About 100 proceedings arose from decisions of Canada’s visa office in Warsaw, Poland
The Federal Court has decided it will not condone another disregard of its orders and directions in group litigation arising from applications by Iranian nationals seeking permanent resident status in Canada under the self-employed class.
The case of Tanhaei v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2025 FC 714, arose after Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s visa office in Warsaw, Poland refused many such applications. Around 100 proceedings challenged these refusal decisions before the Federal Court since about 2018. They were constituted as group litigation in August 2023.
The Federal Court chose eight judicial review applications as lead matters. With the parties’ agreement, the court decided to hear and determine specific legal issues in these applications. The court stayed the rest of the proceedings until the outcome of the lead matters.
In August 2023, the court ordered the parties not to add any new issues. The court initially set the due date for the applicants’ record in October 2023 but later granted multiple extensions of time. In February 2024, the applicants asked the court to consolidate the proceedings.
The court refused to do so. It held that a consolidation would require one judge in a single hearing to apply a vast evidentiary record to an expanding list of issues. The court added that a single court file number could not serve as a vehicle to advance every challenge to the visa office’s decisions.
The court set a peremptory deadline of Jan. 31, 2025. The applicants initially submitted the wrong version of their record for filing and missed the deadline due to the administrative error. When the applicants submitted the intended record for filing a few days later, it included evidence and arguments raising issues going beyond the defined issues in the proceeding.
In the present case, the applicants asked the court to grant them permission to serve and file a new record with more evidence and to vary or reconsider earlier orders framing the issues for determination in this proceeding. The applicants wanted the court to adjudicate “macro-level decisions” that would impact the refusal of the individual applications.
The Federal Court extended the time for the applicants to serve and file their record, which should be strictly limited to the issues identified in the August 2023 order, so that the court could adjudicate these issues.
However, the court ruled that the applicants were improperly attempting to circumvent its orders and directions for the conduct of this proceeding and were trying to expand the issues by including evidence and arguments that went far beyond what the August 2023 order permitted.
Though the court found good reason to dismiss all the applicants’ requests, it decided that doing so would effectively dismiss over 40 judicial review applications. The court notified the applicants that it would not tolerate any more disregard of its orders. The court noted that the size of the group involved in this litigation should not immunize the applicants from any negative consequences.
Next, the court held that granting the applicants’ variance request would make the hearing unmanageable and prejudicial to all stakeholders. The court explained that varying the issues as requested would effectively transform this proceeding into something like a public inquiry on the Warsaw visa office’s actions.
The court noted that the applicants expressed an intention to expand the proceeding to include other processing streams and applicant groups and to seek remedies for all Canadian permanent residency applications under the self-employed class that the visa office has refused since March 2018.
The court determined that allowing the applicants’ variance request would also lead to indeterminate delay since they did not propose a deadline to re-file their record and simply alleged they needed a substantial extension of time.
The court accepted that group litigation generally proceeds more slowly than individual applications. However, the court noted that these proceedings came before the court nearly 30 months ago and that it would likely be hearing these matters beginning in 2027, even if the applicants had timely served their record in January 2025.
