Gender, Sexual Orientation, and the One-Year Refugee Bar: A Computational Study of Bill C-12 and Canadian Refugee Adjudication

Abstract

In March 2026, Bill C-12 amended the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to make refugee claims ineligible for referral to the Refugee Protection Division where they are made more than one year after the claimant's first entry to Canada. Affected claimants are diverted to a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment (PRRA), which is typically decided by an immigration officer on a paper record, with no guaranteed oral hearing, no appeal on the merits, and no automatic stay of removal pending judicial review. The government defended the bar partly on the premise that genuine refugees claim promptly. Critics countered that late claims are concentrated among vulnerable groups, particularly people fleeing persecution based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression (SOGIE). This article tests those competing premises. Using artificial intelligence tools, checked through human review, it examines nearly 29,000 published decisions of the Refugee Protection Division, the Refugee Appeal Division, and the Federal Court from 2006 to 2025. The results of this study demonstrate that, first, while most claimants claim within a year, roughly one in nine in the published record does not, and gender and SOGIE claims are significantly overrepresented among these late claims. Second, among late claims, refusals of gender and SOGIE claims are more likely than refusals of other claims to be overturned on appeal or judicial review. Late claims on other grounds, by contrast, fare somewhat worse on review than timely claims. The one-year bar therefore removes the hearing, the appeal, and the stay from the late claimants for whom those safeguards have been doing the most work. The article recommends repealing the bar or, failing that, adopting exemptions, procedural protections, and greater transparency in PRRA decision making.