Lawyers say $58 million in new federal funding announced for court administration may not be enough to reduce the Federal Court’s rapidly growing immigration caseload.
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Lawyers say they do not yet know how new federal funding for court administration will translate into faster processing at the Federal Court, even after the government earmarked $58 million to address the court’s caseload.
Chief Justice Paul Diner said in an emailed statement that the Federal Court does not currently have additional details on how the confirmed funding will be distributed among its stated purposes.
The Federal Court hears immigration-related matters including visa applications, refugee claims, admissibility cases and removals, as well as cases connected to other areas of federal jurisdiction such as intellectual property, national security and Indigenous rights.
Diner said the court’s workload has ballooned to nearly 31,000 proceedings commenced as of Sept. 30 this year, up from about 7,600 across all of 2020.
More than 27,000 proceedings started this year are immigration cases. Diner previously said in an August interview that judges and court staff have had to work evenings, weekends and vacation days to handle a caseload that has been growing largely because of immigration matters.
The budget says the $58 million is earmarked for the Courts Administration Service, which serves the Federal Court, the Federal Appeal Court, the Tax Court of Canada and the Court Martial Appeal Court of Canada. The documents published Nov. 5 indicate the funding is intended to address the Federal Court caseload, support Official Languages Act compliance, help with a translation backlog and modernize court infrastructure.
The extra funding is set to begin in the 2027/28 fiscal year and continue for four years, averaging $14.5 million annually.
Joannie Fogue, spokesperson for Justice Minister Sean Fraser, said the funding is meant to “strengthen the national courts,” respond to resource challenges and build workload efficiencies, while allocation details are still being worked out. “We are continuing to work through the details and implications of the funding commitment and are awaiting further information on the how allocation will be distributed,” she said in a media statement.
Immigration lawyers questioned whether a modest multi-year increase will be sufficient given the scale of the growth. Jacqueline Bonisteel, an Ottawa-based immigration lawyer, said the funding is welcome but that the Federal Court’s immigration caseload has grown substantially since 2020 and that the resources available to the court are not enough to handle the magnitude of the increase.
Bonisteel said it can take “upwards of two years” to get an immigration case through the court.
Zeynab Moayyed, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer, said problems extend beyond court funding, pointing to shortages of registry staff and delays in routine paperwork. She said tasks that previously took about a day to process, such as filings for a judicial review, now take weeks.
Moayyed said part of the increase in caseload is tied to more mandamus applications filed to force decisions when people face long delays.
Both lawyers said Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has made changes aimed at speeding up processing, but that the resulting approach has shifted more issues onto the court. Bonisteel said the department could ease the Federal Court’s workload by streamlining reconsideration requests before matters are sent to the court, describing the issues as multi-faceted and requiring multi-faceted solutions.
The Immigration Department says it uses AI and advanced analytics tools under human oversight and that the tools do not make decisions. According to the department, the technology is meant to assist with tasks such as triaging applications, identifying routine cases, generating case summaries and answering client questions through chatbots, with its first AI strategy released earlier this year aiming to reduce backlogs and wait times.
Moayyed said long delays cause “a great deal of distress” for people waiting for decisions, describing how immigration lawyers have also become the people clients turn to while their cases remain unresolved.
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