OTTAWAAn increase in asylum claims in Canada could eventually mean a staggering 11-year wait for a hearing and $2.97 billion in social supports for claimants in the meantime, an internal government analysis has concluded.
The Immigration and Refugee Board has been trying to whittle down the current backlog, but received no new money in the latest federal budget.
With 2017 application numbers expected to far exceed earlier projections, the board simply cant keep up, says the memo, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.
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The Immigration Department memorandum was drawn up this spring as a flood of people illegally crossed into Canada from the U.S. to claim asylum, dominating headlines and raising pointed House of Commons questions about the integrity of the borders and the immigration system.
The department was asked to explore estimated backlogs at the Immigration and Refugee Board and the associated wait times under different scenarios, following a meeting about the U.S. border-crosser issue in March.
Since January, at least 2,700 people have been intercepted by the RCMP between legal border points; most went on to file claims. The memo does not directly address the impact of the border crossers, though certain sections were redacted.
But those numbers are only part of the mix.
Asylum claims have been steadily rising since 2015; that year, there were 16,115, and in 2016 there were 23,895. As of April this year, the last month for which data is publicly available, there were already 12,040 claims in the system.
The memo projects that claim levels will hit 36,000 this year and one scenario looks at what happens if they reach that level and continue to rise by 20 per cent a year after that.
This scenario best reflects current concerns around increased volumes of claimants observed to date in 2017 and takes into account overall increases in asylum intake from 2015 to 2016, it says.
The memo goes on to say that by the end of 2021, the new system inventory would grow to approximately 192,700 claims, equivalent to 133 months worth of output from the board, or a wait time of approximately 11 years.
