Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 6th, 2025

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

I don't agree with that. I think it's factually correct. It's not a talking point.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

This is a point of debate.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

It is not a point of debate.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Do you understand what is in the interim federal health program, Chair? Do you understand that eye care is part of these things, as well as dental care, counselling services, prosthetics and hotel rooms?

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

My understanding is that all of that is not part of it.

Thank you.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Okay. I would like my point put on the record as well.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Great. Your point is on the record.

With that, thank you for your testimony and your contribution to our study on Bill C-12. We're very grateful for your excellent work at the IRB. I want to thank you and your team for your excellent work.

We're going to suspend for five minutes to change to the next panel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

We're back.

We're now resuming with our second panel.

For the benefit of our new witnesses, I want to make a few comments.

Kindly wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. This is a reminder that all comments should be addressed through the chair.

Just as a warning, we do have votes today, so the bells may be ringing sometime towards the end of this panel, and at that point I will have to talk to my colleagues to see what they would like to do. I wanted to give you advance warning about that.

With that, I would now like to welcome our witnesses for the second panel.

From the Quebec Association of Immigration Lawyers, we have Julia Green. From the Refugee Law Lab, we have Dr. Simon Wallace, assistant professor. From the Canadian Bar Association, we have Deanna Okun-Nachoff, barrister and solicitor, and Cheryl Robinson, barrister and solicitor.

Each organization has up to five minutes for opening remarks, after which we will proceed to rounds of questions.

I will start with Ms. Green for five minutes.

[Julia Green, Lawyer, Immigration, Association québécoise des avocats et avocates en droit de l’immigration]

Hello. My name is Julia Green and today I am here representing the Association québécoise des avocats et avocates en droit de l'immigration, or AQAADI.

AQAADI's biggest concern with Bill C-12 is the fact that, if passed in its current form, it will mean that two types of people will no longer be able to make asylum claims in Canada: those who have been in Canada for more than one year and those who have entered Canada irregularly between legal points of entry from the United States. Instead, if these people wish to seek protection in Canada, the only option they will have is a pre-removal risk assessment that is offered to them before their removal from Canada.

When someone makes an asylum claim in Canada, their claim is referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board, or IRB, who we just heard from, where trained board members who adhere to strict guidelines evaluate the person's claim for protection during an oral hearing. Board members are highly qualified and trained to evaluate the complexities of asylum claims while taking into consideration the way things like trauma, cultural differences, language barriers and education levels may affect a claimant's way of telling their story. They also take into consideration factors like how long it took a claimant to make their refugee claim, and each board member evaluates whether or not the delay was justified on a case-by-case basis.

If a board member makes a mistake in their decision somehow, which happens, because it's a human being making the decision, the IRB has an internal appeal mechanism. After that, if there are still any mistakes, claimants can go to the Federal Court.

Throughout all of this process, those claimants have something called a stay of removal, meaning that they cannot be deported back to their country of origin while their claim is still being evaluated to ensure there were no mistakes.

In essence, the IRB has legal checks and balances to make sure no one is going back to danger, as is Canada's duty under international law.

With a pre-removal risk assessment, PRRA, there is no mandatory oral hearing and applicants must submit all of their arguments and evidence on paper within 30 days. Then IRCC officers evaluate the claim, and they are not constrained by the same guidelines as the IRB. Furthermore, there is no mechanism under which a decision on a pre-removal risk assessment can be appealed.

The only recourse, if there maybe was a mistake in their decision on their PRRA, is to challenge it at the Federal Court. However, while waiting on the Federal Court to review that decision, there is no stay of their removal, which essentially means that they could be removed back to the country where they believe they are at risk before the court has determined whether or not the decision should have been overturned.

AQAADI is concerned that making the PRRA the first and only way that some people are able to ask for protection might end up with many people slipping through the cracks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

You have one minute.

[Julia Green]

As lawyers in Quebec especially, we are particularly concerned with Bill C-12, because many foreign nationals in Quebec come from moratorium countries. Moratorium countries were mentioned last week, I think. Essentially, these are countries that Canada will not remove people to, in general, because the overall security situation is so bad. Examples of countries under a moratorium right now include Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela, Mali, Yemen and Ukraine, among others.

If someone from one of these countries falls into the two categories mentioned in Bill C-12 that I've already discussed, their only option to seek protection is the PRRA, the pre-removal risk assessment. However, a pre-removal risk assessment can only be offered when a removal is scheduled. If they come from a country where they can't be removed to, they end up in this legal limbo where they can't make an asylum claim and they can't ask for a PRRA. They're just kind of stuck in Canada in between. As lawyers working in a province that is home to many people from especially Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, we find the possibility of so many people falling into this situation to be very problematic.

