Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, fellow parliamentarians. It's wonderful to be here.
I am blessed to be in my 11th year as a member of Parliament for the beautiful riding of Saint John—Kennebecasis, which most of you know now butts up against your chair's beautiful riding of Saint John—St. Croix. We share the same city.
In all truthfulness, committee work is so important to Parliament. I sat on committee, in particular HUMA, for the better part of 10 years. I want you to know how much I appreciate the work you do. It's important to Canadians.
We're here to talk about our 100-day plan. We're here to talk about the CRA. I will start by saying that I was given the privilege to be secretary of state for the CRA. I was sworn in on May 13. I'll certainly say that it's been a wonderful privilege to serve Canadians in this role.
We around this horseshoe, this table, have all heard from Canadians who have come into our offices or called our offices about the CRA and concerns they had with getting a hold of the CRA, wait times and what have you. I knew that, obviously, from being a constituency MP before I was sworn in. I was certainly aware that there were some challenges with the CRA with respect to the frustration level of Canadians wanting to have calls answered.
Very shortly after I was sworn in, I became more acutely aware of what I call the problem resolution service. I call it the PRP. It is the urgent service that, when Canadians come in to a constituency office, members of Parliament have so they can call to elevate and deal with urgent cases. The wait times were off the charts. They were long.
The first thing I did as secretary of state for the CRA was to work with the deputy commissioner and, obviously, the commissioner. We focused on exactly what was going on, and we reallocated more resources to the PRP. There are, give or take, 125 people who look after the PRP and look after that MP line. We allocated another 50 to 60 people to that.
We took action quickly. I would say, as a result, that we have the PRP under good control, back within its times of a response within five days and a resolution, one way or the other, within 15 days.
My background is small business. I've run small businesses, some sports business and some other businesses. I believe in accountability, I believe in focus and I believe in results. What this showed me was that, if we went in and identified a problem—we all knew what that problem was—focused on it and put the proper resources to it, we could have success.
To me, that was a good sign, but we also knew that it was a symptom. There was a larger problem of service delivery. Again, we all heard it. It's not news to anybody around this table that constituents were coming in saying they were waiting forever for the CRA.
On September 2, Minister Champagne and I tasked the CRA to launch a 100-day plan to focus on what's going on, what we could do to address it and how we could fix things. For the record, we also did write the chair of finance. I know this is PACP, but we also wrote the chair of finance to offer to appear. We were proactive. I believe in accountability. I was sworn in on May 13. I'm accountable. The buck stops with me.
We wanted to institute the 100-day plan. The plan has four pillars. Increasing the ability to answer calls is first and foremost. It's hard to believe, but there are 30 million calls to the CRA each year.
Number two was to expand digitalized self-service options to reduce the number of calls. Maybe people can unlock their accounts online without calling. Maybe they can register for the CCB without calling.
Third was to address call drivers upstream and head off problems before people need to call or need to go online.
Fourth was to accelerate service modernization.
Obviously, we saw the Auditor General's report. It looked at a previous period, i.e., backwards from spring. We thank her for that report. However, at the time that report was released, we were already focusing on addressing issues that were kind of in that report. We're almost there. Every day on my whiteboard, I cross something off. I had seven, I had six, and we're one week out.
I'm looking forward to the 100-day plan's ending, but I'm also looking forward to day 101, and forward five years. We are working on a three- to five-year plan. I am excited about that. I believe we're on the right track. We have a wonderful relationship with the commissioner, the deputy commissioner and the president of the union, Mr. Marc Brière. We're going to continue to strive to be better and offer the service that Canadians expect and deserve from their CRA.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm happy to take questions.
