The complainant alleged that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) improperly withheld information under paragraph 16(2)(c) (facilitating the commission of an offence) of the Act to portions of records in response to access requests for 64 separate immigration applications.

The Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) investigated 64 separate complaints on the same type of information and exempted in the same manner by IRCC.

The information that IRCC wanted to protect is located in the “History” field of IRCC’s GCMS Information Request: Application. The name of the field and its content were entirely redacted.

IRCC was initially of the view that releasing the History field and its content would negatively affect the integrity of all its immigration programs. To justify the use of paragraph 16(2)(c), IRCC provided detailed representations explaining the risks it alleged would result from disclosing the information at issue.

After many months of investigation and numerous attempts from IRCC to justify the application of paragraph 16(2)(c), the institution ultimately agreed to release the information at issue in its entirety.

The complaints are well founded.