Privacy Impact Assessment Summary: Randomized Selection Intake Management Process for Parents and Grandparents Program

The Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) was conducted to assess the potential privacy impacts of using a randomized selection process to manage intake into the Parents and Grandparents Program.

To ensure greater fairness and transparency, and to improve access to the application process for the Parents and Grandparents Program, the Government of Canada introduced a randomized selection process, effective January 1, 2017. The randomized selection process requires individuals to submit basic personal information to the Department via a web form, to signal their interest to sponsor in the Parents and Grandparents Program. The personal information required to complete the web form includes name, date of birth, country of birth and mailing and email addresses. This personal information is automatically populated into a database. Once the 30-day period for indicating an interest to sponsor has closed, the Department will remove duplicate entries and then randomly select 10,000 persons, which is the limit on the number of complete applications accepted for processing in any year, to submit an application to sponsor their parents or grandparents.

The Department already collects information from sponsors and principal applicants as part of the Parents and Grandparents Program’s application process. The PIA covers the random selection process itself and the information collected as part of this process in the “Interest to Sponsor” web form.

There are mitigation strategies in place to address all privacy issues identified in the PIA. The privacy risks included issues relating to employee access to sponsors’ personal information; potential for compromise of personal information when it is transmitted from the online form to the database; and accuracy of information submitted through the web form. Mitigation measures include limiting employee access to the information in the database through access controls; encrypted and secure means of transmitting information; and development of a robust system for eliminating duplicate entries.