There is a thicket of bureaucratic language in the eight-page briefing document from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on the upside and downside of waiving temporary visitor visa requirements to get rid of a massive backlog of applications.
But one phrase sticks out in that December, 2022, document: a decision to issue hundreds of thousands of visitor visas without requiring applicants to demonstrate that they are, in fact, just visiting Canada could end up “eroding public confidence in managed migration.”
The solution, as IRCC saw it, was to go ahead and waive those requirements for up to 449,000 applicants, but to keep that change under wraps. It took four months for IRCC to issue a press release on the matter, and then only just ahead of a report by Radio-Canada. To be clear, this was not a technical tweak, but a recasting of a key part of this country’s immigration system that, predictably, has led to a surge in asylum applications, and a growing backlog.
For decades, Canada has been relatively generous in assessing asylum claims once a refugee reaches this country. But the requirements for visitor visas have been strict, making it difficult to get here in the first place, at least for those arriving by air.
This week, The Globe reported new details on the decision, including that the federal government was perfectly aware that the blanket waiver it issued would lead to a surge in asylum claims. Despite Ottawa’s official silence, that surge was obvious enough on the streets of Canada’s biggest cities, particularly Toronto and Montreal.
The IRCC is downplaying the effect on asylum claims, but the department’s own statistics tell the tale. The new policy took effect on Feb. 28 (but only for visa applications made before Jan. 16). From March through September of this year, there were 23,725 asylum applications at Canadian airports, more than double the amount during the same period in 2022. All told, there have been an additional 14,155 asylum applications at airports since the policy came into effect. In September alone, there were 5,435 asylum applications.
The seven-month increase is close to double the 8,600 increase spelled out in the IRCC document, with three months still to be counted before the waiver expires at the end of this year. Many of those asylum seekers could well be deemed to be refugees; in any case, they are not violating Canadian law by making an application.
The fault lies not with them, but with a federal government that is either willfully blind to the consequences of its actions, or arrogant enough to think it could proceed in secret without Canadians being any the wiser.
The government’s statistics aren’t up to date on its backlog for asylum claims but, as of the end of June, it stood at 103,248, up nearly 50 per cent in six months. (A surge of asylum seekers through the illegal crossing of Roxham Road in early 2023 contributed to that increase.)
To sum up: the government has traded the administrative and political headache of delays in processing visitor visas for the even bigger problem of a flood of asylum applications that may take years to process, and which in the meantime will put added strain on already overburdened services for refugees.
It is beyond baffling that the federal government saw that as an acceptable trade-off, and it is yet another dent in Ottawa’s much dented reputation for competence.
But there is a much more fundamental problem with the government’s furtive changes to visa requirements: a seeming obliviousness to the danger of undermining Canadians’ support for high levels of immigration. That support rests upon Canadians’ belief that immigration benefits this country, and is run in an ordered and predictable manner.
Secretive major policy changes undermine that trust. The department itself flagged the possibility of eroding public confidence. Too bad the government did not heed its own counsel.