A sign advises people that crossing into Canada via Roxham road at the Canada/US border in Hemmingford, Que. is illegal, on March 25, 2023.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller would have Canadians believe that unscrupulous immigration consultants are somehow behind the surge in refugee applications by international students, on track to a tenfold increase this year compared to 2018.
Mr. Miller points to anecdotes from within his department that some immigration consultants are counselling students with expiring visas to make false claims of refugee status. Undoubtedly there is fraud occurring among the 13,660 claims filed so far this year.
But if Mr. Miller wants to figure out who is really to blame, he need look no further than the mirror, and the cabinet table. The surge in applications by students, and other refugee claimants, has much more to do with the unrolling debacle that the Liberals have presided over since coming into office.
When the Liberals were handed the keys to the immigration system in 2015, the backlog of refugee claimants sat at 9,999 cases. The backlog has steadily mounted on their watch, hitting 87,720 cases by the end of 2019. That alone seems like an unnerving increase. But it was only the start of a surge that is now bordering on a system meltdown.
At the end of October, 2024, the number of pending cases had soared to 260,142, nearly triple the levels of 2019. Month after month, that backlog has grown. (Only during the pandemic’s height, with a closed border, was there any decrease.)
The result is that there is now a huge incentive to make a refugee claim, even if your case is flimsy. If refugee claims were completely halted – an impossible scenario – it would take the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada nearly 34 months to clear its backlog, if it kept up the pace of October.
The upshot: Anyone making a claim for refugee status can expect to spend years in Canada before their case is adjudicated. The incentive for bad-faith claims is obvious. The statistics back that up: abandoned and withdrawn claims have soared this year, accounting for 22 per cent of disposed cases in the first half of the year – four times the rate of 2015.
The growing backlog is a self-reinforcing problem. The longer the queue, the greater the incentive to file dubious claims, which creates a longer queue – which increases the incentive. Immigration consultants may be taking advantage of the situation, but it is a problem of Ottawa’s creation.
To be fair, there have been funding increases to the IRB to increase its capacity to process cases. Staffing at the board has more than doubled under the Liberals. And the number of cases adjudicated by the IRB has increased even more, indicating that the board is putting those hires to good use.
But it’s not enough. The backlog keeps rising, because the flood in new claims is so much greater. Part of the reason has to do with broader policy decisions by the Liberals. Creating a system that allowed for an explosion in the number of international students is the most obvious example. When Ottawa backpedalled on that policy, some students began looking at ways to remain in Canada. A refugee claim, particularly when it will take years for a case to be heard, was an attractive option. Who knows what might happen by 2027?
As dysfunctional as the system is right now, it could quickly become far worse as hundreds of thousands of temporary residents approach the deadline for departure from Canada. Then there is the prospect of Donald Trump’s policy of mass deportation sparking an exodus north to this country.
What can be done, beyond Mr. Miller’s finger-wagging at immigration consultants? More resources for the IRB are likely inevitable, given the magnitude of the problem. Any such increase needs to be accompanied with a clear plan to roll back the backlog of cases and restore the integrity of the refugee system. And it needs to be a temporary boost.
The IRB needs more than new money; it needs new thinking. At the moment, the board hears cases in the order they were filed – first in, first out. That rule may have made sense a decade ago, but now the paramount concern has to be eliminating the wait times that create an incentive to file a dubious claim. The solution is obvious: hear new claims promptly. If the benefit of filing a refugee claim is only a few weeks more residence, most spurious claims will disappear.
Most of all, the Liberals need to take the problem seriously, and take responsibility for the mess that they have created. The provinces didn’t break the refugee system. Colleges and universities didn’t. Immigration consultants didn’t. Mr. Miller need not look very far to find the real culprits.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the number of Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada workers. This version has been updated.