Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and esteemed members of the committee.
Thank you for inviting me here today to address the committee on Bill C-43, and more specifically on clause 252 regarding the appointment of members to the Social Security Tribunal of Canada.
The tribunal began its operations on April 1, 2013, and is mandated to provide a fair and impartial quasi-judicial process for appeals under the Employment Insurance Act, the Canada Pension Plan and the Old Age Security Act.
It was created to simplify and streamline the appeal processes by providing a single point of contact for all those appeals. All decisions are made by one decision-maker called a “tribunal member”, who is appointed by the governor in council after a rigorous competency-based selection process.
At the outset on April 1, 2013, the tribunal had 28 full-time members, including me. The three vice-chairpersons were appointed in May and June 2013, and to this date, the tribunal has grown to 73 full-time members. The government recently announced the appointment of 21 part-time members, who will help the tribunal process its large volume of appeals.
Bill C-43 would allow the appointment of an unlimited number of full-time and part-time members and would remove the time limits that are in effect in the current legislation for part-time members. These new provisions will enable the government to appoint additional members as needed in either of the tribunal's divisions, depending on the fluctuation in the caseload over time.
I will now give you an overview of the tribunal's structure and where things stand with our caseload. The tribunal has two levels: the general division and the appeal division.
The general division has two separate sections: the income security section and the employment insurance section. The second level, the appeal division, hears cases from both sections of the general division, employment insurance cases and income security cases. It is therefore important to recognize that the tribunal deals with four very different caseloads.
I would like to start with the general division's income security section. When we began operations on April 1, 2013, more than 7,200 appeals were transferred to us from the Office of the Commissioner of Review Tribunals. Roughly 24% of these appeals have now been concluded. Approximately 5,500 new appeals have been received since April 1, 2013. Overall about 2,000 cases have been concluded to date.
We are currently developing assumptions and performance expectations for members to estimate when the backlog will be completed with the number of members we have and the remaining caseload. The magnitude of these income security cases represents the greatest challenge to the tribunal.
Second is the general division employment insurance section. The board of referees continued to issue decisions until October 31, 2013, at which time about 320 appeals were transferred to us. The majority of these cases are now awaiting a ruling from the Canada Revenue Agency or a decision from the Tax Court before the tribunal can deal with them. As of September 30, 2014, close to 5,000 new EI appeals have been received, and nearly 3,000 have been concluded to date. Almost half of the remaining cases are part of group appeals and are being dealt with separately. The other half are assigned to members and are at various stages of their progress.
At the appeal division we have two different caseloads: income security and employment insurance. Let's start with the appeal division's income security caseload. On April 1, 2013, more than 460 appeals were transferred to us from the Pension Appeals Board. By the end of September 2014, around 95% of these appeals had been concluded. For the majority of the remaining appeals, a hearing date has already been set or the appeal has been postponed at the appellant's request. As of September 30, the appeal division had received 258 new income security appeals of which 163 have now been completed.
Now that the majority of cases transferred from the Pension Appeals Board are concluded, we are focusing our efforts on these new cases, which we expect to address within a reasonable period of time.