Government Operations Committee on Feb. 22nd, 2007

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

I appreciate your passion, and I was curious--

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

So if you'd like to, we'll go ahead with your questions.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

I would, but I'd like to clarify beforehand with the clerk. Normally, how does the time go between--

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

We allow seven minutes.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Is it seven minutes for the Liberals, seven minutes for the Bloc, seven minutes for the Conservatives--

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Yes, everybody.

[Raymond Simard, Liberal, Saint Boniface, MB]

And seven minutes for the New Democrats.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Yes, and seven minutes for the New Democrats.

Does your time count toward the Liberals?

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

No. I have the discretion, believe me.

[Raymond Simard, Liberal, Saint Boniface, MB]

No, the chair has the discretion--absolutely, and always has.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

I just wanted to clarify that. Thank you.

I would like to thank the witnesses very much for coming here today. I want to commend you on a job well done with the circumstances you're facing.

One of the things you talked about was capacity and efficiency. I was wondering, have you had the opportunity to do statistical analysis to find out how much of this problem is a temporary problem and how much you think is a permanent problem?

[Gérald Cossette]

It's difficult to come up with a trend because it has occurred over a very short period of time. If you looked until let's say 2002, we were issuing about 1.8 million to 2 million passports a year, and our capacity now is for about 2.8 million passports a year. Last year we were at 3.1 million, this year we may easily be at 3.6 million, and potentially next year at 4 million to 4.1 million. So there's a gap between the existing capacity and what we will need to deliver.

In terms of trends, the problem is they're not constant. As I said, in recent years we all noticed we will double the number of passports over a five- to six-year period. So we're trying to adapt to a certain extent and we are catching up. The passport office is an organization that, in all honesty, should have been modernized years ago. It didn't occur for all kinds of reasons, but given the fact that we have to work within a specific financial envelope, that's what we do.

We seriously believe the only way we can move forward in the medium term and long term is to automate lots of our functions, so we can accrue those savings and invest in services, expansion, and security features.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

I know Canadians are very concerned about security issues. The Auditor General's audit reviewed several security aspects of Passport Canada's operations, and she noted in her report that

Passport Canada still has some major issues to resolve, particularly in the areas of security and identity verification. It faces a complex undertaking that will need the full cooperation of other government organizations at both the federal and the provincial and territorial levels.

In light of her comments, should Parliament be concerned that the hiring of so many new employees could lead to errors in passport approvals and security breaches?

[Gérald Cossette]

It's interesting that you raise the question, because that's a criticism we get all the time: “Why don't you hire people faster?”

We have to clear these people from a security standpoint. People handling passports, physically printing and so on and so forth, need security clearance. It's not as if we could hire a clerk from the street, put them in our room, and then have them process passports. So it takes longer than maybe it should, given the fact that these people require security clearance.

That's why, also, we are taking the time it takes to do the processing, the identification of documents, and so on and so forth. We're not skipping over steps because the volume is increasing. We understand that it is frustrating for Canadians, but after all, this is a document that guarantees your identity and confirms your identity in Canada, but moreover when you travel abroad. So it's extremely important for us to make sure the document keeps its good tradition and so on and so forth.

When it comes to the AG's report, the Auditor General has two main concerns. The first one, when it comes to security, is access to the system. We have an electronic system that gives access to lots of people, from the examiner processing the file, to potentially the administration officer doing the administrative issues. One of her concerns is the fact that too many people have access to all that information. We are in fact in the process of closing dormant files that are not active. We are also in the process of verifying on a monthly basis who has access to the system. If people don't need to have access to the system, we just basically remove their capacity to do so.

But above and beyond that, there's also the fact that very few people in practice have the capacity to get an application from the beginning and produce a passport at the end. Very few people have access to the bags, the electronic system, the security feature, and the passport itself. In theory, yes, it works, but in practice it doesn't work that way. I don't have access to all the buildings myself. So the functions are segregated in such a way that very few people can do the whole thing.

The second aspect of her concerns relates basically to authentication of the document itself, which has to be done with the provinces, and criteria that may prevent people from having a passport, having a criminal record and so on and so forth. The exchange of information among federal agencies and between the federal level and provinces hasn't been as good as it should. We're making significant progress on that front, with the signature of MOUs with the RCMP, CSIS, and so on and so forth. We're making also significant progress when it comes to the electronic capacity of exchanging information live, because the issue is not only to exchange information, it's to do it on time. Otherwise, it's useless to do it three weeks after the fact.

