Getting It Right the First Time: Exploring the False Economy of Bill C-12's Refugee Process Shortcuts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bill C-12 proposes to make two classes of asylum claimants ineligible for Immigration and Refugee Board hearings: those who claim protection more than one year after arriving in Canada, and those who claim within 14 days of irregularly crossing from the United States. Instead, these claimants would be routed to the Pre-Removal Risk Assessment (PRRA) system—a paper-based “safety net” process designed for speed rather than robustness. The government argues this will improve system efficiency. This paper explores those efficiency claims by analyzing over 180,000 Federal Court immigration judicial reviews using computational methods. The findings suggest that PRRA- cases generate more downstream work for the Federal Court than cases that received full IRB review. This raises the possibility that Bill C-12 will make the refugee process system less efficient, not more. The patterns observed raise concerns about Bill C-12's efficiency rationale. Before dismantling a system that appears to work, Parliament should carefully examine potential downstream costs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.024 | 0.144 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".