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Social media these days is chock-a-block overflowing with hatred and misinformation about immigrants. Immigration has become one of the most heated topics in Canadian public life, and the debate is genuinely worth having—questions about housing supply, temporary resident levels and labour market impacts are legitimate policy questions with real trade-offs. But underneath that legitimate debate, a separate layer of viral misinformation keeps circulating with specific, often stunning-sounding, claims about how much money immigrants and refugees supposedly collect from government. Those claims deserve to be checked against the actual data, because they shape public opinion on a subject that affects millions of people’s lives.

Periodically, posts spread on social media claiming refugee claimants receive tens of thousands of dollars annually in government benefits—figures like $82,000 have circulated widely. Fact-checkers who traced these claims back to their source found they conflated the temporary emergency housing costs the government pays to hotels for shelter, meals, and administration with cash going directly into a claimant’s pocket. When Ontario’s actual Resettlement Assistance Program (RAP) rates are used instead, a single adult refugee receives roughly $1,000–$1,100 a month, and a family of six around $1,700 a month — support that is calibrated to, and in most provinces matches, ordinary provincial welfare rates, not a windfall above them.