Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to appear before you.
My name is Andrew Koltun, and I am appearing on behalf of the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association, or CILA.
CILA advocates improvements to immigration-related policies and departmental operations and represents hundreds of immigration lawyers across the country.
I'm here today to explain that for immigration applicants, the ATIP system is broken. It's broken by lengthy and unreasonable delays. These delays obstruct access to justice and are overburdening the federal court system. The solution is to impose a statutory 30-day time limit on extensions.
My submissions today will cover four parts: one, how immigration applicants use the system; two, the problems they encounter; three, how these problems impose access to justice barriers; and four, recommendations.
This brings me now to section one.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, IRCC, is the federal department that receives the most access to information requests. Approximately 75% of all ATIP requests in the federal government go to IRCC. However, unlike other departments, 98.9% of these ATIP requests are for an individual's personal data held by the department. Immigration applicants are often requesting their immigration files and officers' notes on those files. This is because when IRCC refuses a decision, IRCC does not provide the reasons for the refusal. These must be obtained either by an ATIP request or by challenging the decision, often in Federal Court.
This brings me to section two. There are two main problems that immigration applicants encounter within the ATIP system.
The first problem is an increasing failure by IRCC to process ATIP requests within the statutory 30 days and a failure to even seek extensions.
Historically, the majority of ATIP requests for the refusal reasons were processed within the statutory 30 days. During COVID, this slipped to beyond 60 days. However, over the last few months, a worrying trend has arisen. IRCC has both stopped meeting the 30-day deadline and stopped even sending extension notices when the deadline cannot be met. Instead, IRCC merely does not provide the results, and applicants are left wondering if their ATIP will be processed at all.
This brings me to problem two. Even when an extension is provided, it's often lengthy and beyond all justification. In many cases, IRCC imposes blanket 365-day extensions to provide a copy an applicant's complete immigration record. Such an extension is often divorced from the actual time needed to produce that record. When the same request for the same application documents is made by the Federal Court to IRCC, IRCC can produce a copy within one to two weeks.
This brings me to section three.
The delays and extensions by IRCC impose steep barriers for access to justice for immigration applicants. There is currently the highest volume of immigration cases at the Federal Court of any time in its history.
When IRCC does not provide the reasons for refusal by ATIP within the statutory 30 days, applicants are often forced to challenge the refusal at the Federal Court, merely to use the court's power for requests of records to obtain the reasons for refusal. Through its ATIP processing complacency, IRCC is turning Federal Court judges and clerks into ATIP processing officers.
This all comes at great expense. It's expensive for the applicant, who has to pay for court fees and legal fees, and it's expensive for the Federal Court, which often requires more registry staff than ever to handle the increased volume.
This brings me to section four, our recommendations. To address issues with delays, we recommend that the act be amended to impose a strict 30-day limit on the length of an extension that can be applied. As many other witnesses have identified to this committee, access delayed is access denied.
This concludes my opening remarks, and I welcome your questions.