In 2019-2020, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) received 116,928 access requests, a 42-percent increase from the previous year. Almost all of these requests (98.9 percent) were for immigration application files.

Also in 2019-2020, the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) registered 4,298 complaints against IRCC, 97 percent of which involved allegations that IRCC had failed to respond to access requests for immigration application files within the time limits set out in the Access to Information Act. In the two years prior to 2019-2020, the OIC had registered only 226 and 558 complaints against IRCC, respectively.

To better understand and make recommendations to address the root cause of the dramatic increase in access requests and complaints, the Information Commissioner initiated a systemic investigation into IRCC’s processing of requests for immigration application files from April 1, 2017, to February 26, 2020.