Citizenship and Immigration Committee on June 5th, 2007

[Janet Siddall]

Absolutely, and thank you very much for that suggestion.

We certainly have, in the past, done newsletters for members of Parliament on issues. We've done sessions on the Hill. I would go further; we do offer up information sessions for constituency offices on all our services. I'd be very happy to take this back to my colleagues, who work across the country, and have them organize specific information sessions for your constituency offices on these issues.

You can have a town hall, a question and answer, and we can work with you on, as you say, a succinct one- or two- or three-pager that covers the main issues that you're hearing about, and perhaps we could have some dialogue with your offices so that we could test-run it with you to see whether it meets your needs.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Absolutely, and you can create that piece now, over the next month or two, and distribute it. Granted, you don't have all the questions answered, you don't have the new legislation that will be tabled in the fall, and you don't have an outcome to the Joe Taylor case, but then you redo your materials; you update them and you send out another round saying we have an update. I think it would certainly be something that would help me as a member of Parliament.

As my second comment to Mr. Gravel and to the committee, I want to say that it's a great thing that the Minister is taking some time to make sure she gets this right and is carefully drafting this legislation. We've had an awful lot of questions around this difficult issue, and there's a chance for members of Parliament to add their input into this legislation if there's something they want to see included. I imagine the Minister and the Minister's staff will be carefully studying the minutes of this committee. I think there's a chance there to contact the Minister and ensure that there's input into that legislation, and then, of course, we'll all have input in debating the legislation.

Finally, Mr. Chair, my time is almost up. I want to congratulate the officials as well—just one second, Mr. Chair; thank you very much for the hard work you do on behalf of Canadian taxpayers and for your department, especially in regard to this very difficult question.

Thank you.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Thank you, Mr. Batters.

In the infamous words of Al Haig, “I'm in charge now.” Well, apparently not. I'll turn this back over.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Andrew Telegdi]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Wilson.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I just want to say thank you to the witnesses here with respect to the statements you made previously about working together with members of Parliament over the summer and putting together some town hall meetings. I do ten town hall meetings in my riding every summer, and if I can incorporate some of the issues with respect to citizenship and immigration into them, I think it would be advantageous to my constituents, so thank you on that.

To carry on with the questions that I asked previously, I just wanted to clarify that the department or the minister hasn't put forward a budget of any kind to deal with the dedicated transfer of resources to deal with the lost Canadians or to deal with the $300,000 that is going to be spent on an advertising campaign. There has been no budget set aside as to how much is going to be spent on this issue. Is that correct?

[Janet Siddall]

We have done a reallocation of resources to deal with the minister's instructions to deal on a priority basis with those individuals who have lived all their lives in Canada, or most of their lives, and are now finding they have a problem with their citizenship status. Separate from that, if there is new legislation, there is no question that there will be an analysis of the resource requirements to implement new legislation, but that's part of the legislative process.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

So to date, there has been no analysis done to say that we're going to be setting aside $1 million or $2 million to deal with this, and this is where it's going to go—into human resources, into call centre costs, into advertising and promotion, into publication costs?

[Janet Siddall]

Whenever we have new legislation, that's always part of the process, but we'll have to stay tuned to see how that new legislation evolves.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

I must say I'm shocked. Obviously this is an important problem that we're dealing with, but the department hasn't set aside a figure to say this is how it will be dealt with. At the end of the day, how are you going to be able to measure your success or your failure and say you've set aside $1 million to deal with this issue and this is the outcome at that point in time? There's no budgeting process to begin with. There's going to be nothing to evaluate it down the road.

Is it part and parcel of a larger budget that we can maybe analyze after the fact?

[Janet Siddall]

Are you referring to what new legislation might bring, or what we're currently doing?

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

I mean currently—the budget spent to date.

[Janet Siddall]

Well, what we have we can certainly provide to you. It's in the main estimates. That's the amount of money we spend on our citizenship business line, writ large, and therefore that will give you a sense of the resources devoted to granting citizenship or processing proofs of citizenship. We can also give you the costs of operating our call centre.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Does any of this information, any of this data that goes with the lost Canadians, get incorporated into the global case management system, or is a separate data base being used to keep track of all these individuals?

[Janet Siddall]

The global case management system is a system that is under development, but there is an existing rollout for the citizenship business line. It is basically a case-tracking system; that's where we get our data on the number of cases that we're dealing with, but at this point in time I don't want to go that far because I'm not sure.... I'll turn it over to Clark, who works with it. I do not believe it's linked to our financial data systems at this time.

[Clark Goodman]

I don't believe it is.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Would you clarify that for me and get back to me about whether or not it is part of the global case management system?

If it's not, why would it not be linked into that process? We've got it; the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing it, and if we are starting a new database right now, it just seems inefficient.

I'll wait to hear back from you before I comment further.

[Clark Goodman]

Just to clarify, Mr. Chair, we're looking for a link between, say, a financial management system and our global case management system. Is that your question?

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Yes, that, as well as the database to keep track of the individuals who are coming forward as lost Canadians as well.

[Clark Goodman]

Okay. The files that are.... I cannot speak to whether a separate database is kept. Rose Anne, do you want to say anything about that?

[Rose Anne Poirier]

Mr. Chair, I'll try to answer that to the best of my ability.

In terms of applications that are submitted to the case processing centre in Sydney, we have an application from clients that we process. Whether it's an application for grant of citizenship or proof of citizenship, that is the system that is used. That's the electronic system we use to process the applications.

I think we also previously mentioned that we are tracking—In terms of an active application coming forward, that is the system that we are using, and, of course, we can get some information from that system.

In terms of people who are coming forward and calling our call centre, I believe we already provided an answer to that question; there is a more manual tracking done of those particular inquiries as they're coming forward.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you.

Do I have a few minutes left?

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Andrew Telegdi]

No, that's it. Your timing was pretty good.

Monsieur Gravel, Mr. Komarnicki, no comments?

We'll go to another round.

Mr. Karygiannis.

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I was wondering if Ms. Siddall would table the e-mail she was reading regarding the RCMP inspector. Could they give us copies of that, please?

Ms. Siddall, you mentioned that in January the minister asked you to allocate resources in order to deal with this particular matter. Approximately when was that—the beginning or end of January, or the beginning of February?

[Janet Siddall]

It related to her announcement on January 24. She specifically asked us to increase our efforts. There have been ongoing efforts to deal with individuals who have questions about their citizenship status, but she asked us to increase our efforts.

That was specifically targeted to the group of people I have described as those who have lived in Canada most of their life and had a reasonable but mistaken expectation that they were Canadians and who were now having issues related to their status. That was a renewed effort and a reallocation of resources to implement all those measures I spoke about. It was mainly focused on our call centre, our case processing centre in Sydney, and our case management branch at national headquarters.

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

This was a result of all the media hype this particular file received at the beginning of January, as well as the four-point plan I sent to the minister.