The number of applicants applying to Canada’s “LGBTQI+ refugees resettlement program” is up 1,100% year-over-year, with more than $50 million of taxpayers' cash doled out to a single charity so far.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in February 2025 updated the program first rolled out by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in 2011. Since then, the Canadian government has partnered with more than 60 organizations and brought in more than 330 gay refugees.
People who say they are persecuted in their home countries for identifying as gay, trans, queer, etc., can come to Canada, where they will receive a full year of financial “support” — and longer if they can’t support themselves after a year has passed.
“Whichever happens first,” says the Government of Canada website.
Further “settlement supports” include taxpayer-funded transportation, translation needs, childcare and short-term counselling.
“Canada has a proud history of providing protection to and helping resettle those most in need,” says the website.
“That includes those in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and additional sexually and gender diverse.”
It was in November 2020 the Trudeau Liberals updated their “sex and gender identifier policy” to let refugee claimants “change their sex or gender” on their claimant form.
People who are persecuted because of their “sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics are generally identified or referred” to Canada by a number of agencies, including Rainbow Railroad, which received approximately $50 million in funding from 2019 to 2023.
The Rainbow Railroad website features a 2023-2026 Strategic Plan that includes three key steps:
Get more to safety now
Queer the system
Strengthen our foundations
Rainbow Railroad Director of Protection Initiatives Swathi Sekhar told the CBC this week the non-profit has seen an applicant uptick of 1,100 year-over-year since President Donald Trump was re-elected.
Sekhar told the state broadcaster nearly 1,200 queer Americans inquired about the process on November 6, election day — far more on that day alone than the 700 it had received for the entirety of 2024 so far.
"This is really the most requests for help that we've received in a single day from any country," said Sekhar.
"So that really says a lot. About half of those individuals who requested help were trans individuals, a mix of both trans men and trans women."
"They have to show that their government would be absolutely unwilling or unable to protect them in any part of the country. So, they would have to show that they've tried to potentially move from state to state, and were not able to find any safety by relocating internally first.”
So far in 2025, Rainbow Railroad has received more than 1,800 requests for “help” from trans and gay Americans, an 1,100% increase over the first two months of 2024, said Sekhar
Toronto-based immigration lawyer Adrienne Smith disclosed a voicemail to the Canadian Press from a trans American abroad who said they were "extremely terrified" to go back to the US because of "what Donald Trump wants to do to trans people."
Her first is “inundated" with inquiries from Americans looking for similar support, she told CP.
"The overall sentiment that I'm hearing right now is just the kind of terror and speed that they feel like their rights are being stripped. You can hear the fear in people's voices when they're calling," Smith said, adding she’s received five to 10 inquires a day since Trump entered the White House on January 20.
