Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am honoured to be here today before the committee. My name is Micheline Aucoin, and I am the Immigration Program Manager in Manila, and Area Director for Southeast Asia.
I understand that you have a particular interest in processing times in the family and investor categories. I will therefore provide information on these topics in the context of Manila's operations.
As Rénald mentioned, Manila is a large centre for both permanent and temporary migration. The office covers a large territory of Pacific islands, although in practice, the vast majority of the applications we receive are from the Philippines.
To give you an idea of the size of our program, on the temporary side, we receive some 30,000 applications per year for temporary visitor's visas, with processing times which are steadily improving.
We also have flexibility for same-day service for emergency cases. We also receive a large number of applications for temporary work permits, and this number tends to fluctuate with the health of the Canadian labour market. For example, the number of such applications had almost doubled to about 28,000 in 2008, only to drop off by half the following year and further in 2010.
The 2009-10 drop allowed us to not only reduce our inventory and processing times significantly — we now process most temporary foreign worker applications in four weeks —, but to also reallocate resources to other programs with high needs, including priority family class.
We also have a sizeable live-in caregiver program, and we are making significant inroads in reducing inventories and processing times in that category.
With respect to permanent migration, we issued more than 27,000 permanent resident visas last year. Of note is the large increase in the provincial nominee program in Manila over the last few years. Almost 10,000 visas were issued in that category in 2010, the vast majority processed in less than a year.
We have also been able to process the vast majority of our skilled worker applications received after November 2008 —the so-called Bill C-50 cases — within a year and have started to make a dent in our pre-Bill C-50 federal skilled worker inventory.
We still have 45,000 persons in that inventory and are working to reduce it, subject to competing priorities and availability of resources. Manila sees a large and increasing number of applications from dependent family members of live-in caregivers in Canada. For the second year in a row, we issued 6,000 visas in that category in 2010, and yet saw another growth in our inventory.
In the family class category, we issued more than 4,000 visas last year, and I am pleased to say that processing times for priority cases, that is for spouses, partners and children, were at nine months last year, well within the departmental service standards.
That being said, we still have almost 2,000 persons in process in our priority family class, and we are determined to do better.
We have looked at each step in our process to determine if there were ways to cut time and steps that could be eliminated altogether for some low-risk cases. We have made changes that allow some of the cases to be processed in a matter of a few months. There are challenges that are particular to Manila, including the fact that divorce is not available in the Philippines. But there are also factors that should help Manila process applications in a timelier manner than other missions, including the fact that the majority of our applicants are from the Philippines and can relatively easily come to Manila for an interview.
For parents, grandparents, and other family class applications, we have an inventory of some 4,000 persons, and our processing times are about two and a half years. We recognize the inconvenience that this may cause, and are showing flexibility in issuing visitor visas to parents and grandparents who are waiting for their immigration application to be finalized.
The role that family reunification plays in the movement we see out of Manila is not limited to the family class. A good example is the 6,000 visas we issued last year to dependent family members of the live-in caregivers already in Canada. In addition, many of our applicants under the provincial nominee program have extended-family members in Canada.
Equally, on the temporary side, many of our applicants under the live-in caregiver program are going to work for extended family members in Canada. And many of our temporary visitor visas are issued to Filipinos who want to visit family members in Canada.
I know that you are interested to hear about the investors program. In Manila, however, we receive only a very small number of applications under this program—less than 20 last year for federal investors and less than five for Quebec. We currently have about 100 investor cases in our inventory.
In closing, Mr. Chairman, Manila is in a good position to deliver on its commitments this year again and to further reduce processing times in key categories. However, in a program as large as Manila's, with important fluctuations in some categories, we need to always be prepared to prioritize and reallocate resources as need be, to constantly review our internal procedures to find more efficiencies, and to provide better service to our clients. This is what we are doing and will continue to do.
In addition to efforts at the local level, CIC is developing important tools, such as the global case management system, the famous GCMS, and an electronic suite of services, which will have a tremendously positive impact on our work abroad. I will not expand on these except to say that Manila has had GCMS for three months now and already we see the enormous potential in terms of processing efficiencies, redistribution of work, and tracking of cases.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.