A new computer system used by the federal Department of Immigration raises serious concerns across Canada. The tool, dubbed Chinook, was created without legal oversight, according to documents filed in Federal Court, does not keep immigration officials’ decision notes or force them to open evidence presented by applicants. to temporary stays.
It is used in particular to speed up the processing of study permits, for which the number of applications has exploded for 10 years. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), however, has not been transparent about its operation so far, deplore immigration lawyers and researchers from across the country.
Many of these lawyers believe that the system is part of the reason for the significant increase in study permit denials. The refusal rate is even higher in Quebec than elsewhere in the country, and Ottawa is refusing in a growing proportion of French-speaking students from the Maghreb and West Africa, revealed The duty last Friday.
The establishment of Chinook in 2018 is indeed temporally consistent with the increase in refusal rates for these study permits. IRCC denies any influence, ensuring that the tool “does not fundamentally change the way requests are processed,” wrote a spokesperson by email.
In the past three years, several lawyers have started to be alarmed at the preformatted refusals they have started to receive, all of which use the same phrasing. “We also see more and more that the reasons for refusal do not correspond with the evidence that has been submitted,” says lawyer Lou Janssen Dangzalan, based in Toronto.
A couple from the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) recounted precisely this scenario in our pages. Their application for a study permit was refused within a week, on the grounds that they had not sufficiently proved their financial capacity and their willingness to leave Canada after their studies – two elements however largely supported in their initial application, insisted their Quebec lawyer, Krishna Gagné.
Tensions between efficiency and equity
Faced with these increasing cases, “we often wonder if the agents really open the documents”, asked Mr.me Won in interview.
The testimony of Andie Daponte, an IRCC official, in Federal Court last July confirms that the new system gives no indication that all the information provided has been opened and considered.
It is a case between this federal ministry and Abigail Ocran, a student from Ghana refused, which forced to open a first window on Chinook, which one did not know the existence until now.
Mr. Daponte described the mechanics of this in an affidavit: In a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, the main information of a study permit applicant is transferred from another system, the Global Case Management System.
Each of these sheets contains the information for multiple applicants, line by line, for processing bulk applications.
At this stage, an assistant summarizes the evidence received for the decision-maker. “But the file can include 100 pages of evidence that will be summarized in two or three lines in Chinook. It’s a caricature of evidence. How can we believe that this summary is correct and complete? »Believes Me Janssen Dangzalan.
Mr. Daponte further explained in court that IRCC had asked its officials to delete their notes specific to a file generated on Chinook, in particular “for questions of privacy”. These notes cannot then be found.
“The opacity of the decision-making process is therefore of the most concern”, affirms Me Won. “If the notes are destroyed, it is a destruction of evidence,” said Mr. Dangzalan. The two lawyers see it as “a lack of procedural fairness”.
Andie Daponte admitted in Federal Court “that there were no specific legal considerations” taken into account during the initial development of Chinook.
A larger question
The advantage of this system is the increase of up to 35% in the volume of requests that some IRCC offices can process, according to documents presented in court. Study permit applications increased 222% between 2011 and 2019.
For its detractors, it is only a way of refusing “expeditiously” the applications for permits, deplores for example the lawyer Will Tao, who lives in British Columbia.
The other central problem in the debate, say these immigration lawyers, is precisely that too little is known.
At a time when all Western bureaucracies are starting to use this kind of new technology, including artificial intelligence, to deal with a growing number of immigration applications, the issue of transparency is indeed gaining in urgency, underlines researcher Lucia Nalbandian.
A member of the Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University in Toronto, she is studying in particular the automated decision-making system already used by IRCC to sort through requests for temporary stay from India and the United States. China.
In particular, it concludes that learning algorithms should be subjected to further scrutiny, if not a formal evaluation process. New Zealand is betting on systematic transparency as to the algorithms used.
“I don’t understand why IRCC isn’t more transparent. We certainly need more transparency, since we are at the beginning of the use of artificial intelligence in migration management ”, concludes Mme Nalbandian.