After a refusal

Asking the office to look again — and what that is not

A reconsideration request asks the deciding officer to revisit a decision, usually because something was overlooked or misapprehended. It is discretionary, the courts have described it as reserved for exceptional circumstances rather than routine second looks, and it does not stop the clock on your right to go to court.

Have your refusal assessed

The route, plainly

What a reconsideration request actually is

When a visa office refuses an application, the decision is made. Some refusals do carry a statutory right of appeal to the Immigration Appeal Division — refused family sponsorships being the category most people encounter. Most temporary-residence refusals do not. Where no appeal right exists there is no tribunal to take it to and no second officer who reviews the file as a matter of course, so the first thing to establish is which of those you are in.

What exists alongside that is a narrow discretion. In Canada (MCI) v. Kurukkal, 2010 FCA 230, the Federal Court of Appeal held that an immigration officer is not rigidly barred from revisiting a decision, and remains free to exercise discretion to reconsider — or to refuse to. A reconsideration request is simply you asking the office to exercise that discretion.

Note the shape of that. It is a request, not a filing. It creates no obligation on IRCC to reopen anything, no obligation to explain a decision not to, and no entitlement to a reply. It is not adjudicated by anyone independent of the office that refused you. And because it is not an application, nothing about it is on a timetable you can rely on.

That is not a reason never to send one. It is a reason to send one only when you have something specific for it to act on — and never as a substitute for the two routes that actually have teeth.

The mistake that costs the most

The judicial review clock keeps running while you wait

The statutory route for challenging an IRCC decision is an application to the Federal Court for leave and judicial review. That route has a filing deadline fixed by legislation, running from when the decision was communicated to you, and it is short. The period differs depending on whether the matter arose inside or outside Canada — the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act sets both, and it is the only place worth reading them.

Sending a reconsideration request has no effect on that deadline whatsoever. It does not pause it, restart it, or provide an excuse for missing it. The Court can extend time, but only if you ask and only if a judge is persuaded — which is a separate argument you then have to win before anyone looks at the merits of your case.

The pattern we see is depressingly consistent. Someone is refused, sends a polite letter asking the office to reconsider, waits, sends a follow-up, waits again, and by the time they accept that no answer is coming, the deadline has gone. The reconsideration was never likely to succeed, and it quietly consumed the one route that might have.

Work out the deadline before you write anything

Whatever you decide to do, establish the date by which a Federal Court application would have to be filed, and establish it first. Every other decision — request, fresh application, court — sits inside that constraint. If you are close to it, the request is the thing that waits, not the court filing.

If you are already past the deadline, say so early. It changes what is available to you, and it is better known at the start of a conversation than discovered in the middle of one. How judicial review works.

When it is genuinely worth attempting

Four situations with something real to argue

The common thread is an identifiable defect in how the decision was reached — not a disagreement with the officer’s judgement.

Something on file was missed

A document you submitted was not considered

You can show the item was properly filed before the decision — a submission receipt, an upload confirmation, a courier record — and the reasoning shows it was never taken into account. This is the strongest form of request, because it points to a specific error rather than a difference of opinion.

The file was misread

A finding rests on a plain factual error

The officer recorded the wrong employer, the wrong dates, the wrong applicant, or read a figure incorrectly — and the error is demonstrable from the file itself rather than arguable. Not "the officer weighed it wrongly", but "the officer had the fact wrong".

Procedural fairness

You were never given a chance to answer

Where a concern about your credibility or a document arose and no opportunity was given to respond, that can ground a request. It can also ground a judicial review, which is why the two need to be considered together and not one after the other.

Timing

A decisive fact existed but arrived late

New information that was capable of changing the result and relates to the position as it stood at decision. This is the narrowest and most often misused category — evidence you gathered after the refusal, to fix a weakness the officer identified, is usually a reason to file fresh, not to ask for reconsideration.

What makes a request weak

The versions that go nowhere

“Please reconsider my case”
A request with no identified error is a request the office has no reason to act on. Specificity is the entire mechanism.
Disagreeing with the weighing
That the officer should have found your ties stronger is an argument about judgement, and reconsideration is not the forum for it.
New evidence curing the weakness
Documents assembled after the refusal, to answer the point the officer made, usually belong in a fresh application.
Hardship as the whole argument
That the refusal is inconvenient, costly or upsetting does not identify anything wrong with the decision.
Repetition of what was already filed
Restating material the officer already considered gives no basis to reopen. It has to be material that was not considered.

