AI Immigration Decisions Under Scrutiny in Canadian Federal Court

The applicant had a PhD in immunology of aging and a credible path to Canadian permanent residence. What the refusal letter said she did for a living was wire and assemble control circuits, build robot panels, and program industrial equipment.

None of that was real. The job description did not match the applicant’s background and appeared to reflect information not submitted in the application, raising concerns about how the record was generated or reviewed. Her permanent residence application was denied based on qualifications she had never claimed. Her lawyer’s response was terse: “Something seriously went wrong here.”

IRCC’s official position was that “all generated content was verified by an officer.” An officer who read that file and found an immunologist’s credentials attached to an electrician’s job description should have caught it. The gap between IRCC’s assurance and that result is the central question the Federal Court is now being asked to answer, repeatedly. The case was first reported by the Toronto Star.

Chinook Can Review 1,000 Files at Once. That’s the Core Problem.

The tool at the center of most of these disputes is Chinook, an Excel-based system IRCC built in-house to let visa officers process applications more quickly. According to the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association, a single officer using Chinook can review up to 1,000 applications simultaneously. IRCC says the tool doesn’t use AI and that officers retain final authority on every decision. The Department of Justice, defending it in court, argued that Chinook “did not substantively affect the outcome” of decisions.

The Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association isn’t persuaded. Concerns have been raised about the lack of transparent quality control mechanisms and how working notes are preserved within the system. When an officer is reviewing a thousand files, the time available for any individual application creates limits that don’t appear in IRCC’s statements about human oversight.

Since 2017, IRCC’s AI-assisted tools have processed over 7 million applications. The department published its first official AI Strategy in February 2026. It reaffirms that no tool can refuse or recommend refusing an application on its own. That policy may accurately describe how the system is designed. Whether it describes how the system behaves at volume is the question that keeps arriving in Federal Court.

24,000 Cases and Counting

Federal Court immigration filings reached 24,667 in 2024, up from 6,424 in 2020. The first eight months of 2025 brought 18,887 new cases. Immigration now accounts for nearly 90% of the court’s docket in some recent quarters. Chief Justice Paul Crampton described the volume as “quite extraordinary and I’d have to say exceptional.” The court extended its perfection deadline from 30 to 75 days and cut the standard length of certain hearings just to keep pace. Registry staff are working under what the court itself described as “serious strain.”

People who might previously have accepted a refusal and reapplied are now seeking judicial review. Awareness that decisions can be challenged has spread, and so has awareness that some refusal letters contain errors that are hard to attribute to careful human judgment.

The Bar for Winning Is High

The legal standard for challenging an AI-assisted immigration decision is tougher than most applicants expect.

In Espinosa Cotacachi v. Canada (2024 FC 2081), the Federal Court rejected a challenge where the applicant argued that Chinook’s involvement made the decision procedurally unfair. Speculation about how the tool operates, the court held, isn’t sufficient. In Pjetracaj v. Canada (2025 FC 103), the court sharpened the standard: “clear evidence” is required to show the decision-maker improperly delegated authority to the machine.

In practice, that means documented discrepancies. If the refusal letter describes the wrong job, wrong dates, or wrong qualifications, the gap between what was submitted and what the decision reflects is the evidentiary foundation for any challenge. Time-stamps showing a file was processed in a matter of minutes can support an argument that the review was nominal. Broad allegations about AI aren’t enough. Specific, documented factual errors have a far better chance.

The PhD immunologist’s case is instructive precisely because the fabrication was concrete. A refusal letter that invents your profession is harder to defend than one that reaches a debatable conclusion based on the correct facts.

What to Do in the Next 60 Days

The deadline to apply for judicial review is 15 days for refugee decisions and 60 days for most others. The 75-day window is for perfecting an application after it’s already filed, not for the initial filing. Missing the filing deadline eliminates the option entirely.

My Visa Source immigration lawyers generally advise applicants to document factual errors immediately against what the original application actually said: the specific line in the letter, the specific document that contradicts it. If time-stamps suggest minimal review time for a complex file, note that as well. The stronger the documented discrepancy, the better the foundation for a challenge.

Whether Chinook is producing errors at a rate IRCC hasn’t acknowledged, and what “verified by an officer” actually means when one officer processes thousands of files, will continue developing in Federal Court. For the person holding a refusal letter that describes the wrong career, the timeline is more urgent than that. MyVisaSource works with applicants navigating exactly these disputes and can assess whether a documented discrepancy supports a legal challenge.

My Visa Source closely monitors immigration policy developments in Canada and the United States.