Public Accounts Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2010

[Richard Nadeau, Bloc, Gatineau, QC]

We're going to check. We're quite willing to send people to you, but not two hours a week. People use public transit; they manage; it's not easy. These are often newcomers who don't know the mechanisms. So there's work to be done in this regard. As far as assistance goes, that would be very important.

I'm going to speak on behalf of my colleagues from the rural constituencies. I'm thinking, for example, of Serge Cardin, from the constituency of Sherbrooke. In 2007, 10,923 passport applications were filed; there were 10,436 in 2008, 12,186 in 2009 and, currently, 8,070 for 2010. You can look at the blues; I won't go back over the figures. On average, it's 10,000 applications a year, 27 a day.

Since the number of applications is very high, isn't there a way to get offices that meet the needs of the urban constituencies such as Sherbrooke, far from the major decision-making and processing centres—my office processes zero per year; I send them directly to the Hull office; it's easier and faster. We don't want to turn people down. When we've gotten to the point where we're processing 27 applications a day, 10,000 a year, it's no longer a constituency office... We're waiting for your quota for this work. I'd like to know your opinion on that subject.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Madame Deschênes.

[Claudette Deschênes]

We obviously have a problem. The difficulty is determining exactly what it is. We also want to establish a way for our clients to book an appointment. One of the problems with our clients is that we give them appointments and they can't show up at the right time. That means they have to start over again at the MPs' offices. That's another way that we've established.

You mentioned passports. Do you mean you process passport applications? That's another department.

[Richard Nadeau, Bloc, Gatineau, QC]

Yes. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Thank you, madam.

Mr. Shipley.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, witnesses, for coming out.

I have a quick comment for Mr. Yeates. “CIC agrees with the Auditor General's recommendations”: that's a fairly standard comment that we hear, actually. Have you made this comment? Is this a standard comment that's been made?

What I'm wondering about is this. In saying that, have those comments and those recommendations been followed up on since the last one in 2000? Secondly, why are they being followed up on now? Which is good, quite honestly....

I have a second part. You've now developed an action plan that is taking us forward. I think that is great. I'm just wondering, why now? I think CIC has had years and years of problems, quite honestly, in terms of getting its act together.

Don't misunderstand me for my lack of bad words.... I understand the complexity of it, I really do, but it would seem now that there actually.... In fact, Mr. Yeates, as you said, it's a complex problem, but if we don't do this, we don't have a direction on which to base goals and objectives. Is that the thought process now?

There has been a significant push to actually get it together. Why hasn't there been before? Is there an issue about why these recommendations from 2000 on, for example, are just coming into play now?

[Neil Yeates]

Well, Chair, I think for the department, I can speak for my time here, and Claudette has worked for the department much longer than I have. But what I have seen just in terms of the history of the department is that there has always been a lot of change under way. The program has been changing. We've been working for the past number of years to implement a massive new case management processing system that is now being rolled out around our missions around the world. We've been waiting for that.

In some ways, I think the department has been waiting for a more stable environment in which it can implement service standards, but that never really seems to arrive. Things keep changing. I think we've concluded that we need to get on with this. We're going to have to deal with the good, the bad, and the ugly here. We accept that. I think we're sort of turning the corner here. We just need to get on with it.

It's never going to be an ideal time. I think the department historically was hoping it would have a more stable period in which to do this. That never really seems to occur. There's always something that goes on, so we feel that we just need to get on with this. As I said earlier, we will have some service standards that we expect our clients will not be that happy with, but that's the reality of the circumstances within which we work. We do feel, as a department, that we will be better off with those standards than without them.

I think that's the turning point or the tipping point that we've come to.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

The next question is this. You talked about how HRSDC and Canada Revenue have standards. Can any of them be used by CIC? Is there a transfer, a coordination and cooperation? That's to you.

Secondly, then, in terms of CIC, you talk about the amount of online technology, the use of technology, and the encouragement for and education of people to actually use it. Do you have projections on how that will grow and where that will be so that the body behind the phone will actually have more time to deal with those situations that are complex or falling through the cracks? Then it will actually take some of that off the desks in our constituencies.

[Neil Yeates]

Yes. We're sorting through what we would call our service channels. We tend to divide clients into different groups: tier one, tier two, and tier three.

In tier one are people who just want very basic information. We would like to redirect as many of those clients as possible to the website self-serve for basic information. In tier two and tier three, you're starting to get into case information, where people need more specific advice. That's where we'd like to reserve our well-trained people: to provide assistance to them.

We're now sorting through how best to set up each of these service delivery channels in regard to what extent we can apply technology for that and use the call centre, use the Internet, and so on. That really is our challenge. Right now, as I mentioned--as a very short example--we feel we're getting too many tier one clients trying to call our call centre, so we're trying to change that.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Education.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Thank you.

Mr. Allen.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

The question has been asked a couple of different ways, but I don't know if I actually heard the response. Clearly, when you looked at some service delivery, it was almost three years ago that it was identified. Now we're looking at 2010 and, as I hear you, Mr. Yeates, you've said, well, I guess we have to do it now. So in the intervening period, what were we doing?

[Neil Yeates]

The department has actually been doing a lot of work on trying to re-engineer and redesign its services and bring technology on board. I mentioned GCMS, our big new case management system, which is getting into the implementation phase. Implementation is now well under way this year. We set up a service innovation office to look at the re-engineering of these business lines. Actually, a lot of work has been going on.

We did introduce the first four service standards—we would admit they are modest—and it has given us a starting point. I think it has given the department some confidence that this is a reasonable way to proceed. There's a fair amount of trepidation. People don't like to put in place standards that they can't meet.

