A refusal letter from IRCC isn’t automatically the final word — but it isn’t automatically worth fighting either. The first question is never “how do we win,” it’s “is there actually a legal error here worth challenging.”
What a Judicial Review Actually Is
Under section 72 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, a refused applicant can ask the Federal Court to review IRCC’s decision. This isn’t a second chance to resubmit a stronger application — it’s a review of whether the original decision was unreasonable, procedurally unfair, or based on an error of law. Since the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, reasonableness is presumptively the governing standard: the Court doesn’t reweigh your evidence or substitute its own view — it asks whether the officer’s decision was justified, intelligible, and transparent, falling within a range of reasonable outcomes.
The Deadlines Are Short and Unforgiving
An Application for Leave and for Judicial Review must be filed within 15 days of the decision for matters arising inside Canada, or 60 days for matters arising outside Canada. The clock starts the day you’re notified of, or become aware of, the refusal — not the day you decide to act on it. Missing this window generally means the refusal stands, absent a difficult-to-obtain extension.
How the Process Unfolds
File the Application for Leave and for Judicial Review within the applicable deadline. Request the officer’s underlying case notes through a Privacy Act request if detailed reasons weren’t already provided, then request the underlying case notes. Prepare the Application Record — the affidavit, legal arguments, and evidence supporting the challenge. The Court decides on leave first — permission to proceed is not automatic, and most applications are refused at this stage. If leave is granted, the judicial review proceeds to a hearing on the merits.
If the Court finds the original decision unreasonable, the usual outcome isn’t a reversal — it’s an order sending the file back for a fresh decision by a different officer.
Beyond the Federal Court: A Narrow Further Appeal
Even after a Federal Court decision, the matter isn’t necessarily over — but the next step up is deliberately narrow. Under section 74(d), an appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal is only available if the Federal Court judge certifies that the case involves “a serious question of general importance” — a genuinely general legal question, not simply a disagreement with how your individual facts were decided. The Supreme Court of Canada confirmed in Mason v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2023 SCC 21 that even a certified question is still reviewed for reasonableness, not correctness — reinforcing just how high this next threshold sits.
Case Selection Matters More Than Optimism
Leave is granted in only a minority of cases, and the deciding factor isn’t how strong the underlying application was — it’s whether a specific, identifiable legal error exists in how the decision was made. A case built around simple disagreement with how the evidence was weighed rarely succeeds under the Vavilov standard.
How Katrina Berube Law Handles Your Challenge
Honest threshold assessment first — we review your file for an actual identifiable error before recommending judicial review, not after you’ve already committed to it.
Deadlines treated as fixed — filing happens within the section 72(2)(b) window every time, with no reliance on a discretionary extension as a backup plan.
Built on the legal record, not the narrative — arguments are grounded in what the case notes and reasons for refusal actually show, assessed against the Vavilov reasonableness framework, not on what feels persuasive.
19 years of experience applied to the file — across both family and immigration matters, giving your case the benefit of broad legal judgment, not a narrow specialization alone.
Serving Vancouver and clients across all of BC, Katrina Berube Law pursues judicial review and immigration appeals only where the facts genuinely support it.