The recent federal budget included $58 million in additional funding court administration but the Federal Court still doesn’t have a clear picture of how it can be used to reduce a massive caseload that has grown rapidly since 2020.
“At the moment, the Federal Court doesn’t have additional details on how the funding confirmed will be distributed among the stated purposes,” Chief Justice Paul Diner told The Canadian Press in an emailed statement on Thursday.
The Federal Court hears immigration-related issues such as visa applications, refugee claims, admissibility cases and removals. It has responsibility for upholding the law in other areas related to federal jurisdiction, like intellectual property, national security and Indigenous rights.
The court asked for additional resources to handle a caseload that’s ballooned to nearly 31,000 proceedings commenced as of Sept. 30 this year — up from about 7,600 in all of 2020.
More than 27,000 of the proceedings started this year are immigration cases.
Diner told The Canadian Press 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 in large part because of immigration matters.
The budget says the money 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 single mention of it in the documents published Nov. 5 says the new funding is meant to address the Federal Court caseload and to help the Courts Administration Service with Official Languages Act compliance, a translation backlog and the need to modernize court infrastructure.
The extra $58 million in funding is set to begin in the 2027/28 fiscal year and continue for four years, averaging $14.5 million annually.
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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. But exactly how it will be allocated aren’t yet known.
“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.
While the court awaits more details, immigration lawyers question whether the additional money from Ottawa will do much to move cases through the court more efficiently, given how the demands have grown.
“Any increase in funding is positive, but it’s a modest increase and the increase in the Federal Court’s immigration caseload has been anything but modest,” said Jacqueline Bonisteel, an Ottawa-based immigration lawyer.
While Bonisteel said the additional funding is welcome, she doesn’t see how $58 million spread over four years will be enough, given the spike in the caseload.
“It’s not going to be enough to cope with the issues that the court’s seeing right now, a 600 per cent increase in immigration caseload since 2020,” she said.
“The current compliment of judges and the current resources that the court has just simply aren’t enough to deal with that magnitude of an increase.”
Bonisteel said it can take “upwards of two years” now to get an immigration case through the court.
Zeynab Moayyed, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer, agreed the problems at the Federal Court go beyond what $58 million could fix.
Moayyed cited a shortage of registry staff in the court and said routine paperwork that used to take about a day to process — like a filing for a judicial review — now takes weeks.
Moayyed attributed the increase in caseload in part to more people filing mandamus applications meant to force a decision from the Immigration Department when people are facing long delays.
But both Moayyed and Bonisteel said the quality of Immigration Department decisions has declined since the feds adopted artificial intelligence tools and new software in a bid to review and process applications more quickly.
The lack of human interaction at the department is turning small problems into large ones and pushing them onto the court’s plate, they said.
“Previously, (lawyers) could reach out to (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada), to program managers, to visa office managers and so on. And … if it was a mistake they would receive a reconsideration and that matter would be reopened, and if it wasn’t a mistake, (the applicant) would understand what they did wrong,” Moayyed said.
“But with the coming into effect of those tools, at the same time we had the shutting down of informal ways of addressing areas that happen in the system, and applicants started turning to Federal Court.”
Bonisteel said the department could ease the Federal Court’s workload by finding a way to streamline requests for reconsideration before they get shunted to the court.
“These are very multi-faceted problems and they need multi-faceted solutions. So it’s not just about court funding. It’s about addressing the systemic issues that are leading to the increase in the court’s caseload,” she said.
The Immigration Department has said it uses AI and advanced analytics tools under human oversight at all times. The department says these AI tools do not make decisions and are meant to assist with tasks like triaging applications, identifying routine cases, generating case summaries and answering client questions through chatbots.
The department’s first AI strategy, released earlier this year, says the goal is to get the technology to reduce application backlogs and wait times.
Moayyed said those long delays are causing “a great deal of distress” for people stuck in the system.
“Our job, in addition to being immigration lawyers, has become confidant and the therapist for a client, listening to them talk about having their life on hold and in limbo until they get a decision,” she said.