Immigration Canada’s completely failed asylum processing policies are not due to a lack of resources or chronic underfunding. These are indeed significant failures in management and internal dysfunctions which mean that some of the most vulnerable people, among those hoping to find asylum in Canada, find themselves waiting on average three years before receiving an answer. , an expectation that is as unacceptable as it is inhumane.
The Auditor General of Canada, Karen Hogan, has difficulty explaining how, seven years after committing to putting in place an immigration processing mechanism focused on the response capacity of offices and the flow of applications, Immigration , Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has failed to deliver on its promise.
The picture revealed by the auditor last week is not rosy. He points to a system paralyzed by its operating defects, incapable of analyzing the results of the changes implemented, and little focused on transparency and honesty although people filled with hope languish for years before obtaining a return. .
“I’m scratching my head a little bit with this department,” said Karen Hogan, whose audit body monitors, among other things, the government’s efficiency practices. “There are a lot of issues that they are aware of. »
His office looked at eight immigration programs within the federal system. Even if it notes certain improvements, notably in the field of family reunification and that of economic immigration, the most miserably long delays fail in the category of the most fragile: those who seek land where they will be safe. Even though the department has set “service standards,” that is, average deadlines of 6 to 12 months that it should respect, it generally exceeds them in a number of categories. It itself flouts its own rules – notably that of “first come, first served”, because certain more recent requests have moved to the top of the pile, while others have been gathering dust below for years, noted the auditor.
One of the major “issues” that the auditors focused on concerns the capacity of IRCC’s 87 offices, located in Canada and around the world (and their 2,600 employees), to process their respective flow of requests. So, is it normal that the offices in Rome and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, have exactly the same staff, but the African office receives five times as many requests? No, answers Karen Hogan, who relies not only on common sense, but also on the intention expressed by the ministry itself to practice fairness.
This immobility is perplexing.
The dysfunctions also lead to discriminatory practices, notes the auditor, who notes that treatment results are different depending on race and country of origin. While an automatic method of processing a portion of the application is offered to some — and speeds up the process — we notice, for example, that Haitian applicants are penalized, because only the good old manual method is offered to them.
The federal Minister of Immigration, Marc Miller, reacted to this avalanche of criticism by recognizing that his department could do better. From this eternal complaint about undue delays in processing immigration applications, we must remember the apparent paradox between what the administrative machine succeeds in doing and what the political apparatus promises to do. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues to promise the world, and still euphorically defends his intention to receive 500,000 immigrants per year by 2025. But how many thousands of them will remain stuck in the bureaucratic maze of the responsible ministry?
At the end of 2022, the auditor reports, 99,000 asylum seekers were still awaiting a decision in their case. Without a radical change in the way things are done, it will take several years for IRCC to get through the requests that are already in the system. And that’s without counting those who continue to arrive. In 2022, the number of applications submitted under the refugee program was three times higher than the reception capacity in this category.
Reports and analyzes present columns of numbers and scroll through statistics. But refugees and humanitarian protection people are among the most vulnerable group of applicants awaiting a response from Canada. For some, a yes or no could mean life or death.
If it cannot process their request within a reasonable time, Canada at least owes them honesty and transparency, rather than joviality and window dressing.