Lawyer Zeynab Ziaie Moayyed sees the toll that increasing delays at the Federal Court can take on her clients as they try to challenge immigration decisions that didn’t go their way.
Some clients expect to wait more than a year. That’s enough time, the Toronto-based lawyer says, to lose a full academic year or their immigration status, which could leave them in “limbo.”
“The human costs are significant,” she said in a recent interview.
The delays come from the number of people asking for a judge to review an immigration officer’s decision, which is projected to rise to unprecedented levels this year.
According to the court, the average length of time it took to deal with an immigration case in 2024 was 14 to 18 months. Moayyed said before the surge in filings, a wait of six to eight months was more typical.
The number of immigration filings is so high the chief justice of the Federal Court of Canada is concerned it will become an access to justice issue.
“The surge in our immigration workload is quite extraordinary and I’d have to say exceptional,” Chief Justice Paul Crampton said in a September interview from his Ottawa office.
The court hears many types of cases covered by federal law, including national security issues, Indigenous issues, maritime law and patent and copyright cases.
It also hears immigration cases involving refugees, denials of study and work permits or visitor visas.
Before the pandemic, data from the court shows it received an average of 6,000 of these types of applications per year. In 2022, that number began to rise, spiking to more than 24,000 in 2024.
Refugee cases have remained stable, but non-refugee cases have gone up more than four times.
From January to the end of this August, the court received 18,887 new filings.
Federal Court chief justice on increase in immigration filings
Courts administration staff project they will receive between 31,000 and 33,000 immigration cases this year.
“At the end of the day, it’s confidence in our immigration system and the integrity of the immigration system. It’s confidence in the justice system, confidence in the courts,” Crampton said when asked what he thinks is at stake for Canadians.
“It’s access to justice, because if people have to wait, well, you know the old axiom: justice delayed is justice denied.”
Crampton said when immigration officers make more decisions on applications, the Federal Court sees a bigger workload as well. That’s because some applicants who get refused will try to get the decision reviewed by a judge.
According to publicly released data on temporary residents by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), new applications and requests for extensions for types of temporary resident visas hit a high of 6.3 million in 2023. Millions of those requests were not approved.
“We are bearing our share of the brunt of some of those decisions,” Crampton said, but added that the courts are not well set up in terms of funding to meet the challenge.
The Courts Administration Service (CAS) is responsible for handling funding and support services for the Federal Court, the Federal Court of Appeal, the Court Martial Appeal Court of Canada and the Tax Court of Canada.
In a statement, the agency said it received $208.7 million in funding for 2025-2026. It said it received some “time-limited” funding for asylum cases that ended in March 2023, and has not received additional funding since, despite alerting the government to the “emerging crisis.”
Underfunding “undermines judicial independence, directly [impacts] access to justice and raises serious concerns for the integrity of the justice system,” the CAS said.
The chief justice said the courts staff have looked for ways to streamline their work.
“If you have a growing workload and a workforce that’s not growing, then you have to figure out how to do things more efficiently and streamline certain things.”
In an email, Lola Dandybaeva, manager of media relations for federal Justice Minister Sean Fraser’s office, said the minister “values the important role of the Federal Court in ensuring access to justice and appreciates the perspective shared by the chief justice.”
Dandybaeva said the minister’s office will continue to discuss these issues with the courts.
At the beginning of September, the Federal Court cut down the standard length of time for certain types of immigration hearings and limited the length of documents that could be filed.
The changes apply to hearings about study permits, work permits and temporary resident visas. Crampton said these are generally more straightforward than refugee cases, so the changes are an effort to allow the 56 Federal Court judges to handle more cases per week.
He didn’t rule out the possibility that more changes will be needed.
“I’m quite concerned that in the absence of additional resources, delays are going to increase and we may have to take other measures that will reduce the services that the court provides to the public.”
Immigration lawyers have been speaking out about some of the reasons they believe people are taking issue with IRCC officer decisions and choosing to go to court to seek judicial review.
These include concerns that officers are making errors and may not be properly reviewing files, a concern that the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association (CILA) has linked to processing technology developed by IRCC to enable officers to make faster decisions.
In an open letter to IRCC, the association also raised concerns about the Federal Court workload and proposed a number of methods of resolving complaints outside of court.
Moayyed, a CILA member, says at the same time the IRCC has developed processing technology for officers, she feels it has grown more difficult for applicants who believe an officer has made an error to get help within the department from case managers or program managers.
“We used to reach out to program managers and there was a case review option in terms of applications, particularly those inside of Canada. But over the last few years, most of these channels have been closed down in terms of communication.”
Moayyed thinks IRCC staff are “overwhelmed” to the point the chances of getting a response are low.
“I don’t want to say it’s zero, but it’s become much less an effective way of trying to get a resolution on errors,” she said.
Moayyed believes this is contributing to more applicants seeking the court’s time.
IRCC told CBC it’s committed to a “fair and non-discriminatory application of immigration procedures” but wouldn’t speculate on suggestions for new ways to resolve complaints outside court.
It also said clients and lawyers should use a web form or telephone line to report errors.
Some immigration lawyers also point to boilerplate language in refusal letters from IRCC. Some of the department’s processing aid tools can generate standardized answers for officers who wish to explain their refusal.
In late July, the IRCC began to include officer decision notes alongside refusal letters to increase transparency. However, some immigration professionals told CBC these notes contained few details and CILA wrote they “continue to contain boilerplate grounds for refusal.”
Federal Court decisions have made clear that the use of processing tools and boilerplate language is not in itself problematic, and only the reasonableness or unreasonableness of the IRCC officer’s decision itself is at issue for the court.
However, immigration lawyer Mario Bellissimo says the way that decision is communicated is often generic and brief.
“Applicants look at this and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t fair,'” he said.
“There’s different reasons for people coming to Canada that are very important and they don’t feel that they’ve had that opportunity to be meaningfully heard in the application,” he said.
“And what does that lead to? Runaway litigation.”
Crampton, who is retiring in October, said Canadians can feel “comforted and satisfied” that they will get a fair and impartial hearing in court, and that the courts will “bend over backwards” to make timely decisions. But he raises a note of warning.
“If courts aren’t adequately funded, the rule of law will suffer and then democracy could suffer.”
