Human Resources Committee on Feb. 23rd, 2021

[Frank Vermaeten]

We absolutely are working on it. We created a task force and we created a special unit with ESDC to be able to deal with those questions, so if people are denied the CRB they can call ESDC and essentially unblock that piece of data that prevents them from being able to get the CRB.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Is that call line available now?

[Frank Vermaeten]

It has started, yes.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Do you have the number offhand?

[Frank Vermaeten]

I do not.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

All right. We'd have to contact ESDC to get that number then.

[Frank Vermaeten]

Yes.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

I'm pleased to hear it's not actually through CRA, because my next question was about the CRA call wait times, which I'm sure you heard about until you were blue in the face, but I did want to address them with you.

We're hearing from across the country that many people are having issues. In normal years in tax season, people wait a couple of hours sometimes on the phone and that's not necessarily abnormal, but it seems to be incredibly high even compared with a normal tax season. I'm hearing from folks and I know there are MPs across the country.... I'm sure everyone on this committee has probably had constituents complain about this issue, where someone is waiting three or four hours and then they get an operator saying, “Too busy, call back later,” and hang up. Then they have to start again.

My concern is that these are folks who were promised support from the federal government. The Liberal government has announced these things, but the problem is that thousands of people can't even get through to access them through CRA, and there's a whole host of technical things, as we know, that can go wrong and be why people need to call CRA to get those benefits. It's easy to announce these things, yet they're getting roadblocked, some for weeks, trying to get through.

I know you're aware of this issue, so can you explain to the committee the measures you're taking to reduce these call wait times to more of a humane level?

[Frank Vermaeten]

Absolutely, and certainly it is of great concern to us. Just to give you context, the call demand is just unprecedented. In a typical week we might have received, at the same time last year, 350,000 calls and this year we're receiving over a million calls. The demand is just very large. We have ramped up our hiring. We're in the process of hiring over an additional 2,000 people. That gives us 1,500 more people than it did this time last year for the tax season. We have a couple of other processes in place that allow us to get those wait times down.

Let me also just say one tiny thing. It is absolutely true that there are some people who are waiting a very long time. The average wait time tends to be around 25 minutes, but of course it's the outliers. It's often when people need to speak to what we call a tier-two or tier-three agent, a specialist, that they have to wait this long. It's very unfortunate.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

I'm just going to ask a closing question. You mentioned that you're hiring 2,000 people. When did CRA start hiring these people?

[Frank Vermaeten]

That hiring would have started probably in November, I would say. It's hiring and training.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

The only reason I ask and that I find it a bit concerning that it didn't start until November—and this isn't on you—is that we've been in this pandemic for almost a year now. I'm surprised it took until November to start hiring these 2,000. I would have thought that last March, when all of this was happening and you guys were administering CERB, you would have hired droves of people in anticipation of this.

We'll have to address this in Parliament, but I'm a bit disappointed to hear that hiring did not start until late fall—only a few months ago. That might explain why we're still experiencing considerable call volume and times.

[Frank Vermaeten]

Here's the interesting thing: In fact, call wait times were very low in August, September and October, so things were manageable. There was always a plan to hire more people. We always hire more people in tax season, and there was a plan to hire more people than ever.

What we saw as the second wave came—I think it's the second wave, or perhaps the third wave, depending on how you count it—was that call volumes and call-handle time went up really unexpectedly.

I'll point you to the call-handle time. It went up by 40%. A lot had to do with identity theft, with the increase in sophistication of cyber-attacks. That's really what has led to an unexpected demand both in the number of calls and in the duration of those calls.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Vermaeten, and thank you, Ms. Dancho.

Next is Mr. Vaughan, please, for five minutes.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

Thank you very much.

I have a couple of very quick questions, and if you don't have quick answers, a written submission is welcome.

What percentage of people pay into EI but are ineligible to receive it?

This is for Statistics Canada.

[Josée Bégin]

Vincent, would you like to start addressing the question?

[Vincent Dale, Director, Centre for Labour Market Information, Statistics Canada]

I probably can't give you a very precise answer to your question. I can tell you that we have a survey every year called the employment insurance coverage survey, which looks at the question of what proportion of people have had a spell of unemployment—

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

Could you get us that information?

[Vincent Dale]

I'd be happy to supply it.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

The flip side of that is this: What percentage can't pay because of their employment status and may need it but can't receive it because they're self-employed, in the gig economy or in a seasonal employment situation?

Second, do you know which province has the highest rate of ineligibility because of the way in which EI is designed?

[Vincent Dale]

Again, I don't have that information at hand, but we'd be happy to give you eligibility rates by province.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

Could you also give us all the provinces and territories, so that we know who has the lowest, and then correlate that listing with whether there's a high proportion of seasonal industries in those communities?

Do you split it between rural and urban? Is that a split that you give so that we can understand whether the gig economy has a different footprint in EI from that of the seasonal or more resource-based employment scenarios, which are driven by climate and season?

[Vincent Dale]

Everything is always subject to the size of our sample, but we can certainly do so as a custom tabulation to separate urban and rural.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

To pre-empt the chair's prerogative, if you could show that for P.E.I., where you have four zones and one very different zone, in order to understand how it can model into a smaller community in a very different way, that would be helpful as well.

In terms of the CRA, we heard previous testimony that the EI computer system runs on COBOL. Do you use COBOL at CRA as a computer language?

[Annette Butikofer, Assistant Commissioner and Chief Information Officer, Information Technology, Canada Revenue Agency]

Thank you for the question.

Yes, we use COBOL in some of our systems. We also use Java. We use a blend of technologies, based on the platform and the type of system we're developing.