The Liberals broke the asylum system, Editorial Jamie Sarkonak on our inept immigration minister,
- National Post – (Latest Edition)
- 28 Feb 2026
- National Post View
Now that the immigration system — in particular, as it relates to refugees — has come under the harsh light of public scrutiny, Justice Minister Sean Fraser is lashing out at its critics: “We are dealing with, in some instances, some of the most vulnerable people in the world,” he said Wednesday, implying that anyone who touches the issue is a bully.
But the Liberal handling of the immigration file — including Fraser’s personal handling of it from 2021 to 2023 — gives Canadians plenty of reasons to question the asylum system. Immigration officials for years have been mass-approving refugee applications from some of the most dangerous countries in the world by simply rubber-stamping paperwork without an in-person hearing. Untold numbers of fraudsters, terrorists and criminals now have protected person status in Canada, giving them access to generous state benefits and a much higher bar to deportation if convicted of a crime.
A full narrative of this disaster was put together in a January C.D. Howe report by James Yousif, a former immigration tribunal adjudicator and policy director for the government. In 2016, the federal refugee tribunal began getting overwhelmed with claims to the point where it faced the prospect of dissolution. In a desperate bid to keep the lights on, it designed a shortcut to approve asylum claims, reduce the backlog and boost output numbers. This was called “file review.”
“File review,” according to the government, fast-tracked claims from countries and claim types with over an 80 per cent acceptance rate, or those supported by reliable identity documents, or those where the “evidence (of risk) is not ambiguous,” or those where “complex legal or factual issues do not often arise at the hearing.” This was construed to the public in one departmental report as a resource-saver which cut processing time in half.
Among those countries that qualified for rubber-stamping? Afghanistan, Burundi, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Sudan, Syria, Turkey and Yemen. People claiming asylum from those places are more likely to be in genuine danger, but they are also places of terror and organized crime. Not only does the fast pass through security screening put Canadians in danger, it allows terrorists to follow real refugees who settle here. This has been the plight of our Yazidi refugees — former sex slaves of ISIS — who reported in early 2019 that they were being harassed over the phone by men speaking Arabic, and over texts that referred to their enslavement.
Little could be done to remove a country or claim type from the fast-track list, because once it was on that list, it would generate so many positive asylum decisions that it became an even stronger candidate for fast-tracking. As Yousif put it, “The policy feeds itself with data that have been produced by the policy itself.”
Naturally, Canada’s acceptance rate for asylum claims shot up, rising from 63 per cent in 2018 to 80 per cent in 2024.
This is far from the first bombshell to hit the reputation of the Liberal immigration system. This week, Parliamentarians have been aghast at a Parliamentary Budget Officer report from earlier this month, which projects that the federal health plan covering asylum applicants and rejects will climb to $1.5 billion in 2030.
Over the summer, it became known that the immigration department forgave thousands of foreigners’ criminal records, rendering them legally admissible to Canada. Meanwhile, there are nearly 30,000 people whose deportations are “in progress” according to the Canadian Border Services Agency — which means they’re still here, and they shouldn’t be.
These deportation figures don’t reflect the scale of the problem because they represent only those people who failed to meet an already low bar. And while the most recent example of look-theother-way admissions comes to us from Yousif’s report on the asylum system, similar negligence has occurred in the area of temporary work permits. In 2024, the Toronto Star reported that immigration officials had been directed to skip fraud-prevention measures, even as immigration fraud was happening all over Canada.
Not even the checks on the system can be relied upon to correct these problems. Immigration tribunals hire a portion of their decision-makers to fill diversity quotas, and in 2021, as Yousif points out, they drastically lowered standards for new hires, dropping legal and subject-matter expertise requirements.
A step above, at the Federal Court, it was little different: the feds have prioritized diversity and activism in their judicial appointments, resulting in a bench staffed by gates-open judges like Avvy Yao-yao Go, famed for giving second chances to the most obvious abusers of asylum imaginable. Most recently, Go gave a Pakistani refugee another shot at keeping his status, even though he travelled freely to Pakistan six times after being resettled here — a clear demonstration that he doesn’t need Canada’s protection.
There was a time in Canada when our capacity to shelter good people in need was a point of pride. Now, many Canadians are wondering how many of the people taking advantage of their hospitality are either good or in need at all: just in October, the Environics Institute found that 43 per cent of Canadians agreed that “many people claiming to be refugees are not real refugees.”
Despite Minister Fraser’s bad-faith accusations against those who question the legitimacy of the “vulnerable people,” it was up to him and his colleagues to ensure immigration decisions could be trusted. They failed. (National Post, February 28, 2026)
Newly minted housing minister Sean Fraser, who recently said he will be increasing housing affordability without bringing down real estate prices. The sentences are mutually exclusive. Photo by Justin Tang/The Canadian Press