The Decibel - Secret Canada: The 'black hole' of Canada's immigration system

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

Canada’s immigration system is overwhelmed. Cases are backlogged and little information is being communicated to applicants. This has led to a surge of access to information requests, which has created another backlog, and has left people trying to settle in Canada in the dark.Tom Cardoso, an investigative reporter with The Globe, explains why people started using this workaround to get information on their immigration cases in the first place, and why things are likely going to get worse.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

This feeling of not knowing what is happening was eating us. It put a lot of stress on me, on my wife, on my daughter. And I would wake up during nights thinking about it, what could be done. And it was a big stress for me. Sunkar Shagambayev is one of thousands of people wrestling with Canada's immigration system. He applied for permits for him and his family to come to Canada from Kazakhstan. Sunkar, his wife, and his son were allowed into the country. But his adopted daughter, Sabika, was not.

And we thought that, okay, maybe it's like three months of separation, and that's fine. You can live through it. You can imagine that it's going on, like, I don't know, sending her to summer camp. Sunkar had to leave his daughter behind, hoping it would only be a few months

before she was approved to come. That was back in December 2019, three and a half years ago. Sabika and her family are still separated. It's really sad for me, because I wasn't here for her when she was growing up,

when she had some issues, when she needed my advice, when she needed help. I understand that the things I missed, they will never be reversed. Sunkar has been trying to figure out why Sabica's applications have been denied. But IRCC, Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada, has been quiet. For a long period of time, it was complete silence. And we tried to get through it via ATAP requests, contacting members of parliament, calling to IRCC, issuing web forms.

But it was very hard to understand what's going on. It felt like it was just in limbo, like nobody's touching our file. Sunkar has filed nine access to information requests to IRCC to try to get to the bottom of what's going on. It was like hopelessness. The constant feeling of waiting and no response at all from anyone. No information. So lack of transparency. And you could have made completely

different decisions knowing that it would be three and a half years. So I wouldn't go for this separation with my daughter for so long if I knew this. Canada's immigration system is overwhelmed. And as the immigration cases pile up, so do the access to information requests about them. Investigative reporter Tom Cardoso is back on the podcast for the second installment of the Globe's Secret Canada project. He's going to tell us about the consequences of Canada's broken access to information system and its ripple effects on the lives of people hoping to settle in Canada. I'm Mainika Raman-Wellms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Tom, thanks so much for being back here. Yeah, it's been a whole week. A whole week and more stories. Tom, thanks so much for being back here.

Yeah, it's been a whole week. A whole week and more stories. So we just heard Sankar's story about trying to get his daughter to Canada. He said he was filing information requests to figure out her immigration status. Why are people like Sankar filing information requests to IRCC? Well, IRCC does not have the structures or systems in place to share information proactively with people who are applying for any kind of immigration status in Canada. So if you're trying to enter the country and get permanent residency or citizenship or even certain kinds of permits, you apply and then you don't hear back basically until either you're rejected or you're approved or in some cases if they need additional information.

But because there's no information, your only recourse is to file these access to information requests. Okay. And how common is this? Like how many people are doing what Sunkar is doing and actually filing these requests? A lot of people. Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada does the most access information business in the government. They receive 80% of all federal access information requests, or ATIPs as we call them. So they are an enormous part of the access information system at the federal level. I have some numbers here. Please, yeah. So over the last decade, IRCC has seen a 763% increase in access requests from roughly 20,000 a year in 2012 to 177,000 in 2022.

Wow. Okay. So these are very big numbers and it's a steady increase, it sounds like. Oh, it's a straight line upwards. Every year, it's growing really significantly, really, really quickly. There's a lot of requests here. I guess I'm trying to really understand why, Tom. How is this the best way to get information about your file? IRCC collects a lot of information on applicants, and they store them in these case files. And these case files have, you know, your medical history, your banking information, notes from the immigration case officers. And all of that information is really, really important to figuring out where your file is at. But none of that is

shared with applicants. And so there's no way to figure out the status of your application. You know, is the case file officer waiting on documents from a bank? Is there an issue with a medical exam? Is there some irregularity that has hung up the process? You don't know about any of that stuff until you get rejected. Or if you're really insistent, you call, you get a lawyer potentially or consultant to do all this legwork for you. So the end result is that hundreds of thousands of people over the years have realized that their only recourse is to file an access information request, which forces the

government to disclose that information to you. So essentially, it's kind of like these people are applying and their information kind of goes into a black hole and they don't really know until it comes out the other end what's happening. Exactly. It is really a black hole. This information goes in and you only find out what happened when you get the refusal letter. And even that refusal letter or acceptance letter, but let's take the refusal letter example for a second, saying you've been denied for X and Y reasons. Those reasons are really, really basic and simple. And so you have to go and do the legwork. And this is where the access information requests come in. Just to get into the guts of how IRCC works here, GCMS is the Global Case Management System. This is the

software that runs immigration case files, basically. So it's the beating heart of IRCC and the immigration process. The problem with GCMS is that it was built, it's been a while now. And while it has been updated, it hasn't been updated to the point where people can access their own files easily. So this is information from GCMS that people are filing requests for. They're trying to get information from that system. Yeah, they literally call them GCMS notes. That's the term for it. And what that looks like, imagine you took a spreadsheet or a database and just dumped all the information row by row on a piece of paper. And so these files can be 30,

