The letter is two paragraphs long, the second one boilerplate. What it does not say is that it has just started several clocks running at once — some measured in weeks, one as short as fifteen days. When a refusal reaches our office, the analysis runs through the same three doors every time.
First: get the real reasons
The refusal letter is a form; the officer’s Global Case Management System notes are the decision. An access-to-information request (or, once litigation starts, the certified tribunal record) reveals what the officer actually weighed — and, regularly, what they overlooked, misread or copied from a template without engaging with your evidence. No remedy should be chosen before the notes are read. We have seen “insufficient funds” refusals where the officer missed an entire bank statement, and “non-genuine relationship” findings resting on a misdated photograph.
Door one: reconsideration
A reconsideration request asks the same officer (or their unit) to reopen the decision. There is no deadline, no fee — and no obligation on IRCC to respond at all. It works in a narrow band: demonstrable factual error, evidence filed but unread, a policy change postdating the decision. It costs little and occasionally saves everything; it must never be the whole plan, because the limitation clocks for the other doors keep running while you wait.
Door two: the Immigration Appeal Division
Sponsorship refusals, residency-obligation determinations and certain removal orders carry a genuine appeal to the IAD — a fresh hearing where new evidence is admissible, witnesses testify, and the tribunal holds equitable jurisdiction to grant relief on humanitarian grounds even where the refusal was legally correct. Notice must generally be filed within 30 days. For the files that qualify, the IAD is usually the strongest door in the corridor.
Door three: Federal Court judicial review
Everything else — study permits, work permits, Express Entry refusals, citizenship decisions — goes to the Federal Court on judicial review, with leave applications due in 15 days (decisions made in Canada) or 60 days (abroad). The Court does not substitute its own decision; it measures the officer’s reasoning against the Vavilov reasonableness standard and, where it fails, quashes the refusal and sends the file back for redetermination. Paired with a strengthened record, that redetermination is where the approval happens.
The honest fourth option
Some refusals are correct. When the notes show an officer who read a weak file carefully, the professional advice is not litigation — it is a better application, filed once the defect is genuinely fixed. Paying for an unwinnable judicial review is a harm we decline to sell.
Deadlines in this area forgive nothing. If a refusal has just arrived, contact our refusals and appeals team this week, not next month.
