Deny basic care to refugees now and hospital emergency rooms will absorb the fallout later

The federal government is seeking $60 billion in spending cuts to pay for the doubling of the Department of National Defence budget. It’s now clear that asylum seekers in Canada will be among the first to pay the price. Of that entire $60 billion in cuts, asylum seekers and refugees will pay $1 billion of it.

Buried in a footnote of a recently released Parliamentary Budget Officer report, we discovered that roughly half of the cuts planned for the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) will just be a massive service cut to asylum seekers and refugee health care.

The department believes that these people who arrived in Canada with nothing can pony up a quarter billion dollars a year to pay 30 per cent of their dental care costs and cover a new prescription co-pay.

No, they can’t and they won’t.

You don’t fix a budget by cutting basic care for people who have nothing.Getty Images

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The shocking part about this “plan” is that, while IRCC is........

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