Canada's 2-Tiered Refugee System
A recent CBC investigation provides valuable information on how refugees from some countries are treated differently than others, but adopts anti-refugee framing about widespread fraud.
In December 2012, Conservative citizenship and immigration minister Jason Kenney, who spent the previous several years ranting and raving about “bogus refugees” and “false [asylum] claimants” who were cheating the system, announced plans to fast-track asylum claims from countries he deemed “safe.”
Starting that month, refugee claimants from 27 countries classified as designated safe countries of origin—all European Union states and the U.S.—would have one opportunity to make their case for asylum at the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). If they were denied, they would no longer have the right to appeal their case at the board and would be swiftly deported.
Kenney shelled out $3,000 to purchase six billboards in Miskolc, Hungary, where a large Romani population was becoming increasingly targeted by far-right forces, warning residents that if they tried to apply for Canadian asylum and didn’t have all their papers in order, they “will be processed faster and removed faster.”
Soon after, Kenney added an additional eight countries to the list, including Mexico, where a twice-rejected asylum seeker who was deported from Canada was kidnapped and killed by a drug cartel in 2009.
In 2019, three-quarters of the way through Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first term, a Federal Court justice ruled that treating asylum seekers differently based on assumptions about the country they’re from is unconstitutional, a ruling which Trudeau didn’t challenge.
But it turns out that this discriminatory refugee regime remains informally intact, even as increasing numbers of asylum seekers are accepted into Canada.
Aidan Simardone, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer and writer, told the Orchard that the way political leaders talk about refugees “shapes perceptions,” producing long-lasting “unconscious biases” in institutions of power.
“Even when the whole designated country of origin framework went away, you have all these cases of Romani people being denied refugee protection, people from Mexico being denied refugee protection and that legacy therefore continues on,” Simardone said in an interview.
In a Jan. 11 CBC investigation, journalists Tara Carman and Owen Leitch conclude that there exists “two systems for deciding asylum claims: one that produces mostly positive decisions for people from countries Canada has deemed to be sources of legitimate refugees, and another for everyone else.”
According to IRB figures the reporters cite, the number of successful Canadian asylum claims increased from 14,000 in 2018 to 37,000 in 2023.
From January 2018 through September 2024, the recognition rate, which calculates the percentage of accepted claims by excluding those that were withdrawn, abandoned or deferred, increased from 64% to 82%.
Carman and Leitch note the disparity in recognition rates of asylum seekers from various countries between January 2018 and September 2024.
Claimants from Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, representing a combined 35,000 asylum seekers, were accepted at a rate of 95%. Meanwhile, around half of asylum seekers from Mexico, Haiti, Nigeria and India, representing a combined 65,000 claimants, were accepted.
The CBC reporters contend this is a result of an increasing number of cases being handled without a hearing, based solely on the documents claimants submit, which is known as a paper review.
“Refugee claims cannot be rejected without a hearing, so paper reviews have only two possible outcomes: a positive decision, or a decision to send a case to a hearing,” write Carman and Leitch.
With a growing backlog of asylum claims—250,000 in September 2024 compared to 43,000 at the end of 2017—the IRB has opted to increase the number of paper reviews as a quick-fix for claimants from countries with historically high recognition rates.
While the CBC article contains valuable information, it’s framed around the assumption that Canada accepts too many refugees and that “the system is vulnerable to abuse”—the precise type of claims Kenney made vociferously when he was immigration and citizenship minister.
Simardone called this assumption “complete bullshit,” noting that the CBC article contains no data on fraudulent claims—”people literally making things up” to claim asylum—which from his experience “hardly ever happens.”
He said there’s far greater risk from IRB officials being “hyper-vigilant” and rejecting claims based on the “slightest discrepancy” in the claimant’s account.
“Every now and then there's cases of people who make false claims of having cancer and start a GoFundMe. Should we start shutting down GoFundMe and start turning people away from the hospital because there are some false claims? No, that'd be ridiculous,” said Simardone.
The CBC piece quotes Vancouver-based immigration and refugee lawyer Mojdeh Shahriari, who used to sit on the IRB, in which she evokes “common knowledge” that the asylum process “has been and is increasingly being abused.”
Shahriari raises the spectre of paper review documents being fabricated to argue that more IRB cases need to go to hearings, although it’s unclear from the story whether she’s aware of any incidents where that’s actually occurred.
“If there is no hearing, there is no scrutiny of the person's credibility. The door for abuse is always open,” Shahriari said.
But Toronto-based refugee lawyer Debbie Rachlis told the Orchard that an IRB hearing “very often ends up testing how good people are at being witnesses.”
“Most people are not great, but I will tell you that the people who are good tend to be literate and educated,” she said in an interview.
Rachlis noted that when politicians and media discuss potential abuses to the asylum seeking system, there’s often confusion about the definition of refugee, as established in the 1951 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, to which Canada is a signatory.
Under the convention, a refugee is someone who has a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
This definition excludes people who are fleeing horrific circumstances that are outside their control, including poverty and war, Rachlis added.
Failing to meet the convention’s narrow definition of a refugee, she emphasized, doesn’t make the claimant a “bad actor.”
“Some people don't meet the definition, but still have good reason to be afraid,” Rachlis said.
Part of the problem has to do with the biases of individual IRB adjudicators, who don’t require any formal legal training. There’s “nothing scientific” about their rulings, Rachlis said.
Research from Sean Rehaag, who runs the Refugee Law Lab at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, shows recognition rates from 2013 to 2023 fluctuated wildly by adjudicator, ranging from 2.8% to 100%.
In 2017, referring to an earlier version of these findings, Rehaag told the CBC that the individualized disparity in recognition rates demonstrate the need to “appoint people who have a solid understanding of refugee law and who are not predisposed to denying claims.”
Lubomyr Luciuk, a Royal Military College political geographer who denies Ukrainian nationalists’ participation in the Holocaust, served as an IRB adjudicator from 1996 to 1998, and again from a brief period in 2018.
During his initial tenure, he earned the nickname Dr. No for turning down 90% of refugee claimants.
“Be a liar. That’s the first lesson most claimants who come before the Immigration and Refugee Board learn,” Luciuk wrote in a September 2001 op-ed that was published in the Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald and Kingston Whig-Standard, which argued that Canada’s asylum system has it “a haven for … assorted terrorists, drug peddlers and war criminals.”
A January 2018 Global News investigation revealed repeated instances of IRB judges engaging in misconduct, including a 2010 incident in which an adjudicator demanded to see nude photos of a Ukrainian sex trafficking victim before denying her asylum claim.
When Simardone hears talk of too many refugees coming into Canada with insufficient scrutiny, he can’t help but think of the nearly 300,000 Ukrainian refugees who’ve made Canada home over the past few years through the Canada–Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET)—more than triple the number of refugees approved by the IRB from January 2022 through September 2024.
Beginning in March 2022, the CUAET opened Canada’s doors to an unlimited number of Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion of their country, providing them with free settlement services.
“I wish that was the case for everyone,” said Simardone.