My colleague just raised the whole issue of technology modernization. In its response to your report, the Canada Revenue Agency was clearly committed to modernizing its systems to respond adequately to the public.
I'm wondering what happens when calls are rejected, when people are redirected to other telephone options or when they are simply asked to call back later. How is this accounted for in performance measures? What worries me about the numbers I'm seeing are the average wait times, including eight minutes for employment insurance, five minutes for the Canada pension plan and old age security, 32 minutes for Immigration and five minutes for Veterans Affairs. However, these statistics don't include calls where communication is cut off and people haven't been able to speak to an agent. Does that distort the data a little? If communication is cut off in 45% to 50% of calls and people can't talk to an agent, but agents answer the other half of the calls in eight minutes, do you find these statistics reliable?