I’m Tracking It

By True North Uprising | Substack.com/@FightForCanada

Canadian taxpayers have spent at least $9 BILLION since 2015 on refugee, asylum, and humanitarian programs—and that is only the spending we can readily identify.

The real bill is higher. Provincial welfare payments, municipal shelters, legal aid, schools, enforcement, appeals and other costs are scattered across different governments and programs. Canadians still do not have one public accounting showing what the entire system has cost them.

So we’re going to build one.

I’m creating the Canadian National Asylum Spending Ledger: a year-by-year, program-by-program accounting of where the money went, who received it, and what taxpayers paid for. If the government won’t put the full bill in one place, we will.

For years, taxpayers have been told that the cost of Canada’s refugee and asylum system is simply the price of compassion. But when you start adding up the programs that are actually visible in federal records, the numbers become staggering. Our preliminary tally has already identified roughly $9 billion in federal spending since 2015 across refugee, asylum and humanitarian housing, health, resettlement and related programs. And that is not a complete national bill. That is a floor, not a ceiling. It does not capture every provincial welfare payment, municipal shelter expense, legal-aid cost, school expense, appeal, enforcement action or administrative dollar.

That is why we are launching a project to track it. Identify exactly how many of your tax dollars have gone to Niagara hotels, free healthcare, etc.

The goal is simple: build a public, searchable Canadian ledger showing where the money went, who received it, under which program, in what year, and for what stated purpose. Every grant. Every contribution. Every asylum-hotel payment we can identify. Every federal transfer to provinces and cities for asylum housing. Every major refugee and asylum health expenditure. Every resettlement assistance program. Every contractor and recipient we can trace through public records.

This matters because the asylum system is not processing only successful refugee claims. The federal government itself says that only about 60 to 65 percent of claims are accepted; roughly one in three are refused, withdrawn or abandoned. Ottawa has also acknowledged that reforms are needed to deter people from using asylum procedures to bypass regular immigration rules or extend temporary stays. That does not mean every rejected claimant acted fraudulently. It does mean taxpayers deserve to know how much public money is being consumed by claims that ultimately fail.

The spending is growing quickly. Ottawa says the Interim Housing Assistance Program has transferred about $1.7 billion to provinces and municipalities since 2017. The Interim Federal Health Program alone was allocated $896.5 million in 2024–25, and government figures say asylum claimants made up more than two-thirds of its beneficiaries that year. In 2024–25, the federal Resettlement Assistance Program spent another $375.7 million.

Then there is the question of people who are not legally entitled to remain in Canada. In August 2026, Ontario changed its rules to end social-assistance eligibility for people living in Canada without legal status. That raises an obvious question: how much was paid before the rule changed, for how long, and in which jurisdictions?

Canadians deserve an answer.

This project will not label every asylum claimant a fraud, and it will not lump legitimate refugees together with those abusing the system. It will do something much harder for government to dismiss: Publish the receipts.

We want to go back year by year, department by department and program by program. We want to build the database government should already have made easy for taxpayers to inspect.

If you believe Canadians deserve to know where their money went, support this project. Paid subscriptions, donations, research tips and help digging through government records will allow us to keep expanding the ledger. The bigger this becomes, the harder it will be for politicians and bureaucracies to hide the true cost behind scattered reports, obscure grant databases and departmental accounting.

The taxpayers paid the bill. Now the taxpayers deserve to see it.

Stay tuned as I build this out and begin releasing the findings on my Substack, or follow me on YouTube: Fight For Canada

Originally published at substack.com/@fightforcanada