40, 50 pages long. And there are all these case notes from immigration officers. So who is actually filing these requests? Are these always just individuals? Right. There's roughly three types of groups that are filing these requests. First, you have individuals who are filing these requests themselves, doing it all themselves. They go to the IRCC access information portal, type in all their information, submit it, pay the $5. The second group is lawyers and consultants. So you may have hired an immigration consultant or a lawyer to handle your case. They may file on your behalf. The third group are these businesses that have turned this into a bit of a cottage industry where they basically file access information requests on applicants behalf. And the reason that those businesses exist is that some people don't have standing to file

access information requests in Canada. You can only file an access information request if you are a permanent resident or a citizen. And so you need to use a proxy service to file these requests. But I've spoken with people who run these businesses, and it's very funny to talk to them because they almost uniformly tell me that they wish they didn't have to have that business in the first place. I spoke with this man, Manmeet Rai, who runs a company called GetGCMS.com, which requests information from that system that we discussed earlier, GCMS. He doesn't want to have to do this because it slows down the process.

It's not, you know, by his own admission, not a great use of the access information system. It's not what it was designed for. So, you know, this is a real issue that there's a gap in how IRCC is disseminating information, and these businesses are filling it. And so this guy, Mamit Rai, who you talked to, how many access to information requests does he actually end up processing?

Oh, goodness. Overall, he told me he processes somewhere between 5,000 and 9,000 access requests a year, which is a lot. And, you know, he's a known quantity to IRCC. They've written about him in emails that he then shared with me. He and others are called bulk requesters by IRCC, and they're a real thorn in IRCC's side because they're part of the reason why IRCC is getting so many of these requests in the first place. Interesting. Okay, so you've got all of these people on their own filing for this information. You've got immigration lawyers filing more requests and companies also who are doing it for people.

I mean, Tom, how is IRCC able to process all of these requests? Well, you know, they kind of aren't. They are keeping their head above water, but only barely. I spoke with a former director general of the Access Information Office at IRCC. His name was Michael Olson. I think he started in 2014 and retired in 2018. And during that time, he could already see that the number of requests coming into IRCC was starting to increase. There was an accelerating number of requests coming in

each year. And so he started warning his superiors. He would go every year to these meetings and say, you know, we're seeing a lot of requests. I'm really worried. We're going to hit a wall in a few years. He'd go back the next year and say, we're going to hit a wall in two years. The next year, we're going to hit a wall next year. And eventually they did hit that wall. And that's the point at which all of the IRCC processes and systems started to not be enough to be able to handle these requests. So you end up with a situation where IRCC is receiving an objectively enormous number of requests, much larger than any other department in the government. And it's starting to have all these knock-on effects too. So the speed of processing is starting to slow down.

In some cases, people are filing a lot more complaints. And then there's also the problem that IRCC has become such a behemoth when it comes to access information that they're starting to hire people that work in the rest of the government to work for them instead. So there's a lot of poaching of access information officers who are a limited resource in the government. So there's all of these secondary issues that are now starting to become apparent because of the enormity of the access information office at IRCC. We'll be back in a minute. Okay, Tom, at the root of all of this, it really seems to be that people don't have their information from IRCC. So I guess, you know, why doesn't the IRCC just give people more information about their cases? Like, why can't people just like log on to a website or

a portal or something and get updates on where their immigration case is at? So I think there's a couple of reasons for that. First is that IRCC made a very conscious operational decision many years ago to focus on processing as many immigration cases as they could. And that meant that they were focusing less on providing information to applicants. So they were aware that people were starting to file more access requests. I mean, Michael Olson was warning them, others were warning them too. But IRCC chose to focus on processing immigration files. And they did that by communicating less with applicants. So that's number one.

