When Toronto immigration lawyer Siavash Shekarian thinks about why immigration cases are now overwhelming Canada’s federal courts, he doesn’t mince words.
“Confusion and incompetence,” he said.
Immigration and refugee cases made up 78 per cent of all proceedings in the Federal Court of Canada in 2024, up from 57 per cent in 2015. The federal courts hear immigration cases, as well as tax, intellectual property and other matters.
The federal government attributes the rise to an increase in the number of immigration applications it receives and processes. But immigration lawyers say the problem starts with the immigration ministry itself.
“[Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada] … with ambiguous guidelines, and with, honestly, [a] lack of consistency, is causing all of these refusals to end up in Federal Court,” said Shekarian.
Ballooning applications
In 2024, IRCC processed more than 10 million applications for citizenship, permanent residency and temporary residency.
This was up from about 2.6 million in 2015, when the Trudeau government came to power, according to data IRCC provided to Canadian Affairs.
An IRCC spokesperson told Canadian Affairs that the Federal Court’s increased caseload could be explained by the overall increase in IRCC applications. The spokesperson added that IRCC is working to speed up its processes.
“We continue to digitize applications and harness automation technologies to speed up processing,” the spokesperson said in a May 28 emailed statement.
‘Half Chinook, half human’
Immigration lawyers say IRCC’s efforts to automate its processes are actually a big part of the problem.
Numerous lawyers pointed to IRCC’s Chinook system. Launched in 2019, this Excel-based decision-making tool is designed to help IRCC officers quickly process temporary resident claims — which encompass applications for visitor, study and foreign worker visas. Temporary residency applications accounted for about 95 per cent of all cases processed in 2024, according to IRCC data.
“Officers are now expected to issue decisions in a couple of minutes,” said Lev Abramovich, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer. “Obviously the decision that this produced is half baked, because it’s half Chinook, half human.”
Deanna Okun-Nachoff, a Vancouver-based immigration lawyer, agrees. She says the Chinook tool keeps a “human in the loop” to ensure there is not a breach of procedural fairness.
“But what I think we’re starting to discover is that … the human in the loop might only spend a number of minutes on each application … and so it means that there couldn’t have been a substantive assessment of all the material that [the IRCC officer] had in front of them when they rendered the decision.”
IRCC told Canadian Affairs that Chinook and other technical processing aids are meant to augment — but not replace — human decision-makers.
“Decisions are made by highly trained officers who carefully and systematically assess each application,” an IRCC spokesperson said in a follow-up statement on June 5.
“No final decisions are made by artificial intelligence and our tools do not refuse or recommend refusing applications,” the statement said.
Toronto-based immigration lawyer Claire MacLean says she is skeptical about how much human scrutiny is involved.
“ I know they say that an officer does look at it,” she said. “But based on some of the decisions we get — that we know have used Chinook to refuse — I don’t know that someone actually does many checks and balances on those recommendations.”
Inconsistent decisions
Abramovich says immigration applications denied under Chinook often contain little to no meaningful justification.
“They’re not reasoned decisions,” said Abramovich, referring to the contents of the letters his clients receive from IRCC. “They’re one-line, two-line decisions.”
“Those [details] are only available if you order them by way of an [access to information] request, or if you file a case in the Federal Court,” he said.
Inconsistent decisions can also prompt litigation, says Shekarian.
“You can have two of the same exact cases, with the same exact set of facts, and you can get very different results out of different decision-makers at IRCC,” he said.
While refugee cases have risen 24 per cent since Q2 2019, it is non-refugee cases that have skyrocketed. These cases are up 500 per cent over that time period.
Non-refugee cases involve those applying for study permits, work permits or permanent residency from abroad.
Non-refugee applicants have few options if their case is denied, Shekarian says. They can reapply, they can ask IRCC to reconsider, or they can appeal their decision to the Federal Court.
“Many, many lawyers … don’t even bother with reconsideration requests,” Shekarian said, because the IRCC is “infamous for neglecting [them].”
In effect, the Federal Court has become a kind of diagnostic tool to aid confused applicants, rather than a forum for arbitrating the strength of an application, says Abramovich.
‘A systemic crisis’
The burgeoning number of immigration cases under appeal is straining the courts — and affecting potential immigrants.
“The problem here is that the Federal Court has a limited amount of resources,” said Abramovich. ”They only have so many judges, so many clerks, so many registry officers and so on. So increases in litigation in immigration cases are not just going to affect immigration … it’s going to cause a systemic crisis.”
In May, Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton released a practice direction to lawyers acknowledging the toll that an “unprecedented increase” in immigration applications is having on the court.
“[T]he Court is unable to process these filings on a timely basis,” the practice direction says.
In effect, they are telling practitioners the court does not have any option but to extend deadlines, says Shekarian.
These court deadlines mean immigration applicants can now face multiple delays — both to have their application processed by the IRCC, and to challenge an adverse decision. The IRCC’s website indicates that about 760,000 of the two million active cases on its docket have exceeded the department’s service standards for processing time.
Shekarian says these delays mean Canada is losing out on opportunities to attract top talent.
He has personally seen entrepreneurial and high-net worth clients explore immigration pathways into the U.S. and Australia instead of Canada, because their applications face such long decision times here.
“Canada is losing high-potential entrepreneurs because it can’t get its system right,” he said.
Attracting top talent
The court’s caseload may be eased as Canada starts to curb immigration levels. The government’s target for new permanent residents in 2025 is 395,000, down from 500,000 in 2024.
The government is also pledging caps on the number of temporary workers and international visitors.
But immigration lawyers say broader reforms are needed.
Abramovitch suggests one easy fix would be to have the IRCC release reasons in its decision letters to applicants. Currently, these letters provide applicants very basic reasons — such as “insufficient ties” or “insufficient establishment” within Canada — that prompt applicants to file appeals to gain further information.
Shekarian would like to see the IRCC become more consistent in its admission standards and how it applies them.
“IRCC treats immigration not in a systemic way, but as if it’s a water hose,” he said. “They say, ‘Okay, we have too many [applicants]. Now start refusing everybody.’”
He says Ottawa must also do more to ease the entry of “top talent” into Canada.
“If you wanna build a country, what builds the country? People, right? And the only way we are getting those people is immigration,” Shekarian said.
“If we have a dysfunctional IRCC, we cannot get the people we want, so we cannot get the country we want … Top talent has options.”
“[Top talent] won’t wait in poorly designed queues, guessing timelines, submitting webforms into a void, and being treated like case numbers,” Shekarian added in a June 10 emailed statement.
He advocates for creating a premium immigration experience — or “‘red carpet’ immigration.” This would include clarity in the law and its application, reliable and consistent timelines, and assigned case officers who would communicate promptly with applicants.
“We have the exact opposite of that. The immigration system destroys your integrity [and] gives you zero respect.”
“It has become a repellent for the top talent that we want.”
IMO our planet is over run by people. People do not build a community but put excess pressure on it and our environment. They are still clearing the Amazon, the ‘lungs of the planet’ to grow food for people, clearing forests and farmland for subdivisions, for people. Let’s get our population under control and have a community not built on economic inequality but on sustainability.
Also, almost every service worker in our community is an immigrant and our own local teens cannot get jobs!!!!