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OTTAWA — Canada’s backlog of asylum claims will likely reach 100,000 by the end of 2021 before stabilizing, up from 75,000 today, the chairperson of the Immigration and Refugee Board told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday.

The board’s goal now is to manage the growth of the backlog rather than to reduce it, Richard Wex told the committee. He said that without recent injections of federal funding, the backlog would likely have grown to 165,000 claims in the next couple of years, with wait times extending beyond five years, compared to less than two years currently.

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“What we’re focused on in terms of the next 24 months with the temporary funding in Budget 2018 and 2019 is not to eliminate the backlog,” Wex said. “It is to slow the growth of the pace of the backlog from what it would otherwise be.”

Once the backlog is stabilized, Wex said, the government will have various options for dealing with it, including targeted funding to get those claims resolved. He estimated it would cost between $200 million and $400 million to eliminate a backlog of 100,000 refugee claims.