Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, the minister did appear before you, I believe it was on May 29, to signal her intention to table amendments to the Citizenship Act. I believe she said that she would like to table in the fall. There is obviously work to be done when you're drafting new legislation and there is also the whole legislative process, so the only response I can make is I think there is a commitment to move forward as quickly as possible, using the legislative process that is in place.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We appreciate the work that Mr. Edmonston has done, and the department actually has been working with him, but as he himself indicated, the difficulty is knowing. Did 100% of those people not take steps? Did all of them take steps? It's finding what percentage of that potential pool of individuals actually do have an issue with their citizenship status.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If I could, in terms of the current Citizenship Act, someone born outside of Canada to Canadian citizen parents is a citizen. There was no need to be registered. So I would say anyone born after 1977 should not have a problem. Their birth certificate or baptismal certificate would have shown that they were children of a Canadian citizen.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not aware of any plans. I would have to ask the question.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We haven't allocated new resources. We have reallocated existing resources. We have shifted the priorities to deal with these particular situations. We have a unit in the call centre. We've retrained or upgraded the training of the call centre agents on this. In the case processing centre in Sydney, Rose Anne's team is working directly with the clients.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not able to give you a dollar value. Because this has been an internal reallocation, we have not tracked the dollar value.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't know if our financial systems are such that we could do that. That would be going back to doing manual counts, asking people to count how many hours a day they spent on this type of case or that type of case, so I can't make any commitment as to whether or not we can parse out those resources.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The current advertising campaign that we referred—the one launched last week—had a value of $300,000.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, I believe it was launched the day the minister was before committee, by Groupe Cossette Communication.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not aware of any polling that's been done.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We don't have an estimate. It's very difficult to determine who the people may be and where they may be. We—particularly the group before you, those of us in operations—are dealing with the cases that come forward to us and we're tracking them very closely, but I'm not a statistician and I'm not able to make any kind of educated estimation of what the target audience might be, either in Canada or living outside Canada.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would add that we do have a protocol that has been developed for dealing with these cases. The guidelines for dealing with people who may not have status in Canada are published on our Internet site, including scripts to guide our agents so that they're using sensitive language.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  My understanding, and I would have to get confirmation on this from people with more technical expertise than I have, is that we are updating our automatic voice response system at the call centre; it is definitely not state of the art. The new system would be more integrated into tracking the cases through the call centre as they move throughout the rest of our system.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  At the level of the case workers, I would have to say no.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can respond to that, Mr. Chair. Since we set up the dedicated lines, we have asked the call agents at the call centre to track the types of inquiries. This cannot be done by an electronic system; it is done as a manual count, so that we get an idea of the kinds of calls, concerns, and types of circumstances people are calling about.