Thank you, Madam Chair.
As you mentioned, I'm joined today by Ms. Roula Eatrides, deputy chairperson of the refugee protection division, and Mr. Gary Dukeshire, our senior counsel.
I know the committee is particularly interested in IRB's refugee claims inventory, wait times and projections, so I'll get right to the point and dispense with the usual introduction about our role and mandate in the context of the asylum system. I assume you are well briefed on that.
When I testified before the committee for the first time as the new chair of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada in 2018, the operating environment was very challenging.
A surge in refugee claims, both regular and irregular, has far outstripped the IRB's annual processing capacity, leading to the largest backlog and longest wait times in the board's 30-year history.
At the time, we assessed that, without interventions, the backlog would reach well over 200,000 claims by 2022-23, with wait times in excess of six years for a first-level refugee determination. The system, in our view, at that time, was on the brink of collapse. As a result, in 2018-19, the IRB responded by developing an ambitious growth and transformation agenda.
As we are now in the fourth year of implementing our plan, I'd like to tell you about some key outcomes, along with a brief summary of future challenges.
I'll begin by talking about growth.
Since 2018-19, the board has received significant temporary investments by way of successive federal budgets, which allowed us to effectively double our decision-making output and better align IRB's annual processing capacity with the refugee claim intake.
This was a massive scaling-up in a relatively short amount of time for our organization. This growth, coupled with internal efficiencies and pandemic-related border restrictions, led to improved access to justice for existing claimants in our inventory, as measured by the number of claims adjudicated and a reduction in wait times.
Most recently, budget 2022 announced that the funds previously provided in recent budgets to the IRB, on a temporary basis, will be made permanent, and that the IRB will also receive additional funds over two years to process additional claims.
Subject to the approval of Parliament, these funds will allow our organization not only to stabilize at the current levels, but also to continue to build capacity that can handle the increasing number of asylum claims being received.
As part of our transformation agenda, we've implemented a range of measures to improve both the efficiency and quality of our decision-making.
One part of the program that I would like to point out is our hearings operating model. The board took advantage of the opportunities created by the pandemic to become a digital organization.
In 2020-21, during the height of the pandemic, the board moved to a paperless and virtual hearings operating model. All files have since been digitized. Adjudicators now work almost entirely with digital files. An electronic portal has been built and well adopted by the counsel community. Over 98% of our hearings are now held virtually.
Moving to a virtual hearings operating posture allowed the board to protect the health of both our employees and those appearing before the board, while maintaining access to justice during the toughest days of the pandemic. It was key to keeping our inventories and wait times in check. In fact, according to the latest UNHCR global trends report, Canada was one of only four countries, over the previous year, that was able to significantly reduce its inventory of asylum cases at the refugee determination stage during the pandemic.
Thanks to new investments and the new measures implemented under our plan, the refugee protection division and the refugee appeal division handled more asylum claims and calls last year than ever before.
In 2018-19, when I first appeared at this committee in this capacity, in this very room, wait times were at two years and were growing at a pace not previously seen. Today wait times for new claimants are at 16 months, down 25% from where they were in 2018-19 and down almost 30% from their peak in the spring of 2020. At the end of Q1 of this fiscal year, wait times at the IRB were at their lowest since 2016-17, prior to the unprecedented influx of claimants.
Given the operating context over the last few years, by any measure these are solid results.
Despite these positive developments at the IRB, I do need to be very clear: The tide has now clearly turned. The IRB and certainly the asylum system as a whole are once again under real strain. As you've heard, the pending eligibility inventory at IRCC and CBSA is growing quickly. Their intake this year is projected to be some 90,000-plus claims, well beyond the system's and IRB's annual processing capacity of up to 50,000. Referrals to the board are now outpacing our annual processing capacity, leading once again to growing inventories and wait times, reversing hard-won gains.
We therefore need to redouble our efforts to improve system efficiency and move forward with funding strategies that can deal with these realities, improve access to justice and better support the Canadian refugee determination system.
Thank you.
Roula will answer all of your questions.