Reconsideration, fresh file, or court

Three different tools

Reconsideration targets a defect in the decision itself. Cheap to attempt, discretionary, no timetable, and no obligation on anyone to answer. Worth doing when you can point at something concrete.

A fresh application targets a weakness in the file. It is the right route when the officer was reasonable on the material in front of them and that material has since genuinely changed. It also means paying the fees again and starting over — and reapplying without first understanding why you were refused tends to reproduce the same problem.

Judicial review targets legality: whether the decision was reasonable and whether the process was fair. It is the route with real force, the route with a hard deadline, and the most expensive of the three.

These are not sequential steps. Choosing between them is the actual work, and it depends on what the reasoning says — which is why we read the refusal properly before advising anything. Getting the officer’s notes · Reapplying after a refusal

The sequence

How this should run, in order

The order matters more than the drafting. Most of the damage is done by getting steps one and two the wrong way round.

1
Read the actual reasoning first
You cannot argue that something was overlooked until you know what was considered. That means the refusal letter, everything attached to it, and where necessary the officer’s notes.
2
Identify the deadline, not the argument
Before drafting anything, work out the date by which a judicial review application would have to be filed. That date governs the whole strategy, and it does not move because you are writing a letter.
3
Decide between three options, not one
Reconsideration, a fresh application, or judicial review. They are alternatives with different costs, different timelines and different consequences — and for some files the honest answer is that none of them is worth the money.
4
Put the request through the right channel
A request has to reach the office that made the decision, referencing the file. IRCC’s own web form is the usual route for correspondence about a submitted application, and the accepted channels are set out on IRCC’s website rather than anywhere else. Wherever it is sent, it stands or falls on being specific — a general plea to look again is the version that gets no answer.
5
Protect the review route in parallel
Where the deadline is close and the grounds are real, the application to the Federal Court is filed on time regardless of whether the request has been answered. A request that has gone quiet is not a reason to let the deadline pass.
6
Accept the answer, or the silence
The office may reopen, may confirm the refusal, or may simply not reply. None of those is an appeal outcome, and none of them is owed to you.

Channels, addresses and the accepted way to contact a visa office about a decided application change from time to time. Take them from IRCC’s official contact page and its web form rather than from a page like this one.

What commonly goes wrong

The failure patterns we see from Pakistan

Treating the request as an appeal. People send it expecting a process: an acknowledgement, a file number, a review, a reply. None of that is owed. When nothing arrives, they assume it is still under review. Silence is not evidence that it is.

Letting the court deadline lapse while waiting. The most costly error on this page, and the one that cannot be undone without persuading a judge to extend time.

Sending the request without reading the reasoning. If you do not know what the officer considered, you cannot credibly claim something was overlooked. Requests drafted from the refusal letter alone tend to argue against findings the officer never made.

Attaching a pile of new documents. A request that arrives with fresh bank statements and fresh employment letters reads as a second application, and risks being treated as one. It also tends to concede the officer’s point rather than challenge it — which, if that is where you actually are, is an argument for refiling.

Agents selling it as a service with an implied outcome. Because a request is cheap to write and there is no formal decision to point to when it fails, it is easy to charge for and easy to blame on the office. If someone offers a reconsideration package and talks about success rates, ask them to put the discretionary nature of it in writing.

Repeat requests. Sending a second and third letter after silence adds nothing to the file and consumes the weeks you needed for something else.

Being honest about fit

Who this route does not suit

If you cannot name the error, this is not your route

A reconsideration request needs a specific, demonstrable defect in the decision — something on file that was not considered, or a fact recorded wrongly. If your position is that the officer was too strict, or that you deserve another chance, or that you can now provide what was missing, there is nothing here for the discretion to act on, and your time and money are almost certainly better spent on one of the other two routes.

