Spring Budget: Funding and Refugee

spring budget: The IRB expects these impacts will include longer hearings, more postponements and adjournments and more missed deadlines on the part of unrepresented individuals, the notice states, according to CTV. The Ontario Progressive Conservative government announced the funding reduction as part of a series of cost-cutting measures in its spring budget. The Immigration and Refugee Board IRB has issued a notice saying the 30-per-cent cut in funding announced in April to Legal Aid Ontario will affect the board's operations due to an expected rise in the number of refugee claimants who don't have lawyers. The legal-aid cuts included an elimination of funding for refugee- and immigration-law services. Maureen Silcoff, president of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers and former member of the IRB, said upwards of 70 per cent of refugee claimants in Ontario use legal aid to help with their asylum requests. Refugee lawyers have denounced the move, calling it a horrific reduction in services that will hurt an already vulnerable population. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.