Housing asylum seekers at Niagara hotels cost Canada more than $100 million

Newly released figures from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada show the federal government spent more than $100 million housing asylum seekers at hotels in Niagara Falls over the last year.

Nearly 5,000 asylum seekers were sent to hotels in the tourist city between Feb. 1, 2023, and Feb. 1, 2024, according to the immigration department. Most were from Nigeria, Venezuela, Kenya, Turkey, and Colombia.

On average, the refugee claimants stayed for 113 days at a daily cost of $208 per person. The total bill for the year was roughly $115 million.

The cost includes “rooms, meals, services and security,” according to the department.

But it warns the tally is “incomplete” because immigration officials were not fully monitoring those expenses during the first part of 2023.

“The information requested between February and March 2023 was not systematically tracked in a centralized database,” the department said.

Costs incurred since Jan. 1, 2024, have not yet been tallied because Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada “has not received most of the invoices” yet.

The breakdown was unveiled as part of an answer to an order paper question filed by Conservative MP Tony Baldinelli, who represents the riding of Niagara Falls, in the House of Commons in February and released last week.

Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati was not available for an interview to discuss the figures.

But a report released by Niagara Region last year said the influx was stretching resources by putting “substantial and unmanageable pressure on Niagara’s already strained social support system.”

“Staff cautioned that the local affordable housing stock was virtually non-existent and expressed serious concern that asylum seekers would be presented with little in the