OTTAWA — The Immigration and Refugee Board is giving up on following regulations that say refugee claims must be heard within certain time limits.
The board says it is swamped and it no longer has the capacity to follow the deadlines.
Instead, the board says it will now hear claims on a first-come, first-serve basis.
The measures were put in place by the previous Conservative government as part of a board overhaul of the refugee process that linked how claims were handled based on where they were from.
The IRB says the regulations did carve out an exception for operational limitations and in recent months, they’ve had to remove hearings from their schedule for that reason.
Over 43,000 claims for asylum were referred to the IRB in 2017, a record-setting level, due in part to a surge of asylum seekers at the Canada-U.S. border.