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Good practice Imported

IRCC IEC Work Permit Eligibility Model — Canada's AI Tool for Youth Mobility

Canada · Ottawa · See the Canada profile · See the Ottawa profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 14% 80/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Canada's IRCC uses an AI eligibility model to triage and auto-approve routine IEC work permits. Launched Nov 2023 with a published Algorithmic Impact Assessment (Level 2), the tool cut processing time ≈3× while leaving all refusals to human officers.

90,000 per year
IEC applicants processed (2024)
67,727
IEC permits issued (2023)
approx. 3x faster (about one-third of pre-automation time)
Processing time reduction (reported 2026)
30+
Partner countries in IEC programme
IRCC IEC Work Permit Eligibility Model — Canada's AI Tool for Youth Mobility

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC)
Period
2023–present
Keywords
immigration, automated decision-making, government, service delivery

Context

In November 2023 Canada's Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) deployed an AI Work Permit Eligibility Model for the International Experience Canada (IEC) programme, which lets young people from more than 30 partner countries gain work experience in Canada.

Objectives

To triage routine IEC applications and automatically grant positive eligibility decisions for straightforward cases, while all non-approved applications are still sent to human officers; the model cannot refuse applications.

Activities

An Algorithmic Impact Assessment (Level 2, moderate impact) under Canada's Treasury Board Directive on Automated Decision-Making was published on the Open Government Portal together with a peer review and a Gender-Based Analysis Plus (GBA+) assessment.

Results

By 2024 IRCC was processing roughly 90,000 IEC applicants per year (up from 67,727 permits issued in 2023), and 2026 reporting indicated processing times had fallen to roughly one-third of pre-automation levels.

Conclusions

Immigration lawyers and advocates have raised concerns that automated eligibility processing could create systemic bias if underlying criteria disproportionately affect certain nationalities or demographics; IRCC's published safeguards (human final authority, GBA+, annual AIA review) aim to mitigate this, but independent external evaluation of outcomes has not yet been published.

Implementation

Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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