Canadians are increasingly told that tougher immigration rules equal a safer country. With Bill C-12, the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, now law, we are about to find out whether that is true.
We believe the opposite. The bill’s most consequential provisions will not stop insecurity at our borders. They will push it underground, where it is harder to see and harder to stop.
C-12 has two main issues that need to be corrected:
- It grants the immigration minister and department broad new powers to cancel immigration documents based on an undefined “public interest.”
- It denies a refugee hearing to anyone who crosses the border irregularly and fails to file an asylum claim within 14 days or who waited more than a year after first entry to claim asylum — retroactive to 2020. They may be shifted instead to a paper-based pre-removal risk-assessment process (PRRA), where successful applications are less likely.
Furthermore, PRRA decisions have never been subject to appeal before any specialized tribunal. As a result, judicial review in the Federal Court is the only avenue for challenging the decisions. The denial of hearings in C-12 is thus likely to increase the volume of cases in the Federal Court, placing additional pressure on an already strained judicial system.
There are four keys steps that need to be taken to fix these issues: amend C-12 to define the “public interest,” thus replacing ministerial discretion with a rules-based framework; restore the right to a refugee-protection hearing; create an internal risk-removal appeal mechanism; and suspend the retroactive application of the one-year rule.
The problems are widespread
Bill C-12 grants the government broad new powers to cancel immigration documents held by students, those on temporary and permanent resident visas, electronic travel authorizations and temporary work permits — on the basis of an undefined “public interest.”
Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab has acknowledged that the lack of definition is intentional. The legislation deliberately avoids specifying when or how these powers will be used — to preserve what she called “maximum flexibility.”
But a system governed by ministerial discretion rather than clear legal standards is less predictable, makes it harder to hold anyone to account and is more susceptible to the kind of selective enforcement that characterizes weak institutional states.
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In a strong state, the rules govern and officials are bound by law regardless of who is involved. When discretion replaces clear legal standards, outcomes depend on relationships and political will rather than written rules, which is precisely the condition political scientists associate with weak institutionalization. Canada has spent decades building the rule of law as a competitive advantage, but this bill borrows from a different playbook.
Also under Bill C-12, anyone who crosses the Canadian border irregularly and fails to file an asylum claim within 14 days or who waited more than a year after first entry to claim asylum — including anyone who entered Canada after June 24, 2020 — is barred from a hearing before the Refugee Protection Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.
The retroactive reach of that provision is striking. Metlege Diab told a Senate committee that 37 per cent of asylum claims filed between June and October 2025 — roughly 19,000 of 50,000 applications — would be disallowed under this measure.
People who have been in Canada for years may now find cases they believed were progressing to be suddenly foreclosed. Instead, they will be diverted to the PRRA, a paper-based process without an oral hearing, conducted by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers.
Consider people who fled Venezuela — a country plagued by many problems and where they might be in danger if returned — and who entered Canada through an irregular border crossing.
Often disoriented, traumatized and unable to find legal help, they missed the 14-day window. Under Bill C-12, they will never have their case heard.
They enter legal limbo — unable to regularize their status, ineligible for most government services and invisible to the institutions that might otherwise protect them. Because Venezuela is currently subject to a federal measure that suspends deportations to that country, Venezuelans cannot be deported, so are ineligible for the PRRA process, which applies only to people facing imminent removal.
Many individuals from all countries are confused by the process, and the complex legal language may lead them to misunderstand their options or, in some cases, decide to leave Canada, thereby exposing themselves to further risk.
This is where the security logic breaks down. People in legal limbo do not disappear. They become targets. Canadian cities are nodes in cartel-controlled drug-distribution networks originating in the same countries that many asylum claimants are fleeing. Pushing vulnerable people outside the formal immigration system does not wall off those networks. It exposes them directly.
Strip away the right to a refugee-protection hearing, as Bill C-12 does, and you strip away the right to have your case heard by a trained decision-maker.
Making these claims subject to the PRRA is likely to result in fewer acceptances and has been heavily criticized because that process lacks a guaranteed oral hearing, does not offer procedural protections granted at the immigration board and because its decision-makers do not have the independence or the expert resources of the immigration-board adjudicators to assess the merits of a claim.
Procedural issues compound the problem. Because the pre-removal risk-assessment process has no internal appeal mechanism, the Federal Court of Canada is expected to absorb a significant increase in judicial-review applications from people who previously were entitled to a refugee hearing but are now diverted to the PRRA.
That will further strain a judicial system that already faces a serious funding shortfall. Diverting resources to managing the fallout from procedural shortcuts is a false economy that weakens the very security screening that Canada needs to be rigorous.
Now that the bill is law, the question is what Parliament should do next. There are four specific interventions worth urgent attention.
Define the “public interest.”
The bill’s power to cancel immigration documents rests on a term the government has deliberately left undefined. Parliament should amend the legislation to enumerate the specific circumstances — fraud, national security, public health — under which this power may be invoked, thus replacing ministerial discretion with a rules-based framework that can be scrutinized and challenged.
Restore the right to a refugee-protection hearing.
The diversion of claimants to a paper-based PRRA process removes the single most important moment of human scrutiny in the system. Restoring oral hearings — or at minimum creating a right to request one — would preserve procedural fairness and the security intelligence those hearings generate.
Create an internal PRRA appeal mechanism.
The absence of any internal appeal means the Federal Court will be asked to hear every contested decision. A dedicated internal review body would reduce the judicial burden and provide a faster, cheaper remedy for wrongly decided cases.
Suspend the retroactive application of the one-year rule.
Applying new ineligibility criteria to people who entered Canada as far back as June 2020 — foreclosing claims they had no reason to believe were at risk — raises serious concerns that Parliament did not fully debate. A targeted suspension, pending a proper legislative review, would protect those most at risk while Parliament assesses the full implications.
Real security comes from institutions strong enough to process people correctly, not from systems designed to process them quickly and call it done.
Pushing claimants outside the formal system does not make the country safer. It makes the risks harder to manage.
