TACKLING THE BORDER BACKLOG

THERE ARE SIGNS THE SYSTEM IS ADAPTING

Assil Alnaser landed in Toronto in December 2018, more than four years and four countries after she left her home in Syria. In her early 20s, Alnaser, now 28, was a student protester against the Assad regime. When she was 23, she was arrested and jailed. After her release, she fled to Jordan before making her way to Turkey, then Europe, then across to the United States, where she studied as a master’s student at Syracuse University.

Less than 10 months after she arrived in Canada, Alnaser found herself in a hearing room in Toronto, pleading her case for refugee protection. Those 10 months seemed incredibly long for Alnaser, especially after the years she had already spent in transit. But by the standards of Canada’s chronically overstressed refugee system, her wait time, less than a year, was something close to a miracle.

Since 2017, more than 125,000 people have asked for asylum in Canada, an annual rate of entry that is more than quadruple what it was in 2013. More than 45,000 of those claims have come from so-called “irregular migrants” — asylum seekers who walked over the border into Canada at somewhere other than an official crossing. Many of those, tens of thousands, crossed over a ditch at the end of a single dead-end street in upstate New York and onto Quebec’s Roxham Road.

Last week, Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer made a campaign appearance at Roxham Road, where he called for a crackdown on what his party calls “illegal” border crossers. The influx of would-be refugees at Roxham, he told his audience, had undermined the confidence Canadians have in the immigration system.

It is true that the number of people walking into Canada and seeking asylum, though down from the historic heights of two years ago, remains high. At the IRB, more than 74,000 people are still waiting for a refugee hearing, up from less than 20,000 five years ago. Shelters are still straining. “The situation is crazy,” said Francisco Rico-Martinez, the co-director of Toronto’s FCJ Refugee Centre.

But beneath those raw numbers, there are some signs that the system has begun to adapt.

In the first two quarters of 2019, the number of asylum claims from irregular migrants finalized by the Refugee Protection Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board skyrocketed. From January to June 2018, the RPD finalized 2,740 irregular migrant claims. Over the same stretch this year, the board finalized more than 9,000 claims.

This winter, for the first time since the influx at Roxham Road began in 2017, the RPD finalized more cases from irregular migrants in a quarter than it took in new claims. That means that the backlog of new cases — just of irregular migrants — has begun to shrink, even if minutely, for the first time since the border crisis began in 2017.

Those numbers may appear slightly rosier at first blush than they really are. For one thing, a claim “finalized” by the RPD isn’t really final. Most rejected asylum seekers have the right to an appeal. For another, the total number of asylum claims per quarter, as opposed to those just from irregular migrants, is still slightly higher than the number of clearances per quarter.

The total queue is still growing, in other words, if at a dramatically slower rate than it was this time last year.

Still, some former critics of the government’s handling of this file see reason for cautious optimism. “The changes they’re trying to make are substantial. … There’s always ways they could improve, but they’re putting their money where their mouth is,” said Ronalee Carey, an immigration and refugee lawyer in Ottawa. “Kudos to them.”

Refugee lawyers, advocates and analysts say those improvements were achieved using three broad measures. The first and most important was money. The federal government put $208 million of new, temporary money into the IRB in 2019 alone. That allowed the board to hire 50 new RPD adjudicators and, just as important, the staff to support them, part of a broad attempt to make the whole process more internally efficient.

The board also began streamlining cases from countries, like Syria, that tend to produce almost entirely positive claims. Some asylum seekers from more than a dozen countries, including Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq and Yemen are now eligible to have their claims reviewed without a full hearing. In some cases, that means they can get to a “yes” just by submitting documentation. For others, like Alnaser, it means being eligible for a shorter, less intensive in-person hearing.

“The board,” said Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, “realized that it better get its act together.”

Not everyone, though, believes these changes are all positive. One former IRB adjudicator, who asked to remain anonymous, thinks the move away from full hearings for every claimant is undermining Canadian security. He also believes the IRB reforms are making Canada more attractive to migrants looking for an end-run around Canada’s immigration system.

“To my mind, these policies are acting as a magnet,” he said. “As long as there’s a presumptive ‘yes’ category, people are going to come. It’s just common sense.” Rico-Martinez, meanwhile, said adjudicators are getting pushed to finalize far more cases, far faster.

The larger concern for refugee advocates and members of the refugee bar, though, is that the funding that fuelled all these reforms is only temporary. If whoever forms the next government decides not to extend it, “we’re screwed,” said Crystal Warner, the national vice-president of the union that represents RPD decision makers.