Citizenship and Immigration committee  Let's take the case of an individual who is applying to come to Canada permanently. We're looking at a permanent resident visa; therefore, we're going to be going through all the health checks. A person has to go through a lot of different checks, and their medical could take time.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In the case of a medical, a person will have their health check, but you can refuse them on health grounds if you deem them to be a danger to public health in Canada. Currently, that's defined as those two diseases. As an example, hepatitis may be on the list of 56, but an individual probably would not be refused entry to Canada on health grounds if they were known to have hepatitis, because it's not one of the screening diseases.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's something you'd have to ask the airlines about.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much. We looked at this from the point of view of “What do we know about how well the system is working?” and “Where are the weaknesses?, so that we could address them. We found that there just weren't a whole lot of metrics out there to really tell us that. We don't have the quality assurance and the different decision-making to determine whether or not we're using the right indicators, and all of that information.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, GCMS is a system that CIC is putting in place that is supposed to be a much more robust system to manage its information. The audit that was done earlier to look at the implementation of GCMS noted that it was behind and that there were delays. But how GCMS is going to replace the current FOSS and the NCMS—there will be some improvements, I understand, from what the department has said.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We looked at the protection of health, safety, and security and how that information is provided. There are other areas that we didn't look at, one of them being the fraud aspect. That is a completely separate area that would require a lot more work. So we made a scoping decision at this time to just focus on those three aspects of the act.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm going to ask Mr. Stock to get into the details to provide you with more of an answer. At the time of the audit, the question really was that they had no way of knowing if persons were still in the country or not, and I think the number was quite high. Even with GCMS, I don't know that it would answer the question of whether or not the person is still in the country.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd have to say that we really have not audited that area since 2008, so it's very hard for me to say whether or not there has been an improvement without good audit work. Gordon, do you want to add to that?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Certainly, I'd be happy to, and I'll ask Suzanne Therrien to add a bit of the detail. Right now, when an individual is applying to come.... Any permanent resident must have a medical screening—anyone applying to come to Canada permanently. There will therefore be a situation in which they go and get their medical screening, according to criteria laid out by Canada, in the country they are applying from.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Exactly; we need to go back to ask whether we made the right decision. We need the quality assurance so as to come back and ask, when you applied these tools, when you looked at the information, did it work for you? Did the system work? Without that quality assurance, it's hard to know.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Certainly. I will probably have to get back to you on that. I believe you are referring to a report that I actually don't have. We have in front of us today chapter 2, “Issuing Visas”, from 2011. You were referring to chapter 7? Which chapter are you referring to, and from which report?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Are you talking about systems, or are you talking about the detentions and removals chapter?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Right. I think you're referring, though, to chapter 2, “Large Information Technology Projects”, from June. That was an IT chapter that looked very much at systems and how the systems were being developed and whether or not they were progressing as planned. I'm sorry, I don't have the details on that particular chapter.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Absolutely.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Certainly, I'd be happy to. Mr. Chair, the reason we looked at quality assurance was that we noticed.... It's a very difficult job that the visa officers have to do. The job relies very much on the information they have and then the judgments they have to make with it. Based on what is in front of them, they have to decide whether or not to request security screening on individuals.