Refugee housing gets funding bump in government's spring economic update

The federal government unveils the spring economic update. Photo by Staff /Postmedia

Article content

The federal government’s spring economic update gave a reprieve to several programs that were set to see their funding drop.

Article content

Programs for sheltering asylum claimants, processing access-to-information requests at Library Archives Canada and administering temporary foreign worker permits were among those that received new federal funding announced on April 28.

Article content

Article content

Article content

“It’s mostly not a huge amount of money,” Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, an economist at the left-leaning Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives.

Article content

“This strikes me as things shaking out a little bit after the shock of the fall budget where departments had to come up with hundreds of millions of savings.”

Article content

In the run up to the fall budget, most departments and agencies were asked to find up to 15 per cent in savings of their operational budgets. At the time, economists expected that the government would let dozens of social programs expire in attempts to find savings.

Article content

Article content

If it did not renew funding, economists said housing costs for asylum seekers would have been downloaded on Canadian cities starting at the end of the current fiscal year. Ottawa, Peel Region, Toronto and Montreal would face the largest majority of those costs, according to economists.

Article content

Article content

But the federal government is now providing IRCC with $188 million per year for three additional years until 2029-30, a drop from $252 million in 2026-27.

Article content

The economic update did not provide details on whether or not the Interim Housing Program specifically will receive the funding, which was designated for “Sheltering Asylum Claimants.”

Article content

The government’s temporary foreign worker program is also set to receive $88 million in additional funding over two years starting this fiscal year. That program is administered by Employment and Social Development Canada, in addition to a “Migrant Worker Support Program,” which will receive $20 million in 2026-2027, according to the economic update.

Article content

Library and Archives Canada — which was set to slash its struggling access-to-information division by $13.6 million as part of the government’s spending review — will receive $81 million over four years to tackle its backlog of access requests.

Article content

For Mostafa Askari, economist for the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, the spring economic update showed that the federal government is on track to meet its target of balancing the operating budget in three years.