A new C.D. Howe Institute report reveals a quiet transfer of power inside Canada’s asylum system; one that happened without debate, transparency, or measurable results.
Canada’s asylum system has been quietly rewritten, not by Parliament, not by cabinet, and not by the department responsible for immigration, but by an unelected tribunal operating through internal directives that never saw the light of democratic scrutiny. According to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) approved 24,599 asylum claims without holding a hearing between 2019 and 2023. That number alone should stop the country in its tracks. But the real story is the machinery behind it — a machinery that has shifted control of a major national policy area away from elected officials and into the hands of bureaucrats who answer to no voters.
The report’s author, James Yousif, a former senior official at both IRCC and the IRB, states plainly that “Canada’s asylum system has quietly shifted toward accepting 80 percent of asylum claims, in many cases without questioning claimants or conducting a hearing.” That is not an administrative adjustment. It is a fundamental rebalancing of power inside Canada’s immigration system, and it happened without a single parliamentary vote.
The IRB’s “File Review” policy, which allows claims to be approved without an oral hearing, began as a pilot in 2017 and was cemented in 2019. Instead of being debated in Parliament or designed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the policy was implemented through a Chairperson’s Instruction — an internal memo with the power to override the default requirement for hearings. The C.D. Howe report notes that this Instruction “effectively creates exemptions” to the statutory framework, even though such exemptions were never approved by elected officials. In other words, a major national policy change was made through bureaucratic fiat.
The report raises the concern directly: the IRB may be exceeding its statutory authority by using internal directives to reshape how claims are adjudicated. It questions whether the IRB has the legal mandate to create new categories of claims that bypass hearings and warns that this approach “raises questions about the legality” of the policy. The implications are unmistakable. Parliament did not authorize this shift. IRCC did not design it. The IRB — an unelected tribunal — imposed it. And Canada’s obligations under the UN Refugee Convention now shape outcomes more directly than any decision made by elected representatives.
This is not how immigration policy is supposed to work in a parliamentary democracy. Yet here we are.
The numbers in the report reveal a system drifting further from democratic oversight with each passing year. Between January 2019 and February 2023, the IRB approved 24,599 asylum claims without ever questioning the claimant. During that same period, Canada’s asylum acceptance rate soared to roughly 80 percent, far higher than comparable countries, while the backlog ballooned from 17,000 to nearly 300,000 claims despite major increases in staffing and funding.
The File Review policy was sold as an efficiency measure, but the C.D. Howe Institute concludes that it did not reduce the backlog, did not speed up processing, and did not improve system performance. What it did do was create a global perception that Canada’s asylum system is generous, lightly scrutinized, and easy to navigate.
The report also warns that front‑end security screening cannot replace in‑person questioning. Yousif writes that oral hearings are “irreplaceable,” because they reveal inconsistencies, misrepresentation, and inadmissibility issues that paper files simply cannot. This is not a theoretical risk. It is a structural vulnerability in a system that now approves most claims without ever speaking to the claimant.
The report cautions that the policy may undermine adjudicative independence, encourage weak or fraudulent claims, and increase Canada’s attractiveness for irregular migration. These are not partisan talking points.; they are concerns raised by someone who worked inside the system.
What is most troubling is the governance vacuum surrounding the policy. A major shift in Canada’s asylum system was implemented without debate, without transparency, without evidence, and without measurable results. It continues today, largely unnoticed by the public and unexamined by Parliament. The IRB’s mandate is to provide fair, independent adjudication, but a system that approves the majority of claims without a hearing — and without demonstrable efficiency gains — risks eroding public confidence in the institution itself.
Canada’s humanitarian reputation depends on credibility, and credibility depends on process. Process, in turn, depends on transparency and democratic oversight. At the moment, the File Review policy fails on all three. If Canada is going to accept tens of thousands of asylum claims without hearings, Canadians deserve to know why the policy exists, whether it is lawful, whether it is effective, whether it is safe, and whether it reflects the values Canadians expect from their refugee system. Right now, those answers are unclear — and that is the problem.
If Parliament is no longer in control of how asylum claims are processed, Canadians deserve to know who is.
Photo: Gemini
