Maynard, a Quebec lawyer whose seven-year term began March 1, 2018, pulled no punches on May 7, 2024, when she tabled a special report in Parliament, titled Access at Issue: The Unsustainable Status Quo, which details the results of her office’s second systemic investigation into the ongoing problems for immigration lawyers and tens of thousands of immigration clients who seek timely immigration-related information about their files from IRCC and CBSA.
Reiterating the recommendation from her first special report three years ago, which identified the same systemic problems, Maynard called on the federal government “to take the necessary measures to make the long-awaited technological solution that immigration clients require” a reality.
Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard
Stressing that the federal Access to Information Act “was never meant as a substitute for providing individuals with timely access to information through modern digital service delivery methods,” the commissioner admonished that “the federal government must innovate and adopt a fresh approach to providing the information Canadians — and potentially, future Canadians — seek. The already overwhelmed access to information system is no substitute for purpose-built tools and mechanisms that allow individuals to obtain the information they need, quickly and easily.”
Maynard could find little progress since her first special report, Access at Issue: Challenging the Status Quo, recommended that IRCC should develop a digital client service solution that would provide a more efficient alternative for clients to obtain updates on information stored in IRCC’s global case management system.
“Back in March of 2021, in response to my IRCC systemic investigation, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship indicated that, among other planned measures, the new Digital Experience Platform and full roll-out of the new MyAccount functionality was planned for 2023–2024,” she noted. “This new platform was meant to meet the objective of making information directly available to IRCC clients by means other than through an access to information request.”
“Unfortunately, in August of 2023, IRCC indicated that it will take approximately two more years before this project is fully implemented,” Maynard continued. “In the meantime, access requests made to IRCC continue to increase each year.”
The access to information system of the CBSA, which has access to immigration-related information using tools the agency has in common with IRCC, is also under growing strain.
Maynard noted that the deluge of access to information requests to IRCC is higher than the total of all requests to other federal institutions.
Moreover, immigration lawyers and immigration consultants made the most access requests to IRCC, i.e. 44 per cent of 182,907 access requests in 2023-2024.
Maynard said IRCC took an average of 90 days to respond. Notably, although IRCC accounted for more than half of the complaints from information requesters to the office of the federal information commissioner in each year from 2019–20 to 2022–23, the 614complaints registered against IRCC in 2023–24 represented only 18 per cent of all complaints.
However, IRCC started the present 2024-25 fiscal year with a significant backlog of 51,192 unanswered access requests.
Access requests to both IRCC and CBSA have more than doubled since 2017-18, according to the information commissioner’s report.
IRCC had 64,234 access requests in 2017-18, which rose to 184, 587 in 2022-23, the report said.
For the CBSA, the comparable numbers of access requests were, respectively, 7,466 and 18,889.
Isabelle Dubois, a spokesperson for IRCC, said the immigration department continues to improve its systems and processes and to work to modernize its digital platform “that will give clients access to application information, as well as measures to be more transparent, including the proactive disclosure of officer decision notes to applicants.”
Dubois said by email that IRCC is implementing initiatives “from a client-experience perspective, focused on improving transparency and communication with clients. The operational transparency initiative, which is at the core of our ongoing work to modernize our digital platform, is meant to address the root causes of the increase in access-to-information requests and complaints.”
Dubois told Law360 Canada that IRCC recently completed a project where it tested the proactive disclosure of officer decision notes to some refused applicants in the temporary resident visa (TRV) and study permit (SP) programs.
“The results were very encouraging, showing a significant reduction in the number of ATIP requests in the study,” she said. “The goal for both the TRV and SP exercises was to communicate a refusal decision to clients using plain language when listing refusal grounds, and to provide meaningful information to clients. IRCC intends to include officer decision notes as part of scheduled roll-out of programs within its new modernized online account over the next few months. ... The new online account will be deployed to clients gradually, rather than all at once.”
Dubois said IRCC remains “committed to ensuring openness, transparency and accountability to the public.”
The report said that between 2019-20 and 2022-23, there was a 130-per-cent increase in requests directed to the CBSA and its backlog is growing. The number of access requests to the CBSA carried over from one year to another almost doubled between 2021-22 and 2022-23, illustrating that the agency’s access to information staff has not been able to keep pace with the workload generated by the increase in requests for immigration-related information, the information commissioner said.
In a letter last month that was appended to Maynard’s latest special report, CBSA president Erin O’Gorman said that she and the minister of Public Safety, Dominic LeBlanc. “Accept your recommendations.” O’Gorman indicated the border services agency is continuing to develop robotic process automation (RPA) tools to improve its efficiency.
She said that in February 2024, the CBSA invested in 20 more RPA software licences to increase the efficiency of its access to information and privacy program.
O’Gorman noted the CBSA intends to increase its processing capacity for access requests by implementing “in the coming months”:
- more RPA tools to open requests;
- new RPA tools “to automate the extraction of responsive information from corporate databases”; and
- new RPA tools to automate the mailing of responsive records to requesters.
“These investments were important before, and invaluable now as we work as quickly as possible to restore access to the significant volume of files disrupted by a recent Shared Services Canada change to our systems on February 8, 2024,” the CBSA’s president wrote. This “disruption is a notable and discouraging setback in our efforts to reduce our backlog but, with sustained effort, we expect to be back to our regular operational cadence by the fall.”
An IRCC letter (annexed to Maynard’s latest special report), that was received by the commissioner in August 2023 in response to her request for an update on the department’s progress since her first special report in 2021, said (in part) that IRCC’s online Application Status Tracker “is now available to clients in most high-volume lines of business with the recent addition of temporary residence (study, work and visitors) applications, the line of business with the highest volume of applications. Other lines of business include express entry, citizenship grant, and family class spousal sponsorship, which together represent a significant percentage of IRCC’s application intake.”
Wrote IRCC, “The goal remains to make application status information available to clients in all lines of business. With the third phase of the digital platform modernization program, IRCC will be making enhanced application status information available to clients in all lines of business through the introduction of a new client experience platform (CXP). The CXP will provide clients with a single online window to access the department’s services, along with a suite of tools to support them in their application journeys. The CXP will be implemented gradually to clients starting in late 2023. It is expected that the enhanced application status information will be rolled out starting in late 2023 and will be available to clients in all lines of business in 2025.”
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