Good morning, honourable chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
I'll begin with very brief remarks about myself. I am an Ontario-based lawyer and partner at Battista Migration Law Group, a Toronto-based immigration and refugee law firm. Our firm specializes in assisting the LGBTQ+ community in navigating the immigration system.
Today, I want to focus my remarks on the immediate and on-the-ground impacts that immigration lawyers like myself are seeing and have been observing since the passage of Bill C-12.
To begin with the broader context, as of December 31 of 2025, there were just under 300,000 refugee claims pending before the IRB. There's no question that this represents a significant backlog, and I recognize that one of the primary intentions behind Bill C-12 was to reduce the number of fraudulent claims entering or remaining in the queue. However, what we have seen in practice since this legislation came into force has not been an orderly reduction in backlog, but rather a climate of confusion, urgency and, in many cases, panic.
In particular, the imposition of an arbitrary timeline has resulted in hundreds of genuine refugee claims being caught in the crossfire. Individuals with legitimate protection needs are being excluded or disadvantaged, not because their claims lack merit but because they do not conform to a rigid procedural deadline.
This has had a disproportionate impact on certain vulnerable groups. For example, claimants with diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics often require time to come to terms with their identity and to feel safe in disclosing it. Many of these individuals come from places where education on this topic is so limited that they do not possess the cultural understanding or even the vocabulary to begin discussions. It is neither realistic nor humane to impose a fixed timeline on such a deeply personal and often difficult internal journey.
Bill C-12 has not actually resolved the issue of backlog. Instead, it has effectively shifted the volume of cases from one highly trained decision-maker to a much less qualified one. This shift raises serious concerns from a legal perspective. PRRA officers do not receive the same level of specialized training as IRB decision-makers do in assessing complex refugee protection claims. In my experience, there is a higher likelihood of rejection by a PRRA officer than by an IRB decision-maker due to the officers having less training and errors in applying the law. This leads to more unreasonable refusals, which in turn generate an increase in judicial review applications before the Federal Court, thereby transferring and compounding the existing backlog at another level of the system. This does not effectively target the issue of fraudulent claims.
I want to be clear, the objective of maintaining integrity in the asylum system and preventing fraud is both valid and necessary. Canada must have mechanisms in place to ensure that the refugee protection system is not abused. However, these mechanisms must be effective and proportionate. Concerningly, this new legislation unfairly punishes the masses on the basis of a few bad actors.
This is not the only example of overly broad policy aimed at curbing fraud having this type of effect. I note that in March 2025, IRCC announced the removal of points for job offers in the express entry system, citing a significant increase in fraudulent LMIAs as the issue. However, rather than introducing more stringent oversight and reporting requirements for employers seeking LMIAs, points were removed from all applications in the system, impacting thousands of highly skilled and qualified candidates who had gained those points credibly.
We are seeing these same effects with the passage of Bill C-12. The introduction of a strict one-year time limit to make a refugee claim does not meaningfully deter fraudulent claims. What it does do is capture genuine individuals who may have initially pursued other immigration pathways in good faith based on policies and promises provided by the Canadian government for a path to permanent residence.
The new refugee eligibility criteria are premised on the assumption that a genuine refugee claimant will always seek asylum at the first possible opportunity. This assumption is highly inconsistent with established jurisprudence. Canadian courts have repeatedly held that a delay in making a claim is not determinative of whether that claim is genuine.
In closing, I would urge this committee to consider whether the current legislative approach is truly addressing the challenges that it set out to solve, or whether it is instead displacing them while increasing the vulnerability of those the system is meant to protect.
Thank you.