potentially very risky situations,” Goodale said.
“One question I would have is, who organized this movement and did they actually contemplate letting people off on a roadside in the middle of a Prairie blizzard? That’s risky and we’ll want to explore the factor that lead to that kind of risky behavior.”
But Goodale has avoided connecting the illegals entering Canada with the Somali community. Reports indicate that most of the “asylum seekers” are coming from the Minneapolis, Minnesota, where there is a large group of Somali refugees. They are sneaking across the border, they claim, because they are believe the U.S. president will deport them.
Canada’s Somali community is largely concentrated in Ottawa and Toronto.
Mohamud Noor, executive director of the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota, says he has been discouraging Somalis living in the U.S. from making the journey into Canada because of the risks associated with inclement weather — not because it is illegal.
Some are biding there time, “but others, because they don’t have enough resources and they believe that’s the only chance that they have, they’ll take whatever risk that they can encounter. And that’s something which is dangerous,” he says.