Canada.com
[small error in the article below - advisory panel members resigned days - not weeks - after Fleury resigned]

Refugee backlog grows as Harper government fails to appoint adjudicators

Joan Bryden, The Canadian Press
Published: Monday, March 12, 2007

OTTAWA -- Thousands of refugee claims are bogged down in a growing backlog because of the Harper government’s failure to fill vacancies on the Immigration and Refugee Board.

More than a third of the positions on the board are currently vacant as the government prepares to change the appointment process, giving the immigration minister a greater voice in choosing adjudicators.

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Tories took power a year ago, there were only five vacancies on the IRB. By last July, that had grown to 18. Today, 43 of 119 board member positions are vacant.

As well, 17 positions have been eliminated over the last year.

Over the same period, the average length of time it takes to process a refugee claim increased to 12.3 months from 11.7 months.

More ominously, the number of pending claims - those at varying stages of the refugee determination process - jumped to 23,495 by the end of 2006, an increase of 3,000 over the previous year.

Not all those pending claims can be considered backlogged, however. Board spokesman Charles Hawkins says that for optimal efficiency it’s useful to have 15,000 to 20,000 claims wending their way through the system at any time.

Still, using that criteria, a backlog of at least 3,495 refugee claims has developed over the last year. And that’s following a banner year in 2005 in which the IRB, for the first time in a decade, managed to reduce the backlog to essentially zero.

Hawkins said the backlog swelled in part due to “lower productivity towards the last half of 2006 just because of the lack of decision makers.” He added that there was also a slight increase in the number of refugee claims filed.

Potential appointees have been screened and identified by the IRB but “appointment of candidates is the prerogative of the government,” Hawkins said.

Immigration Minister Diane Finley’s office had no comment on the mounting backlog and offered no explanation for the tardiness in filling vacancies at the IRB.

However, Liberal immigration critic Omar Alghabra said the government appears to be stalling on appointments until changes are made to the process that will give the minister more power over the selection of adjudicators.

He noted that Finley has signalled her intention to adopt a recent recommendation from the Public Appointments Commission, which proposed streamlining two different appointment advisory bodies into one and giving the minister a bigger say in choosing adjudicators.

That, said Alghabra, “gives credence to the theory that the government is trying to push its own friends and agenda in the appointment process.”

Just prior to release of the commission’s report, the respected chairman of the IRB, Jean-Guy Fleury, tendered his resignation. While he cited personal reasons, speculation was rife that Fleury quit because of months of tension with the government over the appointment process.

A few weeks later, five members of the existing advisory panel on IRB appointments resigned, openly protesting what they view as the impending politicization of appointments.

For them, the proposal to give the minister more power over appointments, was only the last straw. One of the five has said the Conservative government has been interfering in the process for months, refusing to reappoint adjudicators and rejecting qualified candidates simply because they had some link, however tenuous, to the previous Liberal regime.

Harper has fended off such criticism, maintaining that his government is simply trying to clean up the patronage mess left by the Liberals.

But Alghabra said it’s “ironic” that Harper appears intent on stacking the IRB with partisan appointments, after winning election on a campaign promising a higher ethical standard and an end to patronage. He said it’s hard to imagine any other explanation for letting so many vacancies go unfilled.

“There’s no shortage of qualified candidates and there’s certainly no shortage of files that are waiting to be examined. So what are we waiting for?”
© The Canadian Press