Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Oct. 29th, 2009

[Claudette Deschênes]

I would not say we have double the workload, but, compared to the traffic in the embassies, it is more than normal.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Ms. Thaï Thi Lac.

Ms. Chow.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Thank you.

I actually have something like six questions. What I'm going to do is ask them all, and you can batch them together.

I know that for a family class sponsor, they put in the $75 sponsorship fee and then it takes a year or two years to sort that out, and then the permanent residence application fee is $475 for each person. Why would you take both up front, if you normally take quite a bit of time for the sponsorship application to go through first—a year or two years—and then the permanent residence application comes later? Why not separate them? That's number one.

Number two, you don't really need the medical until the application is fairly far along. Often I've seen that they would do a medical examination—this would be for the applicant overseas—and then the medical examination would expire. Then it costs them quite a bit of money to redo it. They have to travel far distances. Can it be coordinated so they only need to do one medical rather than repeating medicals over and over again, and repeating the security clearance over and over again, because they are not in sync with each other?

My second batch of questions really concerns the dollar amounts. I know in 2005 you got an extra $36 million to help out the visa posts overseas that are the busiest. I think that money would have run out by now. Are you requesting more funds because you have three or four trouble spots that have very long wait times? I notice your expenditures are not very high. How do you divide up your expenditures in visa posts overseas, especially those in the areas where it impacts tremendously on Canadians because Canadians are waiting for their fathers, mothers, or kids coming from overseas?

I have one case where a person waited seven years to bring a daughter from Nairobi to Canada. This is a 12-year-old daughter, and I can't imagine what happens to a 12-year-old waiting for seven years. She was a lot younger than 12 back then. So there are desperate situations in some of the visa posts overseas. What kinds of resources do you need in order to speed that up?

Speaking about resources, I know your department tried several times to have a computer program that could speed it up, and then it keeps not working out and you try it again. I look at Australia. They have computer tracking programs. An applicant in Australia can look at their sponsor—let's say it's the father—and you can tell what number the application is, how long the wait is. It's completely transparent.

In our case it's not transparent at all, and all our offices get asked, and you get asked all the time, “What happened to my application?” or “Where is my application?” So every MP's office gets a huge number of calls. We then ask the visa office overseas, and it goes back and forth about a status update. Why not load it up on the computer to save MPs' offices a lot of time and also save the applicants in Canada grief?

My last question concerns the targets. Have they changed? Often the processing stops when you've met the target in an area. Let's say the target is 5,000 parents, or whatever, from the Beijing visa post. Once the target is met, then you don't process any more. That's my understanding of how it works. So have the targets changed according to how many applications come in? Has it changed in the last four or five years, and if it hasn't changed, why is there such a backlog?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

You have two and a half minutes to answer those six questions. You can pick a question.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Claudette Deschênes]

I'll go with question one, which is about fees and separating, and I would say that it's an exciting question, but I can't answer it because it's under litigation. So hopefully we can get through the litigation and then we can actually look at that question.

On the issue of medicals and making sure they don't expire, I can tell you that as much as clients, applicants, family, and MPs can be upset at that, no visa officer likes to have to redo the same work on a file, so it's something we very much try to avoid. We used to wait and do medicals just at the end of everything being done. We found that our processing times were terrible because we added the two, three, or four months of the medical. So in many places we've moved to try to do the medicals up front, because maybe 50% of the cases actually move quite quickly and it works. There are always cases where we get into that issue. I think in places like Nairobi, where this is more of a problem, we try to be very careful as to when we request the medical so that we avoid having that.

One of the problems, of course, is if you have tuberculosis, for example, you have to be treated for tuberculosis before you get your medical result. So sometimes by the time the medical result has come, it has an expiry date of a couple of weeks and we can't help ourselves but start the process.

On the $36 million, which year were you...?

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

I think it was 2005.

[Claudette Deschênes]

I'm not sure. I think that was additional money that was given for the parents and grandparents.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

That's right, yes.

[Claudette Deschênes]

I think at this point, with the money we've got in the department, we're not likely to be getting more, but I think what's more important for us in the operations is to see how we can get more efficient, which goes into your question about global—

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Ms. Deschênes.

Mr. Calandra.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to just begin by thanking you. I know how difficult it must have been under the 13 years of the previous administration to wait for reforms that never came and to have the waiting list increase to a million people. I can only imagine how difficult that must have been for you and the department. I know how hard you've been working to help implement some of the reforms we've brought in, which according to many of my constituents have helped restore their faith in Canada's immigration system in tackling the wait list and working together with the provinces. So I commend you and your officials for what I believe is some extraordinary work in helping address the real deficiencies of our immigration system that came out of 13 long years of inaction by the previous government.

