The Federal Court has launched a pilot project to streamline the judicial review of rejected student visa applications.
The Federal Court said that this year, it was on track to receive 24,000 immigration filings by the end of December. That is approximately four times the yearly average the court experienced in the five years before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a statement.
The pilot is called the Study Permit Pilot Project. Under this program, the court promises that those who apply for a judicial review of their rejected student visa will receive a resolution in five months instead of the usual 14 to 18 months.
Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton said the pilot project will not require a hearing and will allow judges to rule on leave and judicial review simultaneously.
“This will be a win-win for applicants, who will save significant time and costs, and for the Court, which will save scarce judicial and registry resources,” he said in a statement.
This initiative is in partnership with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and members of the Federal Court Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Law Bar Liaison Committee.
This comes days after Global News reported that nearly 13,000 international students had applied for asylum in Canada in the first eight months of this year.
Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31, a total of 119,835 refugee claims were made in Canada. Of these, 12,915 were claimants who were on either study permits (11,605) or study permit extensions (1,310), the department data said.
Global News asked the department for a breakdown of how that compares with applications from claimants on study permits dating back to 2015-16 but officials said they needed more time to provide that data.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller said in an interview with Global News that a “growing number” of international students are claiming asylum in order to stay in Canada after being allowed in on student visas, calling it an “alarming trend.”
Speaking to Mercedes Stephenson in an interview that aired Sunday on The West Block, Miller said those claimants are using the international student program as a “backdoor entry into Canada,” often to lower their tuition fees, and that universities and colleges must improve their screening and monitoring practices to weed out bad actors.
He said his department is studying the issue and suggested further reforms to the program were being explored.