Forget the refugee claimants, it’s the Canadian citizens we can’t afford!

“It is estimated that each failed asylum claim costs Canadian taxpayers $50,000, mostly in provincial social service and health costs...”

• They never managed to reach the figure of $50,000. They calculated an average of  $47,935 per refused claimant, based on the claimant being in Canada 50 months. Presumably they felt they could just round that up to $50,000.
• The figure of $47,935 is based on a number of questionable assumptions about the average refused claimant. Most importantly, it assumes that 75% of refused claimants are receiving social assistance (for a per claimant average of $22,650, nearly half of the total). Or you could look at it as assuming that the average refused claimant is on welfare for 75% of their time in Canada.

• The other big items are: $7,269 for education, based on 17% of the claimant population being of school age, and $2,300 for health care (a monthly average of $46 for Interim Federal Health (IFH) over 50 months – all figures are based on the claimant being in Canada for 50 months).
• The costs actually associated with the refugee determination process are just $6,473 – remarkably cheap for a system considered to be among the most credible in the world!

But the biggest flaw in the calculation is that they consider only the costs, and none of the benefits – one of the most basic errors in economic analysis.  Even according to their deeply unconvincing estimate of social assistance rates, 25% of these “average” refused claimants are working – and paying taxes. And all claimants are also paying consumption taxes.

To illustrate the problem, let’s do the same exercise with an “average” Canadian:

Health care costs over 50 months: this is a scary $22,717. (This goes to show how little health care coverage refugee claimants get!)

Add in the same figure for school and average amounts for a few of the benefits that claimants don’t enjoy (university and universal child care benefit), and we get to $35,000. This is just the beginning – it doesn’t include other benefits I can’t readily find numbers for, such as Child Tax Benefits and Old Age Security.

This $35,000 for the average Canadian is just for 50 months. But the average Canadian can’t be deported, so we are stuck with the expenses for a whole lifetime!!! Based on life expectancy of 80 years, the average Canadian is costing us over HALF A MILLION DOLLARS!

Clearly it doesn’t make sense to consider only the costs of a Canadian. It makes no more sense for refugee claimants.

Once we start considering what people contribute to the system, we may notice that claimants pay the same taxes as Canadians, but they don’t benefit from anywhere near the same range of government services that Canadians do. Some of the taxes paid by claimants go to support, for example, health care services that they can’t use. 

In that sense claimants are actually paying for Canadians, rather than the other way around.