Immigration professionals and people applying to enter Canada say they’re increasingly getting refusal letters they think don’t make sense — leading them to wonder whether their cases are being fully and properly reviewed by a human being.
Toronto immigration lawyer Mario Bellissimo began to have concerns after seeing multiple examples, such as a case he worked on where the officer refused an application on the grounds that no birth certificate was included, even though he says a copy of the birth certificate was attached to the application.
“It worries me as an applicant and as a lawyer for an applicant: what is actually being looked at?” Bellissimo told CBC News.
Immigration professionals like Bellissimo are pointing to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s use of computer-assisted decision-making technology as the problem.
Although IRCC acknowledges it has developed computer programs that allow officers to sort and process applications faster, it rejects the idea these programs affect the thoroughness of officers’ reviews.
IRCC says human officers make the final decision on eligibility and admissibility for immigration cases. It says refused applicants get “thorough correspondence” from the department.
“Decisions about whether an applicant meets these requirements are made by highly trained officers who assess each application against the relevant program criteria,” IRCC said in an email statement to CBC News.
But multiple immigration professionals told CBC News they’re concerned some IRCC officers are refusing applications without checking all the submitted documents.
“[Refusals] should never infringe or breach procedural fairness. And in order to do that, it is required that the officer looks at every single document in the file,” said Annie Beaudoin, a retired senior immigration officer for IRCC who is now an immigration consultant.
“And lately, there is evidence that that is not done.”
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has faced immense public pressure to deal with backlogs and long processing times, which can take years in some cases.
Numbers released by IRCC at the end of July indicated there were more than 2.2 million applications in IRCC’s systems. Of those, more than 901,000 had exceeded the department’s time standards for processing and were considered back-logged.
Former IRCC officer on procedural fairness in visa applications
Beaudoin, who worked for 15 years in the immigration department’s Los Angeles office, says that when she started in 2004, there was “much less pressure.”
She says that by the time she retired in 2018, managers would regularly remind officers of quotas for the number of cases to process in a given time. She felt there was a lot of pressure to go fast, and less emphasis on the quality of the work.
The department began to use a computer model in 2018 called “advanced data analytics” to sort cases and help officers make eligibility decisions. It claims the system can speed processing by up to 87 per cent.
In an email, IRCC said advanced analytics uses “machine learning technology” to find patterns in data, such as how likely it is that a specific type of applicant has been approved by an officer in the past.
It says advanced analytics doesn’t recommend refusals; only human officers can do this, “based on their own review.”
For the human review step, IRCC developed a spreadsheet-based tool called Chinook to allow officers to examine and approve or refuse multiple cases at the same time. It offers officers boilerplate language to explain their decision.
IRCC describes Chinook as a tool to “simplify” the displayed information for the officer. The agency emphasizes the tool itself doesn’t use any artificial intelligence and doesn’t make or recommend decisions.
But immigration lawyer Bellissimo, who has made submissions to parliamentarians on IRCC’s use of new technology, worries it can lead officers to miss or skim over parts of applications.
He says he has seen some decisions with time-stamps that suggest the officer only considered the case for a couple of minutes, which in Bellissimo’s view should not be viewed as a “badge of honour.”
“It does not instill the confidence we need in an immigration system to foster a belief that we are processing applicants in a fair and transparent manner to the benefit of Canadians,” he said.
A 2018 Chinook user manual released under access to information suggests an officer can use the system to examine up to 1,000 cases at the same time.
Vancouver immigration lawyer Will Tao, who wrote a master’s thesis on IRCC’s use of technology, is concerned that officers can use Chinook to take “bulk” actions, giving the same answer to multiple cases. The feature can be used for both refusals and approvals.
Internal IRCC documents state officers can use Chinook to make decisions on up to 150 applications, which IRCC says can all be added into its information management system at once.
In a 2023 briefing note, IRCC described bulk processing as important for handling growing numbers of cases efficiently.
“This bulk and blanket treatment of individuals definitely has had a negative impact on the system,” Tao told CBC News.
Tao acknowledges IRCC’s view that the tools do not affect the officers’ decisions, but he thinks the “line between the two is quite thin.”
“What it does do is it alters decision-making,” he said.
Chinook was first rolled out in some IRCC offices in 2018. An IRCC document released under access to information in 2022 praised the efficiency in processing cases that offices from Ankara to London were able to gain by using Chinook.
It even noted that computer problems in some offices meant “strong processing officers were down to 60/day compared to their usual 75+/day.”
Beaudoin says she saw but never used an early version of Chinook before retiring from the L.A. office.
In the last year, in her work as an immigration consultant, she says some of her clients have received refusals she feels defy logic. She cites the example of a work permit refusal on the grounds that only one employment-related document was submitted, when in fact multiple documents were included.
“As a [former] immigration officer, I have a lot of sympathy and compassion, because officers have a lot of pressure to do a lot of decisions extremely fast,” she said. “And that’s when these problems occur.”
In its statement to CBC, IRCC says it trains officers to “carefully and systematically” assess all applications and make decisions “based on the information presented before them.” It adds that it’s up to the applicant to satisfy the visa officer that they meet the requirements for a visa.
Beaudoin says the department is willing to acknowledge and reconsider errors, but she says a refusal based on an incomplete review of a file is unfair.
Other immigration professionals are equally worried.
In an open letter to IRCC on Aug. 13, the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association wrote, “The introduction of automated and analytic tools to assist decision makers is in our opinion directly linked to the increase in decisions that are neither meaningful nor well-reasoned.”
When applicants disagree with an officer’s reasons for refusal, they may ask IRCC to reconsider. That was the case for Chandni Ajwani and Jay Dave, whose application to be reunited in Canada was initially refused.
Ajwani is a Canadian citizen and lives in Montreal, while Dave is an Indian citizen who lives in Ahmedabad, India. The couple married in July 2023.
They have a spousal sponsorship application underway, which is expected to take some time to complete. In the meantime, Dave applied for a visitor visa so he could see Ajwani in Canada.
“When you’re staying at a distance, that is something that pinches you a lot,” Dave said.
In December 2024, an officer rejected the application for a visitor visa, saying Dave had insufficient funds and that the visit wasn’t consistent with a temporary stay.
The couple, who work in finance and human resources, disagreed with that reasoning, and told CBC they submitted many documents to prove their incomes.
The notes on the officer’s reasoning for refusal didn’t mention a Canadian spouse or that Ajwani has an active sponsorship application for Dave.
Their immigration consultant, Beaudoin, expected to see at least some acknowledgement of that relationship, and believes an officer gave insufficient attention to the file.
This led Beaudoin and the couple to ask for a reconsideration. Dave’s visitor visa was eventually granted in March 2025.
Ajwani says she was upset and felt the application wasn’t examined fairly the first time.
“There was anger, I’m not gonna lie. And the sad part is I know that’s not how Canada functions. Our immigration system is quite fair,” she said.
IRCC plans to keep using computerized tools to assist its officers, saying in a statement it has assessed the impacts and considers technology “essential to modernizing our immigration system.”
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