Ottawa is streamlining the asylum process and imposing new timelines in its attempt to “improve processing efficiency and integrity,” but critics are unconvinced the changes would make the system faster.
According to the proposed reforms published Friday, a person seeking protection in Canada would be given 60 days to submit a complete asylum application, with a one-time extension of 30 days upon request.
The Immigration Department would have up to a year to screen and conduct due diligence around security, criminality, admissibility and program integrity concerns before referring the claim to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada or deciding to intervene in the case. That one-year window could be extended if officials needed more time.
After that, the claimant would have another 30 days to submit additional information and at least 10 days before the hearing.
The Conservative government more than a decade ago under Prime Minister Stephen Harper imposed strict timelines to fast-track processing of claims from so-called “safe countries,” but it faced logistical challenges such as delays in obtaining documents from abroad that made it impossible to stick to the timelines.
Although the proposed timeline is more generous than what the Harper government had stipulated, refugee lawyer Adam Sadinsky said claims would simply be sitting in the Immigration Department’s or border agency’s inventory, rather than at the refugee board, since only complete files would be referred and scheduled for hearings.
“The claimant will not see a huge change and the system will not see a change,” said Sadinsky of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers. “There’s an inventory. It’s just who it’s sitting with.”
The government proposal said there were 298,200 cases in the system as of March and the average wait times reached 25 months. Changes are necessary to ”enable operational efficiencies that cannot be achieved through administrative measures alone.”
Gauri Sreenivasan, co-executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, also doubts the changes would speed up asylum processing.
“What we know for certain is that the government has cut funding for the Immigration Department precisely when they wanted to see more processing happen,” she said. “They did not increase funding to the refugee board. So that’s not a promising way to get things moving faster.”
Rather, Sreenivasan is concerned that the regulatory changes would give new power to the immigration minister to hold back files from the refugee board, which could allow room for political interference if the government wanted to target a certain country’s claims from moving forward for political reasons.
The public will have until July 20 to submit feedback on the proposed changes.