We recognize that it could go faster and be better, but slowly we're moving toward having the security features we need to deliver the documents we would like to deliver.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

You mentioned worldwide agencies. Have you been working with other agencies worldwide to look at new technologies? There's talk of a possibility of a ten-year passport, which might solve a lot of this problem. Can you tell us how that's going, with talking with other agencies?

[Gérald Cossette]

In fact Mr. McDonald chairs a committee. It's the ICAO committee.

Gary, if you want to say a couple of words....

[Gary McDonald, Director General for Policy and Planning, Passport Office, Department of Foreign Affairs]

Yes, thank you.

For some years now we've been leading the effort to develop new international standards for passports. You may have heard of e-passports, passports with an embedded chip. It's the new international standard for passports. It was adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization in 2004. E-passports are now being rolled out by many countries around the world, and we've been a part of that. Actually, we've been a major part of developing those standards.

So yes, we work very closely with our colleagues in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. We meet regularly. We exchange information regularly with those colleagues on practices, not just security practices, but service practices as well. If you heard us talking, I think you would be surprised--or perhaps not--at the degree to which we all face the same challenges and the same issues when it comes to confirming individuals' identities, in great part because we come from societies that share similar values and have similar government infrastructures when it comes to the identity issue.

So perhaps it's a long answer to your question, but yes, absolutely, we do. I would say that we are among the world leaders when it comes to developing new technologies and developing particularly the standards around those technologies.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Are there some countries that have this technology with the chip right now?

[Gary McDonald]

Yes, absolutely.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Are we close to implementing something like that?

[Gary McDonald]

We're getting closer.

Obviously, as in all organizations, we've had to structure our requirements and initiatives, and we have to get a sequence to those initiatives. The AG's report from two years ago certainly gave us a list of immediate issues that we had to attend to.

Many countries have introduced the e-passport already. In large part, it became a priority for those countries, because they were required by the United States to be issuing e-passports by last fall in order to maintain their visa waiver status for tourists. So with that requirement imposed upon them, the priority to issue e-passports went straight to the top of their list.

We took a slightly different approach. It's not that it's not important; it is. But clearly we developed a detailed work plan based on the guidance that we received from the AG and our discussions with the AG.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Thank you.

Mr. Bevington.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for coming out today.

Certainly every member of Parliament is concerned about this passport issue. It's created a great deal of work in our constituency offices, but in some respects it's changed.

I'd like you to outline the changes you've made about the way a member of Parliament's office...and your rationale for the changes that you made with the movement of the passport. It seemed that in about October or November of this year, we quit directing passports to Ottawa. A directive came that we weren't to do that. We were to move them on to Service Canada. Did that change come from you?

[Gérald Cossette]

No. In November there was a little seminar organized for all parliamentarians, in terms of the services provided and how to work with the Passport Canada MP service channel.

I did not attend the meeting. There may have been reference to the fact that Service Canada is also available, but not in lieu of the service provided by MPs.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Okay.

Many citizens coming from a northern riding in a rural and remote area have a great deal of difficulty with passport requirements, even regarding passport pictures. It has turned out to be a problem for many of our people. It adds considerable expense, and it's something that perhaps Passport Canada could look at in terms of a Service Canada centre, particularly in Yellowknife, or if you're going to open one in Inuvik. If you had photographic equipment there, it would guarantee that the photographs would be of sufficient quality to make the passport application work. That would be very useful.

In many cases I've had people with dual citizenship come to me and say, “I sent my passport from Yellowknife to England, and I sent one in to the Canadian office at the same time. The one from England came back in two weeks, and the Canadian one took considerably longer.” I wonder if in some respects we can look at other countries to find out how to streamline our mail services to ensure that these things are working in a correct fashion.

I'm looking at your projection here and your target for mail delivery, and I can't really say that I've seen those results at all. That goes before your particular ramp-up of passports in the last while. So I'd say that we really need to look at how the mail service is working to ensure that people in rural and remote communities have better access, more guaranteed access, because it's very difficult for them.

I've had the situation where people have to take an airplane to a passport centre in order to get their passport to meet up with their obligations. They could be involved in better planning, and that might help them, but that's not always the opportunity they have. I'm sure you've heard this a hundred times.

Something really has to be done for rural and remote communities across the country to smooth out the system and to ensure that in each post office in the country, for example, there is a very clear understanding of the nature of passport requirements in very plain English, with very good displays, which would allow people to make sure that when they fill out the passport application, they're doing it correctly, and that language and the understanding of technology is not as much of a problem as it is now.

Those are some of the things that maybe you'd want to comment on.