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For years, Ahmed imagined returning to Pakistan after finishing his university studies in Canada.
Now in his mid-twenties, Ahmed arrived in the Maritimes five years ago as an international student. He planned to eventually build a life back home, close to family. Maybe start a business with the skills he’d acquired in North America.
Then, for the first time in his life, Ahmed fell in love with another man. But as he faced the reality that he’d have to go back home and enter into an arranged marriage, the two separated.
“It was six months of physical pain,” Ahmed said of the heartbreak that followed and altered his future plans.
The way he saw it, he had two choices after that: return to Pakistan, where, he says, he had been kidnapped and beaten as a teenager by peers after they discovered him being intimate with another boy; or make a refugee claim in Canada, where his status as a student was running out — and potentially never see his family again.
By the time he chose the second path, Ahmed had already lived in Canada for four years.
CBC has agreed not to use Ahmed’s full name and exact location because he fears repercussions from family members in Pakistan. Same-sex relations are criminalized in Pakistan, and human rights groups have documented widespread violence and discrimination against 2SLGBTQ+ people.
No one in his family knows he’s gay, he said.
“I realized, oh, I can actually have a good life where I don’t hate the person I’m married to,” Ahmed told CBC.
In late March, though, Ahmed’s prospects for staying in Canada changed after Ottawa passed Bill C-12, a sweeping asylum reform barring people from making refugee claims if more than a year had elapsed since their first entry into Canada. The law is retroactive to June 24, 2020, and applies to claims made on or after June 3, 2025.
Ahmed is one of the estimated 30,000 asylum seekers in the country to have received a procedural fairness letter in the wake of the reform. The letter, which he received last month, informed Ahmed his refugee claim may no longer be eligible for consideration, because he arrived in 2021 and made his claim in December 2025.
“Every single thing I feared came into my brain at that moment,” Ahmed said. “I couldn’t breathe right. I couldn’t really think.”
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada told CBC News in April that the letters are not deportation letters.
“Procedural fairness letters are routinely used across many programs to give applicants an opportunity to provide additional information before a decision is made,” the agency said.
Addressing asylum backlog
When the federal Liberals introduced the legislation, they argued it was needed to reduce a backlog of claims and to deter people from misusing the asylum system.
But lawyers say the new law disproportionately affects 2SLGBTQ+ people, victims of domestic violence and people whose situation has changed since they arrived in Canada.
“They’re trying to find technocratic solutions” to the backlog, says Toronto immigration lawyer Jared Will. “But they’re going to be devastating for people’s lives and people’s rights.”
Will and others say 2SLGBTQ+ claimants and survivors of gender-based violence often take longer to apply for asylum because of the trauma involved, fear or coercion they may feel or because many arrive as students and discover their sexual orientation once they’re here.
“It takes time,” said Maryse Poisson of Montreal’s Welcome Collective, an organization helping migrants and refugees. “People often realize, OK, I can’t go home, or their families have found out in the meantime that they’re gay.”
Thiago Buchert, a Halifax-based lawyer representing several 2SLGBTQ+ clients affected by the law, says he’s seen stories similar to Ahmed’s “over and over and over.”
Before the law, Buchert says, he often advised 2SLGBTQ+ claimants to seek other immigration options, because of how invasive the asylum process is.
“Imagine the process of trying to prove your sexual orientation in a legal setting,” Buchert said.
But with C-12, people on temporary work or study visas who are at risk in their home countries are now penalized for waiting for other options, said Buchert and more than a dozen other lawyers who spoke with CBC.
Under the previous system, claimants would generally receive a hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board, where they could testify and present evidence in person.
But under C-12, the only option is a pre-removal risk assessment — a paper-based process handled by immigration officers available only to some claimants and for which there is no official appeal preventing deportation, as outlined in guidelines by the United Nations High Commissioner.
Ahmed said he’ll pursue that process, and his lawyer says his case is strong. He has documentation corroborating the danger he would be in, including photos of bruising following the 2018 attack by his peers in Pakistan.
Still, Ahmed says he’s unnerved by the idea that someone who will never meet him face-to-face or hear him tell his story will decide his fate.
One of Ahmed’s tormentors back in Pakistan is the boy he was found with. Every time Ahmed has returned home since, he says he’s received threatening messages and his parents’ home has been egged. His former lover, who turned on him after the pair were discovered, has also threatened him and stalked him at family functions.
“I remember thinking how I took walking outside for granted, because the second I land in Pakistan, I know I’ll be scared he’s around,” Ahmed said.
The Canada Border Services Agency is removing people, largely refugee claimants, from the country at a rate not seen in over a decade as the Carney government moves to slow population growth. Refugee lawyers express concern deportations may ramp up further if Bill C-12 passes next year.
Calls for exemptions
Advocates have asked for exemptions to the law for cases involving vulnerable claimants, but Canada has so far released no exceptions. The government suggested it would only create an exemption for unaccompanied minors in the law’s regulations — which it has yet to release six weeks after the law passed.
In response to questions from CBC, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada confirmed the ministry had committed to the exception for unaccompanied minors.
“The minister will continually assess the impact of the legislation with careful attention to where additional exceptions could ensure the alignment of Canada’s asylum system with our humanitarian obligations and values,” wrote Remi Lariviere.
Joshua Eisen, in-house counsel at Toronto’s FCJ Refugee Centre, is one of several experts who presented before Parliament, calling for exemptions.
“It’s just so hypocritical that at a time where Canada has this self-image of championing this liberal global order … we’re introducing this extremely draconian legislation,” Eisen said.
The United States has a similar one-year bar on asylum but created exceptions for people who can prove extraordinary circumstances or changed conditions. In 2012, the U.S. government issued guidance stating that “coming out” or undergoing gender transition could qualify.
Ahmed says the uncertainty over his status has already changed the way he lives.
“I can’t start dating someone. I can’t continue relationships that I think have a future,” he said. “If I’m not staying, then I actually need to stop living my life the way I’m living it right now, because I need to get used to whatever the normal will be.”