AQAADI strongly suggests that Bill C-12 not be passed unless the proposed amendments to paragraph 101(1)(b) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act be removed, as they risk compromising the efficacy of our refugee system. At the very least, there should be exceptions in the law for specific situations, such as for cases of domestic violence, unaccompanied minors, LGBTQ+ claims and people who come from countries where the situation has changed significantly since they arrived.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Thank you, Ms. Green.

You have completed your five minutes. Maybe you can finish your testimony as part of one of the answers.

[Julia Green]

Sure. No worries.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Next we have Mr. Wallace.

You have five minutes.

[Simon Wallace, Assistant Professor, Refugee Law Lab]

Thank you.

I come to you today from the Refugee Law Lab, a computational research lab based out of York University and Osgoode Hall Law School.

One of our purposes is to use new computational research methods to better understand how the refugee system functions as a system. Today, I'd like to share some empirical findings from an earlier paper on Bill C-12's proposal to transfer some refugee cases from the IRB system to the PRRA system—the proposed new ineligibility rules.

After computationally analyzing over 180,000 Federal Court of Canada files focusing on that refugee case subset, I come today with a very simple warning. If enacted, these provisions are likely to make the refugee adjudication system less efficient and not more efficient. The reason is simple. This bill does an end run around the refugee appeal division of the IRB. The RAD, as we all know, was created by the previous Conservative government, and now that we have the data, we can see the RAD for what it is—an efficiency success story.

Again, as you know, the ineligibility proposal is simple. It does not forbid new categories of people from claiming refugee protection in Canada. Rather, the proposal is to transfer jurisdiction for some refugee cases from the IRB system to the PRRA system.

As we just heard, the IRB is an expert tribunal with well-trained adjudicators, a world-class research directorate, dedicated legal services and massive institutional experience. Refused first-instance decisions can be appealed internally to the RAD.

We think of these often as rights-enhancing measures for refugee claimants, and they of course are, but there is another way to think of this. When the IRB refuses, its refusals are well justified. Its refusals are informed, and errors are caught by the RAD. This means—and this is probably my key point—that the IRB writes decisions that can be well defended in court.

In contrast, the PRRA was always designed to be a last-ditch safety net and not a front door. It's an important part of our refugee system, to be sure, but it's not a thoroughgoing study of the merits of really any case.

As I said, in 2012, the previous Conservative government made this major change. We got the RAD. My view is that there was no greater efficiency change in that period than the RAD. With all the data that we now have, we can see that the 2012 changes protected Canada's refugee system when it came under the greatest stress. We heard about the volume of cases from the IRB this morning.

I circulated some charts, so let me just give the quick hits.

Chart 1 that I've circulated shows the Federal Court's immigration caseload. After the 2012 amendments, the number of refugee cases that ended up in the Federal Court dropped significantly, despite the huge overall increase of refugee claims made in Canada. The RAD protected the court. This protected the system from expensive redos from court hearings, from lawyer fees and from backlogs. The bottom line is that the RAD works.

Chart 3 is maybe the more interesting chart for our purposes and for this bill because it shows what happens when cases do reach the Federal Court. The Federal Court—and again, this is what we just heard from the IRB—upholds RAD decisions about 95% of the time. When the Federal Court looks at an RAD decision, it has a high degree of confidence in that decision. In contrast, if I read the data correctly—and I make some arguments in the paper about how to read it—we're approaching a point where almost 40% of PRRA decisions, when they reach the court, are either overturned or settled, or something else happens.

There are two bottom lines. One, we found that the IRB and the RAD protect the court's caseload. Two, we found that when the PRRA decisions reach the court, they have much higher grant and settlement rates.

My argument is that if Bill C-12 passes as is, Parliament is going to end up transferring cases away from a part of the system that works, and works efficiently, to a part that will cause surges in the workload of the Federal Court.

Maybe in the first instance the IRCC is going to render PRRA decisions faster than the IRB. I don't know. Faster to error, though, is not more efficient. When the system is under pressure, it is more efficient to get it right the first time.

I sense that I am running low on time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

You have seven seconds.

[Simon Wallace]

I'll leave it there and donate my seven seconds.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Thank you so much, Dr. Wallace.

Ms. Okun-Nachoff, you have five minutes, please.

[Deanna Okun-Nachoff, Barrister and Solicitor, The Canadian Bar Association]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'm going to start by addressing the Canadian Bar Association's administration of justice concerns with Bill C-12.

