C-12 Is Not Just an Asylum Bill

On March 26, 2026, a piece of legislation received royal assent that most immigration watchers have processed primarily through its asylum provisions. Bill C-12 — the Strengthening Canada's Immigration System and Borders Act — does tighten the asylum system in ways that matter. But the provision that deserves sustained analytical attention is less dramatic and more structurally consequential: the new group processing powers granted to the Governor in Council.

For the first time, Cabinet can issue orders that apply to entire classes of immigration documents simultaneously — work permits, study permits, temporary resident visas, permanent resident visas. It can cancel them, suspend them, modify them as a group, or pause the intake of new applications entirely. These are not powers that route through individual officers or adjudicators. They operate at the portfolio level, through order-in-council, published in the Canada Gazette and reported to Parliament, with full Cabinet approval required each time. The legislation includes one significant limiting clause: these powers apply to documents, not to immigration status itself. The government can cancel a work permit en masse; it cannot, through the same mechanism, strip someone of their permanent or temporary resident status. Whether that distinction constitutes a meaningful legal safeguard or a largely cosmetic one depends on how courts eventually interpret the practical consequences — and that question has not yet been tested. What is already clear is that C-12 has given Canada an executive instrument to manage immigration as a system, not as a collection of individual adjudications. That is a fundamental departure from how IRCC has operated since it was created.

The political context in which these powers arrive matters. IRCC's total application backlog has now fallen below one million — a milestone worth pausing on, given that it peaked above two million in the pandemic years. Work permit processing times are easing. The March 17 Canadian Experience Class draw invited 4,000 candidates at a CRS of 507, the lowest cut-off for that category in eighteen months; French-language proficiency draws have been landing consistently below 400. The intake machinery is working. Which makes the institutionalisation of group processing powers at this particular moment an interesting policy choice, because these tools were clearly designed for emergencies: a fraud wave, a public health crisis, a geopolitical shock requiring the rapid suspension of a specific visa class. They are being codified precisely when the emergency justification is weakest. The "public interest" grounds enumerated in C-12 — fraud, administrative errors, public health, national security — are terms that have historically expanded to fill the interpretive space available in Canadian immigration law, and I would watch carefully how broadly they are read in the first orders issued under this authority. The precedent set early will define what eventually becomes normal. The comparisons worth studying are the U.S. executive order mechanism and Australia's character-based cancellation regime — two systems that acquired portfolio-level immigration tools earlier and used them, in time, in ways their architects did not initially advertise. The Governor in Council, it is worth noting, acts on Cabinet's advice, and Cabinet is the Prime Minister's instrument. The accountability requirements — Canada Gazette publication, Parliamentary reporting — are meaningful procedural obligations; they are not independent institutional checks.

Here is where the more important policy conversation needs to go. The economic argument for Canadian immigration is not primarily about volume — Canada landed 485,000 permanent residents in 2025, up 8% against target, with provincial immigration set to grow by a third in 2026. The ambition is visible. What is less clear is whether the system is actually reaching the highest-productivity economic immigrants it could attract. This is where a separate and quietly significant development intersects with C-12's logic. In August 2025, IRCC designated ETS and the TOEFL Essentials test as an accepted language testing option for permanent economic immigration programs — Federal Skilled Workers, Canadian Experience Class, Provincial Nominee Programs. Eight months later, IRCC has still not begun accepting scores. Language certification is a hard gate in every economic pathway. The IELTS near-monopoly in Canadian immigration imposes real costs on internationally educated professionals — particularly those from academic environments where TOEFL is the standard, which describes much of South Asia, East Asia, and the United States. An administration that just acquired the ability to modify tens of thousands of immigration documents with a single Cabinet order has not yet managed to activate a language test it designated eight months ago. If we are building the infrastructure for speed, we should be building the infrastructure for reach with equal urgency.

Whether C-12's group processing powers end up serving genuine administrative modernization or political management of intake volumes is the central question I'll be tracking. My instinct, watching how comparable tools have been used elsewhere, is that the answer will depend less on the legislation itself than on the specific policy vision — and specific political pressures — of the government that first deploys them in anger. Canada has the instruments now for a more ambitious, more efficient, and more economically selective immigration system. I'll return to this question as those first orders come. The details, when they arrive, will tell us everything.

— Oded Oron, PhD