Number two is that IRCC also has a built-in risk model. The idea that the more information you give applicants about how to work through the immigration process and what's going on with their file, the higher the likelihood is that they will find ways to hack that system to their advantage, to gain an immigration benefit, as they call it. So the immigration process is starting to be a little bit more automated now. So if you know the types of things that you have to put on application to get yourself pre-approved, it may not require as much human review, which means that you could get approved more easily. So there are concerns that if IRCC communicates more with applicants, gives them more information about their own files,

people will find a way to exploit that. But I have not spoken with anyone that's told me that if we were to disclose more information, it would lead to an increase in immigration fraud. I spoke with a former ADM, Assistant Deputy Minister of Operations, who's effectively in charge of all case officers for IRCC. He's the head operations person at IRCC. And he told me, yeah, like these files should be given to the applicants. It's their information in the first place. It's information about them. Yeah. I mean, Tom, you were talking before about Michael Olson, that former director of IRCC.

He was raising alarm bells years ago about the volume of requests that were coming in. I mean, why hasn't this been fixed yet? The issue is ultimately that IRCC saw this coming and made a very conscious choice not to address it. The person responsible for the immigration system is the immigration minister, right? And I spoke with a lot of public servants currently and formerly at IRCC who told me that this all rolls up ultimately to the minister. The minister has been warned about that successive ministers have been warned about this for years, and nothing has changed. So when we look at the problems that IRCC is facing now, the problems that the access information system federally is facing because of IRCC, I think the people that have to be looked at for answers are those ministers. But ultimately, yeah, this is a problem of political will. If the

minister wanted to address this, they could have done that. And they could have done that years ago. And that problem is exacerbated by the fact that we have very aggressive immigration targets for Canada in the next couple of years. Last year, the government announced that it was going to admit 500,000 new permanent residents a year by 2025. To put that number in perspective, in 2019, Canada admitted 341,000 permanent residents. So we're talking a lot more people. And a lot of those people are going to be filing access information requests as a matter of course, because they're going to need information about their files. Yeah. And Tom, IRCC is a government department. What has the government

said about what it's going to do about all of this? Well, I've tried multiple times to speak with the minister, Sean Fraser, but they haven't made him available to me. So I've gone back and forth with them a little bit on the specifics of how they're going to fix this. They have a plan called the Digital Platform Modernization Project that's supposed to essentially be an upgrade or replacement to GCMS. But everyone I've spoken to has told me that that is years away from, you know, fruition. And in the meantime, people like Sunkar and others are going to be having to file one, two, three, four access

information requests to get their information. In some cases, those access requests could take months to be filled. So that's a lot of time if you're trying to start school in the fall. I spoke with people who had to defer their university for a year because they didn't get their immigration status in time. Just lastly here, Tom, you mentioned before about Canada's immigration plan, right? We're going to be bringing in half a million people starting in 2025 every year. So, I mean, given what we heard from Sunkar about how difficult the process is, and your reporting too, which shows how clogged up the system is, I mean, what's going to happen in a year and a half when we start to bring in so many more people and these applications,

the number of applications is going to rise? Yeah, well, the access information system within IRCC is already strained. They've been trying to find ways to keep their heads above water. Because again, this is not what the access information system was built for. People in 1983, when this law was passed, weren't trying to get immigration applicants information. That wasn't their primary purpose. It was about providing information to people in Canada about how the government functions. This has become a weird workaround, essentially, because people don't have access to their information. It's absolutely a weird

workaround. Yeah. So the other wrinkle with all of this is that there was a small federal regulation change that happened in 2022 that meant that a lot more people are now able to file information requests to the government. So a brief primer on access law in Canada. It's going to be very fast, I promise. We have the Access Information Act and we have the Privacy Act. And the Access Information Act is what journalists, researchers, regular people use to learn about government operations. Give me this briefing note, give me this report, blah, blah, blah. The Privacy Act is used to request information about

yourself. And the Access Information Act is the one that I mentioned earlier, doesn't allow you to file unless you are a permanent resident or a citizen. But in 2022, the Privacy Act was quietly changed to allow anyone in the world to file a request. You don't have to have any kind of status in Canada whatsoever. You can just file it and it's free. And there's no reason why you can't file a Privacy Act request for your immigration file because it's ultimately information about yourself. So IRCC, seeing that this was coming down the pipeline, put together some predictions on the kind of growth that they could be seeing in requests. And, you know, those numbers are pretty staggering. So that 2021 memo estimated that if one out of every 20 applicants were to file a privacy request, the department

would receive 332,000 access to privacy filings in the year ending March 2023, so a few months ago. If one in five people exercise those new rights, that number would be 706,000. If we use that one in five metric and consider the way that information requests are growing currently, IRCC would be facing 926,000 requests a year by March 2024, which is an astronomical increase. Yeah. And meanwhile, people like Sunkar are still struggling to get information about their status and where things are at. And IRCC is struggling to provide that information, too.

They're struggling at less than 200,000 requests a year right now. If it's 900-something thousand, I can only imagine what the system is going to look like then. Tom, thank you so much for your work here and for speaking with me today. Yeah, of course. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Welms. Our summer producer is Nagin Nia. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.