Madam Chair, I thank the committee for giving us the opportunity to speak to you about the Immigration and Refugee Board.
As you know, the IRB is a quasi-judicial tribunal. We report to Parliament through the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. Our mandate is to resolve immigration and refugee matters efficiently, fairly and in accordance with the law.
As an administrative tribunal, we must use our expertise to hear and decide a high volume of cases. The IRB issued 102,000 decisions last year. Of those, 78,000 were decisions from the refugee protection division. That's a 42% productivity increase from the year before, with a funded capacity of 60,000 cases.
To resolve so many cases, we harmonized, simplified and standardized our processes across the country. We now manage our inventory nationally. We used technology and automated our processes wherever possible, and we manage our inventory in a way that maximizes time for hearings.
High volume is nothing if our hearings are not conducted in a way that upholds natural justice and procedural fairness. Our reasons for a decision must meet the test of the Supreme Court in Vavilov. They must offer sufficient justification, be transparent and be easily understandable for the reviewing courts and, most importantly, for the claimants themselves. That's normal. We hear cases that involve charter-protected rights—life, liberty and security—and that can't be reduced to a checklist exercise.
We know our decisions pass the test because they aren't often overturned. Last year, the Federal Court overturned 1% of the refugee protection division and the refugee appeal division decisions.
I'd like to turn to our challenges.
You all know about the RPD inventory. It stands now at around 290,000 claims. A third of those are incomplete files. How did we arrive at that number?
The answer is fairly simple. There were two years of historically high levels of intake. In 2022-23, there were 154,000 claims in one year. In 2024-25, the year we just finished, there were 176,000 claims. We were funded for 60,000 claims; we finalized 78,000 claims.
We can contrast that with the previous 10 years when intake was, on average, 29,000 or 30,000 claims, and the board finalized on average 26,000 claims. If you look at the few years towards the end of that 10-year period, the highest was 75,000 for intake and 48,000 for finalization.
At the end of 2022, before the numbers I mentioned earlier, the caseload was 54,000. At current capacity—around 80,000, with the improvement we've made—we could do the 54,000 claims in eight months, just to give you a sense of capacity, if it hadn't been for a huge intake.
Because the current asylum claims inventory is relatively young, mostly less than two years old, a case decided today has waited about 22 months for a decision. That includes the six to eight months it takes for CBSA to do security screening.
For a case being sent to us today, given our ability to finalize about 80,000 a year and with the capacity we have, it would take about 44 months or 45 months to issue a decision.
The IRB-funded capacity is now 70,000 decisions, but, like I mentioned, with the improvements we made, this year we think we can reach at least 80,000 decisions. The IRB has invested to increase its productivity. Some of our projects have already delivered real results—that's why we do better—and others are about to become reality. We've seen real, concrete progress, but there's more to do. That's why I'm confident that the board can continue to successfully meet the challenges ahead and play its part in a much larger Canada asylum system.
With this, Madam Chair, I turn the floor back over to you, and I look forward to the exchange today.
