Refugee & Asylum Claims

No. A Canadian asylum claim can only be made from inside Canada or at a port of entry. There is no form you can file from abroad, and anyone offering to file one for you is not telling you the truth.

The route from outside Canada is resettlement, and you cannot apply for that directly either. You must be referred by the UNHCR, another designated referral organisation, or matched with a private sponsorship group in Canada.

If you are outside Canada and at risk, registering with the UNHCR or the relevant authority where you are is the practical first step, because referrals flow from that registration.

If you have close family in Canada, a family sponsorship application may be considerably faster than any refugee route, and it is worth checking that first.

Long. At the end of July 2026 there were 268,058 claims pending at the Refugee Protection Division. That is down from a peak of 300,347 in December 2025, and the Board has been finalising claims far faster this year, but the backlog remains very large.

IRCC's own internal material states that claimants could wait over three years for a decision. There is no published service standard, so we will not quote you a figure we cannot support.

This is why the practical questions matter so much: your work permit, your children's schooling and your healthcare coverage will shape your life far more than the hearing date will, at least for the first few years.

Yes, and for most people this is the single most important practical step.

You can request a free open work permit inside your online claim. It is issued once two things happen: your claim is found eligible, and you pass the immigration medical exam. An open permit means you are not tied to one employer. Family members included in your claim can apply too. Once you have the permit, apply for a Social Insurance Number.

Your children can attend school from kindergarten to grade 12 without a study permit. Post-secondary study does need a permit, which is free for claimants but requires a medical.

Healthcare is covered by the Interim Federal Health Program while your claim is in progress. Your provider must be registered with the programme, and you need to show your document at every visit.

If your claim was found ineligible, a temporary public policy from 26 March 2026 means an existing work permit is not cancelled, and some people without one can apply.

An agreement between Canada and the United States under which each country treats the other as a safe place to claim asylum. In practice it means people arriving in Canada from the United States are usually sent back to make their claim there.

Since 25 March 2023 it applies across the entire land border, including internal waterways, not just at official crossings. That closed the route many people previously used.

There are four exception categories: certain family members in Canada, unaccompanied minors, holders of certain Canadian documents, and a narrow public interest exception mainly involving death penalty cases. The family member definition is broader than most people expect and can include siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and grandparents.

One consequence is often missed: people found ineligible under this agreement are also barred from a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment. That is not true of the one-year or 14-day rules, which is why identifying exactly which rule applies to you matters so much.

Act immediately. Every route from here has a short deadline.

Most refused claimants can appeal to the Refugee Appeal Division: 15 days to file the notice of appeal and 45 days for the full record, both from when you received the decision. Most appeals are decided on the written record rather than at a new hearing.

Some people cannot appeal at all, including where the decision says the claim has no credible basis or is manifestly unfounded, where the claim was withdrawn or abandoned, or where you were referred as a Safe Third Country exception at a land border. In those cases judicial review at the Federal Court may be the only route, and you have 15 days to start it.

After appeal rights are exhausted, a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment may follow, though there is generally a 12-month bar. A humanitarian and compassionate application may also be possible, but it does not stop a removal.

Do not wait to see whether something changes. It will not, and the deadlines are unforgiving.

Refugee hearings at the Immigration and Refugee Board are private and not open to the public. That is a deliberate protection, because the risk of your account becoming known in your home country is itself part of what the system is guarding against.

Your conversations with a licensed representative are confidential as a matter of professional obligation. If you are worried about who might see your information, say so at the first conversation. It is a reasonable question and nobody should make you feel awkward for asking it.

One practical point: the eligibility checker on this page runs entirely inside your own browser. Nothing you type into it is transmitted to us or stored anywhere.

These are recognised grounds. Canadian refugee law treats sexual orientation, gender identity, being a woman, and HIV status as falling within membership of a particular social group, which is one of the five Convention grounds.

Claims of this kind often turn on evidence that is difficult and painful to assemble, precisely because people have spent their lives concealing the thing they are now asked to prove. A well-prepared Basis of Claim matters enormously here.

There is also a dedicated resettlement route from outside Canada: the Rainbow Refugee Assistance Partnership, extended to 31 December 2029, supports up to 50 privately sponsored LGBTQI+ refugees a year, and a separate stream operates through Rainbow Railroad.

If this is your situation, you are entitled to ask for a representative you feel safe speaking to, and to have interpretation arranged.

Alongside the rules already in force, IRCC has announced a modernised asylum process that has not yet been implemented. It would come through changes to the regulations rather than new legislation, and IRCC has said it is expected over the coming months.

The announced elements include a single simplified online application, referring only claims that are ready to be scheduled, a requirement that a claimant be physically in Canada for the Board to decide the claim, treating voluntary return to the country of alleged persecution as abandonment, removing inactive cases, and making a removal order effective the same day a claim is withdrawn.

None of this is law yet, and we will not describe it as though it were. We say so here because several sites already present these as current rules, which could lead someone to make a decision on a false basis.

We update this page when things actually change, and we date what we state.