Your refugee hearing will be scheduled at the discretion of the Refugee Protection Division (RPD), generally between 8 to 24 months after you receive your Refugee Protection Claimant Document or “brown paper”. Nothing can be done to speed this process up, but your counsel may, from time to time, remind the RPD of how long you have been waiting.
The Refugee Protection Board’s current target for completing cases is that 80% of cases will be finalized within 36 months or less. The most recent results are that 80% of cases are finished within 37 months.1 The average wait time when last calculated (April 2023) was 22 months.2 This means that a wait of 2-3 years is perfectly normal.
Although the Act,3 Regulations,4 and Rules5 state that your hearing will be scheduled at your eligibility interview, and that it will be held within as little as two months, this has never been the usual case.
- Canada, Immigration and Refugee Board, 2022 to 2023 Departmental Results Report, https://irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/reports-publications/planning-performance/Pages/departmental-results-report-2223-r.aspx#s31, see under “Results Achieved”. ↩︎
- Canada, Immigration and Refugee Board, 2022 to 2023 Departmental Results Report, https://irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/reports-publications/planning-performance/Pages/departmental-results-report-2223-r.aspx#s31, see under FN 2. ↩︎
- Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, SC 2001, c. 27, s. 100(4.1), https://canlii.ca/t/7vwq#sec100. ↩︎
- Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations, SOR/2002-227, s. 159.9, https://canlii.ca/t/7xsp#sec159.9. ↩︎
- Refugee Protection Division Rules, SOR/2012-256, s. 3, https://canlii.ca/t/8r6d#sec3. ↩︎