A suspected Lankan Tamil migrant boat now believed to hold as many as 500 refugees has entered Canada’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone and is being escorted by the Canadian Navy to the British Columbia coast.

“We expect it will land either late (Thursday) evening or early Friday morning,” a senior federal official said Wednesday of the Thai-flagged ship, the MV Sun Sea.

While Canadian Navy and Coast Guard authorities would neither confirm nor deny the whereabouts of the vessel Wednesday, US Coast Guard Commander Mark McCadden said that the 188-ft cargo ship had been spotted approximately 300 miles off the coast of British Columbia early Wednesday morning.

The vessel was met by a Canadian navy ship from Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt when it reached Canada’s “exclusive economic zone” at an unknown time Wednesday.

The Tamil ship is thought to be engaged in “human smuggling and human trafficking, which is obviously a very dangerous thing,” the federal official said, adding that Canadahas unconfirmed reports that one of the ship’s passengers has died.

The government fears other migrant ships may be on the way, the federal official said.

“We are becoming a target of human smugglers and human traffickers,” he said.

“We are looking to send a message to these people who are usually (part of) criminal organizations, in some cases with possible terrorist connections in the case of the Tamil Tigers...that we are not going to allow our laws to be broken.”

On Tuesday, news of the Sun Sea’s imminent arrival with a reported cargo of only 200 Tamils had two Maple Ridge jails preparing to receive roughly 100 asylum seekers each.

On Wednesday, however, BC Corrections spokesman Jess Gunnarson said that he had heard reports that there were now as many as 500 Tamils on-board the ship.

Gunnarson said that housing as many as 300 additional migrants would not pose a problem for the province’s corrections system.

“We have a longstanding formal agreement with the federal government and if you look back to the past decade, we certainly have a lot of experience in meeting that demand when migrant ships arrive. So certainly we’ll meet the demand as it’s required,” he said.

While the Metro Vancouver prisons prepare to house the Tamil migrants for an unknown but likely extended time, in the short-term, Victoria General Hospital is re-opening its unused seventh floor to accommodate 75 people in need of medical attention.

In addition, a former emergency ward at the hospital will be used to treat the migrants, all of whom have been on board the ship since it left the Gulf of Thailand in May.

It is expected the vessel will be escorted to either Ogden Point, normally used by cruise ships near Victoria’s downtown and where a similar ship was towed last year, or to CFB Esquimalt.

In October 2009, the MV Ocean Lady arrived in Victoria bearing 76 Tamil refugees who have since been bonded and released pending immigration hearings.

Most of those migrants now live in Torontoand Vancouver, according to David Poopalapillai of the Canadian Tamil Congress.

^{Canadian media reports}