In our preparation for today's meeting, we noticed that when we originally became aware of the contract with Gatestone for 1-800-O-Canada, it was at $79 million. That was when we started. We noticed just this weekend that the size of the contract has now gone to $158 million, and we don't know why it would have increased so much.
We can only assume that the government intends to expand the usage they originally intended to have. It's horrifying to us that this one contract has doubled and we were not made aware of it through any kind of labour-management consultations, nor of the intentions. We will be asking about that.
When it comes to IT, although another union—PIPSC— represents those workers primarily, I want to comment on a couple of things.
As I stated, I represent the majority of the unionized workforce at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and at the Immigration and Refugee Board. We've noticed a massive increase in the digitization and automation of the work that's being done in those departments. We have a lot of concerns about that, in particular at IRCC when it comes to the client experience and things like the inherent unconscious bias that gets built into these programs.
When we're having labour-management meetings and we're questioning why this work is being contracted out, why this work is being digitized and how artificial intelligence is getting used to do work that used to be done by our members as our bargaining agent work, we get told things like “it's going to help increase efficiencies” or “it's going to be a more efficient application process”.
When we ask them questions, it seems to us that often they don't fully understand, appreciate or grasp the scope of the type of technology they've been given, so they are forced to contract out because they don't know what they're working with or the capacity of it. That's instead of working with in-house employees who understand the programs and obligations of the Government of Canada. We're very concerned about the contracting out that's being done with these types of technologies and the impact it could have on future Canadians.