Privacy Impact Assessment Summary: Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Youth Advisory Group (YAG)

IRCC has created a departmental Youth Advisory Group (YAG). Several IRCC branches, other federal departments, and external stakeholders were engaged extensively to inform the YAG’s design, scope, mandate, and intake process.

The YAG will serve as an ongoing forum for engagement between youth and IRCC officials, including the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.

The YAG will be comprised of 15 to 20 youth between the ages of 16 and 24 from across Canada, who have lived experience with and/or knowledge of the Canadian immigration system. YAG members will be identified and selected through a targeted intake process in collaboration with IRCC stakeholders.

The YAG will hold annual in-person meetings in Ottawa, as well as two to three virtual meetings per year. During these meetings, IRCC officials will present on various Departmental initiatives and topics in order to seek YAG members’ views, ideas, and feedback on a variety of immigration-related topics, with a view to ensuring that youth perspectives are taken into consideration when advancing policy and programming initiatives.

Scope of the PIA

This privacy impact assessment covers the information that will need to be collected in order to launch, run, and evaluate the YAG. Specifically, personal information will be collected to:

1. identify/assess applicants and select YAG members;
2. facilitate YAG members’ participation in YAG activities;
3. engage with YAG members in meetings to seek their views, ideas, and feedback on immigration-related topics; and
4. create internal and external facing communications products.

Summary of Privacy Issues and Mitigation Strategies

The privacy impact assessment has identified four overarching privacy risks:

• personal information could be used or disclosed for unauthorized purposes by employees;
• YAG applicants and members could provide more personal information than required, resulting in over-collection of personal information;
• personal information could be compromised during transfer between parties; and,
• applicants to the YAG may not be who they say they are (i.e., identity accuracy).

The impact of the above risks could be medium to high should they occur. However, the Department has assessed that there is a low likelihood of occurrence in light of strategies adopted by the Department to mitigate these types of privacy risks, including:

• use of secure methods (encrypted online platform, registered mail) for sharing of personal information between parties;
• clear instructions and restraints (e.g., character limits) to avoid over-collection of information; and
• employee use of data is monitored, and can be audited at any time.