Canada hints at fast-tracking refugee refusals

By Anna Mehler Paperny

Canada's immigration minister says he plans to propose measures to reform the country's refugee system, potentially fast-tracking refusals of cases deemed to have little chance of succeeding.

Experts and advocates warned that could violate asylum-seekers' right to due process and could be challenged in court.

"I plan to put forward more measures. I want to reform the system. It's not working in the way it should," Immigration Minister Marc Miller told a parliamentary committee on Monday.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been changing his government's welcoming stance on migrants, pledging to cut immigration and reduce Canada's population over the next two years as his party trails in polls and Canadians surveyed profess dwindling support for new arrivals.

Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board, an independent adjudicator of refugee claims, is seeing claims from "people having increasingly fewer hopes to stay in Canada and being counseled to file, I think unjustly, asylum claims where they shouldn't have the ability to do so," Miller added.

Canada has seen its highest number of refugee claims ever in recent months. Although the monthly total has dropped to about 17,400 in October from about 20,000 in July, the number of claims pending is the highest ever – at more than 260,000 last month.

More than 265,000 non-permanent residents came to Canada in the second quarter of 2024, according to Statistics Canada.

Thousands of the refugee claims are from international students filing refugee claims, whose veracity Miller has questioned.

The reforms would be aimed in part at preventing people who planned to use their international study as a path to permanence in Canada from filing refugee claims as a last-ditch effort to stay now that new rules have closed off that path. Refugee claims were rising prior to the new rules.

"There are an increasing number of international students making asylum claims, I think with very little hope, given their conditions," Miller said.

"Are there things we can do to make sure that's more streamlined? I would encourage you to follow the next few weeks as we propose more amendments to the immigration system and the asylum system."

Miller did not say what those changes will be. He is "exploring options related to asylum reforms," spokesperson Renee LeBlanc Proctor wrote in an email Tuesday.

But fast-tracking refugee refusals would likely meet legal challenges on the grounds that it "short-circuits" procedural fairness, said University of Toronto law professor and Human Rights Chair Audrey Macklin.

"You can't say (in effect) 'We think this is a 'bogus' claim so we won't bother with a hearing,'" she wrote in an email Tuesday.

Advocates for migrants have argued for better resourcing of the Immigration and Refugee Board so it can process more claims faster, and potentially fast-tracking claims from countries with high acceptance rates because they are more likely to succeed.