The Supreme Court of Canada ruled on June 27, 2025 that a permanent resident visa’s expiry after arrival does not, by itself, eliminate the right to appeal a removal order to the Immigration Appeal Division. For that appeal right, the relevant time to assess the visa is when the person arrives in Canada.
In Pepa v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2025 SCC 21, six judges adopted that interpretation and sent Dorinela Pepa’s case back to the tribunal to decide her appeal. A seventh judge agreed that the tribunal’s refusal to hear her case was unreasonable but would have let it reconsider the statutory interpretation. Two judges would have dismissed her Supreme Court appeal.
The ruling established Pepa’s right to have the removal order reviewed by the appeal tribunal. It did not make her a permanent resident, reverse the underlying misrepresentation finding on its merits or determine whether she should ultimately be allowed to remain in Canada.
A visa expired before the hearing
Pepa arrived from Albania in March 2018, aged 20, with a permanent resident visa issued to her as an accompanying dependent of her father. She had married after receiving the visa and disclosed the marriage when an immigration officer asked about her marital status on arrival. Because the marriage affected her eligibility as a dependent child, she was admitted for further examination rather than granted permanent resident status.
The Immigration Division later found her inadmissible for misrepresentation because she had not told Canadian immigration officials of the marriage before travelling. It issued an exclusion order in October 2018. The Supreme Court judgment records that the order carried a five-year bar on entering Canada following removal, absent ministerial authorization.
Her visa had expired on September 16, 2018, nine days before the admissibility hearing began. Its expiry date reflected the expiry of her supporting medical documentation. When she tried to appeal the removal order, the Immigration Appeal Division concluded that her expired visa left it without authority to hear the case. The Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal upheld that conclusion.
Why arrival was the decisive date
The dispute concerned section 63(2) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. That provision gives a foreign national who holds a permanent resident visa a right to appeal certain removal orders. It does not expressly state when the visa must be held.
Writing for the majority, Justice Sheilah Martin rejected an interpretation that made appeal rights depend on how quickly an examination and admissibility proceeding moved through the system. In Pepa’s case, the visa had expired before the hearing even started. The tribunal had found no evidence that the process took longer than normal; the problem was therefore not confined to exceptional administrative delay.
The majority reasoned that Parliament intended an effective safeguard against removal decisions. Tying eligibility to the date of the removal order could extinguish the appeal right before there was any decision to appeal. Martin also considered it arbitrary to make that right turn on the expiry of a passport or medical documentation used to set the visa’s validity period.
The tribunal’s reliance on earlier cases did not adequately justify its conclusion, the majority held. Some concerned an older statutory provision with different wording; others concerned revoked visas. Martin distinguished a visa that merely expires from one withdrawn because the basis for issuing it is no longer valid. Pepa’s visa had never been revoked. The judgment does not establish that any expired or revoked document can support an appeal, regardless of its status on arrival.
The majority also faulted the tribunal for insufficiently addressing the serious personal consequences of losing the appeal route, including family separation and the five-year exclusion. Those consequences required an explanation of why the tribunal’s reading best reflected Parliament’s intention. They did not themselves settle whether the removal order should be overturned.
Agreement on review, disagreement on the remedy
All nine judges agreed that the tribunal’s interpretation should be reviewed for reasonableness. That approach asks whether the administrative decision is coherently explained and justified by the relevant facts and law. The Court did not create a new exception requiring judges to decide this type of statutory question from scratch.
The six-judge majority nevertheless concluded that only one reasonable interpretation remained after examining the provision’s wording, purpose and context: the visa must be assessed at arrival. It rejected later checkpoints, including the preparation of an inadmissibility report or its referral for a hearing, because they created the same risk that the appeal right would disappear during processing.
Justice Malcolm Rowe agreed that the tribunal’s decision was unreasonable, but dissented on the remedy. He would have returned the matter for reconsideration with the Court’s guidance, without fixing the statutory interpretation. He warned that the Court fixing that interpretation could substitute the Court’s preferred answer for the tribunal’s and create consequences elsewhere in a complex immigration scheme that the tribunal was better placed to understand.
Justices Suzanne Côté and Michelle O’Bonsawin went further. They considered the tribunal’s decision reasonable, including its use of prior court and tribunal decisions. In their view, it was reasonable to require an unexpired visa when the removal order triggered the appeal right. They also opposed the majority’s conclusion that arrival was the sole reasonable interpretation.
The majority set aside the appeal tribunal’s decision and the Federal Court judgments that upheld it. The case returned to the Immigration Appeal Division with Pepa’s right of appeal established, leaving that tribunal to determine the appeal against her removal order.
Source: Pepa v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2025 SCC 21.