Having said that, just to touch a little bit further on what Ms. Thi Lac said and to go a bit down that road, how do you redistribute resources to adjust for changing local needs in immigration source countries?

[Claudette Deschênes]

That's tied to the target and the level, so every year we look at what the levels plan is that's submitted to Parliament. We look at what types of applications we have where. We look at the priorities in terms of provincial nominees, in terms of investors, and in terms of business, and we look at the resources we have in place. We also look at what potential growth area there is in the mission. Many missions are at full capacity and we couldn't put anyone else there. You need to know that every time we move someone from one place to another, we lose money on that move and have to give more money to DFAIT to do that because of the costs and so on. That's how we try to balance it, and we try to look at it not only from day to day or year to year but for the longer term.

Again, I guess I would like to say that for us it's how to modernize our system, how to leverage our global case management, which will be rolled out next year, how to look at creating a virtual network so that we can make certain decisions, not necessarily in situ but somewhere in more of a centralized environment. That is what will get us better processing times in the longer term.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

I have another question, just before I hand it off. In our economic action plan we allocated some resources for improving or modernizing Canada's immigration system. Part of that money was to go to hiring and training more visa officers. I'm wondering what are some of the challenges you're facing in increasing staff levels at missions abroad.

[Claudette Deschênes]

The biggest challenge we have is, of course, that it takes about two years to bring a new officer up to speed to be able to go and deliver the program overseas. Then one of the other challenges is creating space for them. Sometimes we basically just get enough officers hired to replace the ones who have retired, so it's a constant catch-up.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

I will transfer it over to Ms. Grewal.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

It's my understanding that the recent Mexican visa imposition highlights the flexibility of your department in deploying resources. Could you tell us about that?

[Claudette Deschênes]

The visa imposition was quite a complex process for us. We couldn't announce it too quickly, but we had to get ourselves organized. We hired a number of retired officers to support us in the initial stages. In anticipation, we did some local hiring without tipping anyone off that we were imposing restrictions. During the first few weeks, we depended a lot on all the resources in the mission. Even the ambassador was creating files for us at night and over the weekends. For the first couple of weeks, our staff in Mexico worked pretty much 22 hours a day to get it working.

I am glad to report that we are back to normal. We are now processing applications for people who will be travelling in December and January.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

The rest of my time I will pass to Mr. Young.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

I saw that you reduced the initial assessment time for the federal skilled worker program from years to weeks. You are making decisions within six to 12 months instead of six years. I have never seen such a change in management in government. It is a massive improvement. Could you tell us about your efforts to centralize the intake for skilled workers? By the way, this holds promise for other categories of immigrants as well.

[Claudette Deschênes]

We would have liked to centralize a full application, but that would have meant that all these applications would have come to Sydney. The issue was trying to get some of the administrative work out of the missions. It is very expensive to put people overseas. The overseas officers need to focus on where the risk exists.

When we get global case management—and we are also working on an e-application process—we will have a virtual central office that will do all the front end and the back end. Only the work that requires local knowledge will go back to the missions. It is a beginning. It has growing pains, but we are getting to where we need to go.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

You talked about your e-services program, the pilot project for students. This is ideal because students communicate by computer. It's first nature to them, and I think it holds great promise. But as soon as I see “e-” something, I think of the e-Health problem in the province of Ontario, where they blew $600 million to $1 billion on consultants and made very little progress. Can you assure us that this program is being handled responsibly and tell us about the expansion of services to speed up application times?

[Claudette Deschênes]

I will take the opportunity to answer Ms. Chow's question also. We're trying to connect with global case management, and it will soon be possible to have people submit online. Many cases are also supported by consultants and lawyers. They will be able to do the same thing. For applicants who are not at ease with computers, China and India have application centre networks. We will have a network available to support other people. I can assure you, we are doing all we can, and there is lots of oversight on all the work we are doing to deliver our program.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

We're going to start a second round, and unless the opposition gets generous, the government will lose out.

Mr. Bevilacqua.

[Maurizio Bevilacqua, Liberal, Vaughan, ON]

I want to follow up on some of the points that were raised by some of the Conservative political commercials. I thought they were limited to TV, radio, websites, and newspapers, but I guess they are seeping into committee hearings.