We are building on our colleague Mario Bellissimo's testimony in your study on improving fairness in the immigration system and our longer report, “Law, Technology and Accountability” that contains 100 recommendations to improve accountability and transparency in Canada's immigration system. This report is highly relevant to our submissions today because, in our view, Bill C-12 is a step in the wrong direction.

Dramatic plans are afoot to restructure Canada's immigration landscape. The levels plan affirms the minister's mandate to reduce temporary residents from 6.5% to 5% of our population in just one year. Against this backdrop, we are here debating a bill that enables mass cancellations of applications by order in council and seeks to exempt those orders from certain steps in the legal vetting process. Why is there the need to bypass normal regulatory review?

Category-wide cancellations have been accomplished within the existing IRPA framework. For example, the federal skilled worker backlog was terminated in 2012. The current system is clearly not lacking in legislative mechanisms. We question whether mass cancellation is the right look for Canada. Our position is that they are not something we want to entrench, particularly by reference only to vague and subjective language like “in the public interest”, certainly not without clear requirements for prepublication and committee study.

That an entire category of visas or applications impacting applicants who have substantially invested in Canada could be cancelled raises the spectre of litigation. Meanwhile, we risk tarnishing our ability to attract and retain top talent from around the world. The minister has said that she will limit her use of extraordinary powers to times of war, pandemic or cases of mass fraud, but no such parameters are imposed in the act itself. Nothing prevents a broader application by her or future ministers.

We also question whether fraud can be coherently addressed through category-wide cancellations without an unacceptable risk of charter violations. Prepublication, expert testimony and committee studies like this are important safeguards to prevent arbitrariness and unchecked growth of state powers and to ensure constitutional compliance.

We therefore ask that Bill C-12 be pulled for further study.

[Cheryl Robinson, Barrister and Solicitor, The Canadian Bar Association]

I'm going to continue. I'm going to talk about our second concern, which is the impact that the bill will have on Canada's ability to both prioritize and protect the most vulnerable.

The introduction of designated representatives in non-IRB matters is encouraging. This will enable the voices of the most vulnerable to be heard, children and others with significant mental health and trauma, as well as enable their participation in immigration proceedings; however, we are concerned that this entire scheme is being delegated to regulations and away from the review of Parliament.

The bill states that there may be circumstances where a DR may wholly make decisions on behalf of an individual. This could include whether to make an application or to waive an application such as a PRRA. This is substitute decision-making, and it goes beyond what has already been granted to the designated representatives before the IRB. As such, it requires further parliamentary study with consideration for the need for an independent oversight body.

Turning to the one-year refugee claim bar that has been a hot topic of conversation, we are concerned that this will not protect genuine refugees, as it is contrary to the lived experiences of refugees and our jurisprudence. Risk can arise after entry to Canada, and it does. Countries' conditions change, civil wars break out, minority groups become persecuted or, after time in Canada, a person may realize their sexual orientation or gender identity or come to grips with the trauma that has impacted them and prevented them from acting.

As the one year is tied to the initial entry to Canada, not the most recent, we can also imagine a very common scenario where an individual who genuinely fears persecution is barred from the refugee claim process because they came to Canada on vacation as a child. None of these individuals are protected by the one-year bar.

While there is access to the PRRA, this is not an adequate replacement as it lacks procedural safeguards, including a hearing. The diversion of these individuals to the PRRA system is simply a redistribution of inventory to the IRCC, which lacks the expertise of the IRB and will increase litigation at the Federal Court. PRRA litigation takes up twice the judicial resources because it has both an underlying judicial review and a motion for stay of removal. This is in addition to litigation around the provision itself and the constitutionality, which will create greater strain on our courts and impact access to justice.

Thank you very much, and we welcome any questions that the committee may have.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Perfect. You had 15 seconds to spare.

Our first round is six minutes, and our first round goes to Mr. Menegakis.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you for appearing before us today.

Dr. Wallace, we heard testimony earlier about the asylum claim backlog. We knew that is was already in the hundreds of thousands due to failed Liberal immigration policies over the last 10 years. They have now put forward this bill, which will make the process less efficient and less fair and will certainly increase cost.

Would you agree that it at least appears that, through this legislation, the Liberals are trying to offload responsibility for the mess that has been created?

[Simon Wallace]

I have a real concern that the overall efficiency of the system is going to decrease when things are moved around. Essentially, more bureaucracy is going to be created as opposed to streamlined bureaucracy.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Do you think it could be challenged in the courts?

[Simon Wallace]

I'm a law professor, so my job is to say that a lot of things can be challenged in the courts. My expectation is that there will be constitutional challenges.