I'd be happy to do so.
In Canada's refugee system, you can present a claim at the port of entry--at the border--when you arrive. Many people also present a claim at one of our inland offices. What that chart tells you is that when that claim is examined up front, before it's referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board, which is the administrative tribunal that examines claims in Canada, there are a limited number of grounds for saying that we're not going to refer you.
If you're what we would refer to as a very bad person, such as a security risk, an organized crime risk--somebody who may pose a threat to Canada--we may be able to exclude you from being referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board. If we have evidence that you received protection in a different country before coming here, we may be able to exclude you and not refer you to the Immigration and Refugee Board and send you directly to a pre-removal risk assessment.
Since the port of entry enforces the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States, if you're presenting your claim at the land port of entry between Canada and the United States and you don't fall within one of the exceptions, you may be returned to have your claim entertained in the U.S., which is a signatory country to the Geneva Convention.
As you can see, most people--97%--then get referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board. There they will determine whether the person is in need of protection. About 44% of people are approved. They will have an application for permanent residence processed for landing in Canada.
People who are rejected have a couple of more actions of recourse. Most of them will ask at some point for a pre-removal risk assessment, where they will say whether they have a fear of returning to their country of origin and will try to make a case for why they should not be removed. Your initial application for a pre-removal risk assessment stays your removal, so you will not be removed until that assessment has been done.
You can see that in 2005 about 2% were approved at that stage. That figure can be misleading, because it includes all countries. It includes people from the United States and western Europe who have applied for pre-removal risk assessments. If you take some countries that maybe produce more of the kind of protection considerations we have at the time, the PRRA acceptance rate can be as high as 16% or 17%, and that's after a number of people have already been approved for refugee status by the immigration and refugee program.
If you've been rejected by the IRB and you're rejected at the PRRA, and let's say you are in a situation where you think you've created roots in the country, and you think that removing you to your country of origin would create huge compassionate problems, huge hardship problems, you can actually apply on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.
Now, what is important to understand on this chart is that for the people who come in and pursue their claims--because there are a number of people who, after they claim, do not pursue their claims--about seven out of ten will get some form of status: refugee, PRRA, or humanitarian and compassionate status.
The right-hand side shows the situation in 2001, when the asylum system in Canada was under a lot of stress, and what was done under three different sets of measures, some dealing with access, some dealing with processing these refugees, and some dealing with the consequences, which meant trying to give permanent residence to people we approved and trying to assist people who were not approved as refugees to depart.
On access, we've imposed a number of visas since 2001. We've imposed 11 visas and we've tightened the visa that is used by seafarers to come to Canada. We've implemented the Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S. Under IRPA, we've eliminated what we call multiple repeat claims by people. And that has reduced substantially the volume of claims, and the reduction has really been targeted at the people who are trying to use the system as a way in but are not necessarily in need of protection.
On trying to deal with the process and reduce the inventory, in 2001 there were 52,000 claims in the IRB inventory. That inventory is now around 20,000, and the measures that have been taken there have been measures to streamline the process within the IRB. Some targeted investments and the fact that the intake had gone down has helped to reduce the numbers.
All of these measures also have benefits, because for the people who are need of protection, you can see that in 2005 we landed almost 20,000 approved refugees in Canada compared with a little less than 12,000 in 2001. If we're not directing so much attention to people who try to use the system but are not in need of protection, we can do a better job of trying the help those who are in need of protection.
This gives you a summary of the administrative measures we've taken. You can see that in the same fashion, in our efforts to reach the consequences sooner, the volume of removals or failures of claims has also gone up. Claudette can talk more about that.
The last page on the placemat gives you all our data on one page. In the column on the left you have the levels planned for 2005. You will remember earlier in the presentation that we gave you the plan for 2006. So here we show you what the plan was for 2005, we gave you what was actually achieved in 2005--that's the second column--we're giving you the number of months that the cases have been processed at the 80% median, we're giving you the approval rate, and we give you the state of our inventories at the end of December 2005. The last column is a percentage of the cases that are the in-Canada part of the inventory versus the overseas part of the inventory.
A couple of things are important to note in this table. One is that while we have huge inventories and huge processing challenges, a lot of the time is actually spent in the queue, waiting for your turn to come before you're processed, in some categories such as the skilled workers and the parents and grandparents. In the priority processing lines, like spouses and dependant children or provincially nominated cases and most Quebec cases, we actually have less than a one-year inventory in these cases. Most of them are processed in a year or less. So that's an important consideration.
On the right hand side, we give you our total volumes on the temporary residence business lines, how many visas we issued in these business lines for visitors, students, and temporary workers; we give you what was the approval rate; and we give you a sense, using different medians, of what is the state of our processing time.
The state of our processing time on temporary residence in the three categories is the best it's ever been. I'm not saying it couldn't be better; we certainly always like to improve. But this is an area where we've made a fair amount of improvement, and in some of our immigrant business lines, the processing time for spouses and minor children is also the best it's ever been. We would like to bring it to 80% processed in six months or less. We're getting there, but we're not there yet.
We talked to you about the extensions in Canada, what are the volumes, the time it takes, and the approval rate. When you look at the processing time for these extensions in Canada at CPC Vegreville, it includes mailing times, so there are ten days--five days in, five days out--of mailing time included in this chart.
Then we bring you to some of our other business lines. As you know, in 2002 one of the major document integrity initiatives that were introduced was the permanent residence card. By the end of December 2005, we had issued 1.7 million of these cards and our inventory is almost nil. We're processing them as they come in.
Citizenship also gives you some of our volumes. We've made a tremendous effort on the citizenship front this year to deal with the substantial inventory that we had, and we have made significant progress. I think our clients and the stakeholders will see even more progress this year as this caseload goes through our various field offices.
Then we talk about our call centre. As you can see, there are almost six million calls per year. When we introduced the permanent resident card we were not able to answer even 50% of unique calls. The industry standard is 80%. As you can see, there are now at 89% of unique calls being answered in our call centre, so we've made progress in dealing with access. We know we still have progress to make on the satisfaction front, and we're certainly committed to doing that.
The last chart gives you a sense of the volume of Internet visits we get. It's quite phenomenal. It has forced us to think about how we can use the Web as a better communication tool for our clients. This is another area where we think we have a lot of progress to make. In the service initiative that the minister spoke about, this is an area where we're trying to do some work.
So if you look at pure transactions, not counting call centres and website visits, there are two million transactions annually in the department. When you include the call centre transactions, there are more than eight million transactions per year.
Merci.