Former federal defence minister and United Conservative Party leadership candidate Jason Kenney has weighed in on Saturday’s vehicle attacks in Edmonton that injured a police officer and four pedestrians.
According to Kenney, there is no reason that anyone would need to seek asylum in Canada from the United States.
“The United States has a fair and independent refugee determination system,” he said. “There is no reason we should allow anybody to ‘asylum shop’ by moving from the U.S., if their claim is rejected, up here to Canada.
“Illegal migrants are fleeing north into our border, abusing our generosity, clogging up our asylum system – when they have no business doing so,” he said. “If they’re in the United States, they can go through the American refugee system.”
“When an asylum claimant makes a claim in Canada, we take their fingerprints and we bounce that off against U.S. watch lists,” Kenney explained. “And the Americans would have, in that case, told us this guy was under a deportation order. Unfortunately that didn’t come into effect until 2013, the year after this person entered Canada.”