Public Accounts Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2010

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

So you've conducted two pilot programs, which I think are a great idea, and I'm hoping you learned a lot from them. That's what I wanted to ask you about.

From the business express program and the student partners program, what have you learned that you can apply to your whole spectrum of clients to make a system faster, better, and more efficient?

[Neil Yeates]

I'll ask Madame Deschênes to speak to those.

[Claudette Deschênes]

One of the key things we found in those two programs is that we need to identify the risk and mitigate risk. So the more we can get the application perfected, with as much information as is easily verifiable, the faster we can process those cases.

The other thing we need in the student partnership is a loop back to be able to see if those who have come to Canada are really studying. Schools can tell us “yes” and then we would know if our risk is correct or not.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Thank you.

Mr. Bains.

[Navdeep Bains, Liberal, Mississauga—Brampton South, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

This is just a follow-up with respect to the question I asked earlier. Some other members on this committee have asked this question. With regard to the excessive waiting times for citizenship, the question is whether the minister has given the department any directive on how to reduce that time. Is there a plan in place to reduce the waiting time for those who want to obtain their citizenship? Is there something in the works?

[Neil Yeates]

Yes. As I say, we're doing two things. We have added some resources this year. We started in the summer. We're doing that and are looking at our ability to continue that on a permanent basis. We feel that we do need to make a permanent adjustment to our capacity for processing. That's part 1.

Part 2 is re-examining our process from end to end to make sure it's as efficient as possible and we don't create a new bottleneck. We have had a bottleneck at our processing centre in Sydney, so we need to sort that out. We don't want to create a new bottleneck in our regional offices in terms of running the citizenship test and the ceremonies and so on. We have to make sure that we have capacity right from end to end to make this work smoothly.

That's what we're sorting through now, the sort of “re-look”, if you like, at all that of process. But in regard to our time horizon for that, we hope to be through a lot of this in time for next year.

[Navdeep Bains, Liberal, Mississauga—Brampton South, ON]

Have any targets been set that you are working toward?

[Neil Yeates]

In terms of processing times?

[Navdeep Bains, Liberal, Mississauga—Brampton South, ON]

Yes.

[Neil Yeates]

We haven't landed on that, but we would like to reduce them very significantly. I can tell you historically where we've been. We've been in that four- to six-month time horizon on citizenship proofs and we would like to get back to that. We're at about nine months right now. We're in that 15- to 19-month range on grants, and for sure we'd like to reduce that to less than a year.

[Navdeep Bains, Liberal, Mississauga—Brampton South, ON]

So that's roughly what you would like to go to, the historical target, and you are trying to anticipate that change will take place in about a year's time. Is that a safe assumption based on your analysis?

[Neil Yeates]

Yes, within the next 12 months.

[Navdeep Bains, Liberal, Mississauga—Brampton South, ON]

The next question is with regard to the gap in processing times. This is something that we've talked about as well and was brought up in the AG report.

I understand that there can be certain one-time challenges. For example, we've seen a spike in applications with respect to the challenges we see in Haiti and the pressures afoot. There are those odd exceptions.

But how do you explain, for example, that someone in Ghana in the economic class takes 86 months to process while the same application for someone from Italy takes 29 months? Why the large discrepancy? The issue I see here is one of resource management. How do we allocate resources to manage these processing times, particularly the large gaps that exist in this case between Ghana and Italy? I think that's pretty large. I just want to get a better understanding of that.

[Neil Yeates]

I'll start and then ask Madame Deschênes to follow up.

We try to keep track of that fairly carefully. We are concerned when we start to see significant differences between missions. Things happen. The character of the applications does vary a lot from one mission to another. One part of the world may have very significant security review issues, for example, and may need to go for review through CSIS. That may take a fair bit of time before the file comes back to us.

Then, we have our own issues about allocating resources as these circumstances change. We're always in a bit of a lag in responding to them. Other than on a temporary basis, it's never a quick fix to move more staff to a mission overseas. That's always a challenge.

Claudette.

[Claudette Deschênes]

The other thing I would comment on is that certainly some cases are more complex than others. I'll note that the processing times are historical, right? They look at the cases you've processed in the last year, so if you have a lot of old cases that you've put in the process, your processing time is going to be longer.

What we've done now that we have global case management is that we're going to move to one case management process, which will permit us to centralize the intake of some types of applications and process them as one inventory, as opposed to the past, when the inventory sat in missions. Therefore, as Mr. Yeates has said, in the past the only way to deal with them was to send more resources. That's costly and there's not always the space and so on.

Now we're intaking them all in Sydney, and we'll be able to shift them to the missions and do some of the front end and the back end in Canada in a centralized fashion. We hope to deal with some of those issues of very different processing times in the longer term.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Thank you, Madame Deschênes.

Mr. Dreeshen.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being here today.

I want to go specifically to the report. I noticed on page 9 that “the Department solicits feedback from its front-line employees and also monitors service quality at its call centres to help identify service issues”. You've just mentioned global case management. I'm just curious as to whether that might have been a consequence of some of the employee feedback or where it was that you decided this might be the best method to solve some of the issues that have come up.

[Neil Yeates]

One of our challenges has always been spikes in workload across our network, throughout the world and across Canada. We have not had a case management system that would allow us to share the workload in an efficient way. GCMS basically allows cases to be processed anywhere in the world, so if we have a situation in which we've had a caseload buildup, we could take the next available flexibility in the network and have them do processing work on those cases.

That is a huge step forward for us. In the past, we would have to physically ship paper files around the world in order to do that, which was, as you can imagine, expensive, time-consuming, and so on. To be able to do this electronically is an enormous step forward for us.

As I say, it has been our experience that we deal with these peaks and valleys in workload around the network, and to make ourselves as productive and as efficient as possible, we needed a way to share that workload in a very quick and instantaneous kind of way. GCMS is the system that allows us to do that.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Getting back to employees and the responsibilities they have, and perhaps some of the ideas you have seen from this, I know that you have national working groups on improving service. I wonder whether there are examples you could share with us that have come from these working groups.

[Neil Yeates]

Sure.

Madame Deschênes.

[Claudette Deschênes]

Certainly the call centre is monitored in terms of the calls they're getting and how we can solve some of the problems. The deputy spoke about tier one, tier two, and tier three. To improve the information available, what we're trying to do is get feedback from the call centres about the types of questions we constantly get. That's one aspect.

Then, of course, we also use the call centre when there are urgent requests for cases that are in the backlog, to identify them, and then sometimes they'll come to us to explain that they're getting the same questions because it's not clear what our processes are. So we work on operational guidance to ensure that the intent of the act is actually the way we're delivering it. That's the type of thing.

Now we're doing a lot of work in, for example, citizen redesign. We're canvassing staff and asking what things work well, what things are duplication, and what we could be and should be doing better. That's all part of the work we're presently doing.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Is it part, then, of the service innovation office? Is it related to that and the leadership and coordination for service delivery? Are these the same types of issues as those related to that office?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Well, I'd make the comment that the deputy moved the service innovation office into operations, so now we're doing the service innovation office. Plus, all of the operational managers are very much involved in taking control of where we need to go and in making some decisions.

Obviously, modernization is messy, so we're anticipating that there may be some things that won't work out perfectly, but we think we need to move, so the commitment is there that we're going to move in the next short period of time.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you.