The City of Ottawa could be stuck paying more to shelter homeless asylum seekers as the federal government prepares to cut back funding that now covers a big chunk of the bill.<\/p>\n
The Interim Housing Assistance Program (IHAP) has helped the city offset costs as a surge of refugee claimants overwhelmed Ottawa’s shelter system in recent years. <\/p>\n
Ottawa is receiving $112 million from the program for the period 2025-2027. It’s relying on IHAP to buy a hotel to shelter families. In the past, the program has helped cover everything from makeshift shelters in city recreation centres to overflow hotel rooms for migrant families. <\/p>\n
But IHAP isn\u2019t funded beyond March 2027 and a new report suggests the federal government is relying on “adjustments” to the program to save about $81 million per year after that date.<\/p>\n
Those savings are part of a slate of spending cuts first announced in the November budget as the federal government looked to cut billions of dollars in spending.<\/p>\n
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), a left-leaning think tank, obtained numbers reported to the parliamentary budget officer that reveal the precise scale of the spending cuts for IHAP and other immigration programs. <\/p>\n
In a report published on Monday, CCPA relies on those numbers to argue that the funding is slated to fall to zero, leaving cities on the hook for the full cost of sheltering migrants.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is just cost downloading that’s taking their costs and making it somebody else’s problem,\u201d said David Macdonald, a senior economist with CCPA.<\/p>\n
Funding drop already expected<\/p>\n
IHAP funding was already set to fall, even before the federal government announced the spending reductions in November, as it forecast lower migration levels and prepared to shift more of the burden onto municipalities. <\/p>\n
Instead of the current 95 per cent, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) will only pick up 75 per cent of the bill starting this April. Spending was slated to fall from about $400 million this fiscal year to about $267 million in 2026-27.<\/p>\n
The November spending reductions pare that latter number back to $252 million, according to the CCPA numbers, to post $15 million in savings.<\/p>\n
But it was unclear what would happen afterwards, beyond the program’s 2027 expiration date. In Macdonald’s view, the $81 million in reported savings suggests that the government was planning to fund IHAP at a reduced rate past 2027, but changed its mind in November and now plans to reduce funding to zero.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt looks like the department was going to force a 50\/50 split onto the cities…\u201d he said. \u201cIt looks like they’ve now forced 100 per cent onto the cities.\u201d<\/p>\n
IRCC responds<\/p>\n
In a written response to CBC, IRCC said it has not announced plans to stop all funding to the Interim Housing Assistance Program.<\/p>\n
The department said it is making “targeted adjustments” to IHAP to reflect a drop in asylum seekers, as 34 per cent fewer people submitted claims in 2025 compared to the year previous.<\/p>\n
It said that the program was set up as a “temporary, emergency program.”<\/p>\n
Laura Dudas, the city councillor who chairs Ottawa’s community service committee, said she wasn’t surprised by what she read in the CCPA report.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe always knew as a municipality that the IHAP funding did have an end date,\u201d she said. \u201cWe did know that it was going to run until 2027. So that is not a surprise to the municipality. It’s not a surprise to any recipient of IHAP funding and we have actually been working at contingency plans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Macdonald estimates that Ottawa would end up paying about $15 million per year to shelter refugees if the program ends, though it could end up paying more if the federal government’s forecast for future asylum claimants is wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe risk is that some crisis, say in the Middle East for instance, causes more asylum seekers to end up in Canada,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThen that’s at the city’s cost to house them because the federal government at this point is out of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dudas said those numbers would be “deeply concerning,” though she can’t confirm they are accurate. She said IRCC has not communicated anything to the city about its plans for the program or the possible impacts.<\/p>\n
“I’d be remiss to say the house is on fire when we don’t even know if there’s any smoke,” she said.<\/p>\n
Won’t affect hotel purchase<\/p>\n
Kale Brown, the city’s director of housing and homelessness, said the city is aware of the CCPA report and is working with the federal government to better understand the implications for the city.<\/p>\n
Whether the program faces adjustments or disappears altogether, Dudas is hoping the federal and provincial governments will come through with other funding streams to help fill the gap.<\/p>\n
\u201cImmigration is truly a federal responsibility,\u201d she said. \u201cI cannot stress enough that any cost that should be borne by any level of government has to reside at the federal level because, once again, we do not have the capacity as a municipality to absorb those additional costs and nor should we.\u201d<\/p>\n
The expected demise of the IHAP program is not expected to affect the city\u2019s pending purchase of a former hotel on O\u2019Connor Street which staff are aiming to turn into transitional housing for families.\u00a0Brown said the city has already signed an agreement for IRCC funding to buy the building.<\/p>\n
The price is $45 million plus tax and closing costs, and the city is still counting on a 95 per cent federal contribution through IHAP. <\/p>\n
Dudas said the hotel should help cushion the blow of any lost federal funding, since the cost of housing families in a city-owned facility is expected to be lower than the cost of putting them up in private hotels.<\/p>\n
But Macdonald noted that the city will have to pay the full cost of operating the transitional housing facility, potentially without any federal help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The City of Ottawa could be stuck paying more to shelter homeless asylum seekers as the federal government…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":528405,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194295],"tags":[49,48,20739],"class_list":["post-528404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ottawa","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-ottawa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}