It also does not suit anyone close to the judicial review deadline who intends to wait for a reply before deciding — the waiting is the risk. It does not suit anyone whose refusal involves a misrepresentation finding, which needs separate handling before anything is sent. And it does not suit anyone who has simply not yet read what the officer actually wrote.

We would rather tell you on the first call that a request has nothing to work with than take a fee for a letter that was never going to be answered. The discretion is not ours to exercise, which is why we publish a no-guarantee policy.

How we work on this

Deadline first, then strategy, then drafting

We start with the refusal and its date, and establish what your remaining options are and how long each of them is open for. That is a short conversation and it frequently changes what people were about to do.

Then we read the reasoning — the letter, its attachments, and where it is warranted the officer’s notes — and decide whether there is a defect a request can act on, whether the file is better refiled, or whether the matter belongs in front of the Federal Court. If more than one of those is live, we say which order they go in.

If a request is worth sending, it is drafted narrowly around the specific error, with the evidence that establishes it and nothing else. If it is not worth sending, we tell you, and we do not charge you to write it anyway.

Our fees are published, and we do not take a file we do not think has a route. See our fees.

Straight answers

The questions people actually ask

Is a reconsideration request an appeal?

No. There is no right to it. In Canada (MCI) v. Kurukkal, 2010 FCA 230, the Federal Court of Appeal held that the doctrine of functus officio does not rigidly bar an immigration officer from revisiting a decision — the officer remains free to exercise discretion to reconsider, or to refuse to. Discretion is exactly what it is. IRCC is not obliged to reopen your file, is not obliged to give reasons for declining, and in many cases is not obliged to reply at all.

How likely is it to work?

We will not put a figure on it, and you should distrust anyone who does — nobody publishes reliable success rates for a discretionary request that generates no formal decision. What we can say is what the case law says: the discretion is understood to be for exceptional circumstances, and dissatisfaction or disagreement with the officer’s assessment does not by itself make a case exceptional. A request built on disagreement gives the discretion nothing to act on. Plan the file on the assumption that it will not be reopened.

Does asking for reconsideration pause the judicial review deadline?

No, and this is the single most expensive misunderstanding on this page. The deadline for applying to the Federal Court for leave and judicial review is set by statute and runs from the decision. Sending a letter to the visa office does not stop it, suspend it or extend it. An extension is possible only where the Court grants one, and that is a separate application you have to persuade a judge to allow. People routinely wait months for a reply that never comes and find the review route has closed behind them.

Should I ask for reconsideration or just apply again?

If the refusal identified a genuine weakness and you have since fixed it, a fresh application is usually the more honest route — reconsideration is not a mechanism for submitting the evidence you should have filed the first time. Reconsideration is for cases where the decision itself is flawed on its own terms: something on file was not considered, or a fact was recorded wrongly. If your argument is that the officer should have been more generous, that is not a reconsideration argument.

Can I do both — request reconsideration and file for judicial review?

It is possible to pursue reconsideration while a judicial review application is on foot, and where the deadline is close that is often the safer structure, because it preserves the route the clock would otherwise close. It also costs more and needs to be planned deliberately rather than drifted into. Decide the strategy before the deadline, not after it.

What if my refusal involved a misrepresentation finding?

Then this is the wrong first page. A misrepresentation finding carries consequences well beyond the single refusal and needs to be assessed on its own terms before you send anything to anyone, because a poorly-worded letter can make the record worse. Read our page on misrepresentation findings and get the file looked at before you write.

How long does IRCC take to answer a reconsideration request?

IRCC publishes processing times for applications, not for reconsideration requests — a request is not an application, so there is nothing for a published time to attach to. Some offices respond, some respond much later, and some do not respond. We will not quote you a typical wait, because there is no official figure to quote. Build your strategy on the assumption that no reply will arrive in time to help you.

Can you guarantee a reconsideration will succeed?

No. Nobody can, and a discretionary request is about the least guaranteeable thing in this field. What we can do is tell you honestly whether your file contains the kind of error a request can act on, and if it does not, say so before you spend money on one.

Before you send a letter

Find out whether you have anything worth reconsidering

Send us the refusal, its date, and anything that came with it. We will tell you what your deadline is, whether a request has a real error to work with, and whether a fresh application or the Federal Court is the better use of your money.

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