Immigration Minister Jason Kenney could table amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act in Parliament as soon as Thursday, The Canadian Press has learned. (Canadian Press)

The federal government is planning to create a new class of asylum seeker — the "mass arrival," The Canadian Press reports.

That proposed new designation, outlined in a leaked memo, would subject certain asylum seekers to tough new detention rules as part of the Stephen Harper government's crackdown on human smugglers.

Refugee claimants who arrive in Canada as part of a mass arrival would have to wait two weeks instead of the current 48 hours for their first detention hearing, according to a draft proposal of the changes.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is expected to table amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act in Parliament as soon as Thursday.

The new measures are the government's response to the controversy surrounding the arrival of the 492 Tamils who landed on the British Columbia coast aboard the MV Sun Sea last month.

The proposed changes would give the immigration minister new powers to designate similar incidents as a mass arrival if the government did not have the resources to respond to a large influx of migrants in a timely manner.

The proposal doesn't say exactly how many people it would take for the government to make a determination that a "mass arrival" has occurred. But it specifies that once the minister makes that determination, the "existing grounds of detention" would be extended from the current legal requirements.

After the first hearing, subsequent detention reviews would be held at the expiry of a 60-day period, a doubling of the current 30-day requirement.