A lot of change has been going on during the past three years. As I say, we feel now that we have to get on with it.

[Claudette Deschênes]

I would just add that about four years ago we brought all the operations under one area. We've worked very hard to integrate knowledge, both geographically and across business lines, so we can start talking about risk in the business and really focus our energies so that maybe 70% of the cases can be done much more quickly.

So there has been a lot of work done on program integrity, risk-tiering, where is the best place to do these things so we can actually move to baseline, and how much time it actually takes. We've also brought all of our data together in terms of processing times, so we can analyze from end to end. Because we had a tendency in the past to talk about how much time it takes in Mississauga and how much time it takes overseas, and we kept saying that from a client perspective, they don't see themselves in that. We need to talk end to end. We've done a lot of that work over the last few years.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Yes, I know that it's easy to get the impression of the “you and us”, so to speak, and I know that folks in the immigration offices quite often probably feel that way, to a certain degree. But the service standards need to be such that.... As was pointed out earlier, I received my citizenship in 1975. I didn't wait two years to get it. I came here as a landed immigrant. After I met the requirements and applied, my family applied.... I was a young adult when I applied, so I had to apply separately. I didn't wait two years.

You can imagine the folks who come here voluntarily, who want to come here, and who go through the process, which is in itself arduous, to meet all the compliances. They are excited about getting it done. They then feel as if they've been pushed off the table and told, “Just hang on and we'll get to you”.

I'm not suggesting that's how you intend it to be. That's the reality we see on the ground. Folks are saying, look, there's an election coming up, or they want to travel, or there's something else coming up where they need their citizenship, and they can't get it. How are you going to move that? Do you need additional funding?

[Neil Yeates]

In terms of citizenship processing, it is a combination of two things: increasing the capacity in our system, which we will look to do through reallocating resources in our department, and re-engineering. As the committee probably knows, our budget is frozen for the next two years, so we will look internally to do that. I would say that what is equally important is that we have to re-engineer our process. It's not as efficient as it could be.

Those two things are going to turn around the citizenship processing and get us into a reasonable space in terms of processing time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Thank you, Mr. Yeates.

Mr. Young.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Yeates, I think the theme of this discussion should be “no control over your intake”, like an open-ended system. I've served in different companies and businesses of all sizes for over 30 years, and there's nothing to compare it with. Everything is a moving target, in your case driven by international events to a large degree with the refugee determination, and by political decisions.

But I'm looking at the transition you've made which is basically from the 20th-century paper economy to the 21st-century digital. It's a massive, massive transition. My question is, how much do you expect your total productivity to increase once the case management system is in and working the way you want it to?

[Neil Yeates]

It's difficult, Chair, to put an absolute figure on that, but I think we are moving into a regime or a period of time, an era, in which we can fairly readily meet the processing requirements for the annual levels planned, for a clientele of 250,000.

We've gone through periods of years when it was quite a challenge for us to meet that in terms of processing capacity around the world. We feel we are now at a point where we do have the capacity and we do have the efficiency and the productivity to meet that fairly readily, all other things being equal. It's allowing us to focus more efforts on fraud detection and some of the other parts of the program that perhaps have not had as much attention as they might have, historically. We feel that's a very good thing.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Mr. Bains pointed out that there is a bottleneck. We know that 45 million people worldwide would like to come to Canada and--

[Neil Yeates]

Yes.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

--that's unlikely to change.

But as well, we can only accept so many new citizens who can be fully integrated. We know, for instance, the funding to the provinces to help citizens become integrated is the highest in history. We know that the largest number in history came to Canada last year under our government. So there are things pushing on either side.

One of them is that immigrants, when they decide to immigrate to another country, make an application, and sometimes, unlike in the case of Mr. Allen, they do not want to come right away. Some of them know there's a waiting period so they apply in advance because they have a lot to do. They have to settle.... Sometimes somebody has to finish school or they have something they want to do in their job. There might be a bonus at the end of the year in their job. They have to sell property. They have to say goodbye to their friends. They have to prepare emotionally and pack their bags. There are a whole lot of things that might take time.

So in an ideal situation, if you get to where you want to be, what would be an ideal waiting time for someone to come Canada? What would it be, so that people don't defer and say they're not going to wait that long, that they're going to go to Australia, and so that on the other hand, they have time to deal with what they have to deal with? And then we would be able to absorb and help integrate those people into our society, to help them find homes and a job, and to get the children in school, etc.

[Neil Yeates]

We think that an ideal processing time is in the six- to twelve-month time horizon. As the member has said, they do take into account how long it's going to take their application to be processed in terms of how they are interacting with our system.

But information gets out of date. When there are long waiting times, then information gets out of date. Ideally, we'd be in that six- to twelve-month period and people would be finding out one way or another—of course, we don't approve all applications—what their situation is. We do find that annually there is what we call a wastage rate on visas that we issue and are not taken up. It's typically fairly low, but we do factor that into our calculations.

The member is quite correct. Canada remains a very popular destination of choice. There's no shortage of people who want to come here.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

So all things being equal, with no international emergency and a government that still wants a lot of immigrants, as our government does, when can you get there? When will you be where you want to be?

[Neil Yeates]

Well, the big structural change in terms of our system is in moving away from an open intake system and setting limits on the number of applications we will accept by category every year. We've done that this year for federal skilled workers with the 20,000 that we have identified.

That, in our CIC ideal world, in terms of processing this stuff, would be done where practicable for all of the immigration categories that we have. For some, like refugees, you can't really set a cap, but for the rest of the categories, that would be the case.