Citizenship and Immigration Committee on March 30th, 2010

[Ken Dryden, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

I have one last question, if it's possible.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

You're way over. I can't let you do that.

That would be a third undertaking.

[Claudette Deschênes]

Does that mean I don't have to come back?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

I don't know.

I'm sorry; you were getting onto a good line, Mr. Dryden, but we have to move on.

Mr. Calandra.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

When did you start on the process of the global case management system?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Do we have a note on that?

I should know, because I was there, but let me just see.

GCMS was originally funded in January 2002, and it has been rolled out and it's doing citizenship cases.

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

So it has been a long time that you've been working together.

I know the overall budget of the department has increased, because we've dealt with the estimates and we saw the budget. But there are some regions that just always have higher wait times; they're just persistently higher. I'm wondering whether you can give me the top five or six reasons, or even more, that those offices have higher wait times that make them different from anywhere else.

[Claudette Deschênes]

One of the key issues is the type of clientele there. If there's lots of fraud, if we cannot trust the documentation, then we have to go to interviews, and interviews take much longer than looking at a file and moving it forward.

Another reason is If there are health issues. In many places there is tuberculosis. You cannot come to Canada with active tuberculosis; you have to be treated. If you're treated, you can come if you can show that it has become dormant. That's the period of time, when you're managing that file, when they have to get treatment.

Another is if there are issues of getting access to clients: we travel to them, but they don't show up for an interview, and we only travel into that region or that country once every six months, because we wait to have enough to make it a cost-effective use of Canadian taxpayers' money.

Another issue is if there are problems in correspondence. Still another is if there are problems in terms of how they describe their family to include a lot of people who are not necessarily their own children. We understand that culturally that's an issue, but does it fit within the definition that we have of family class?

So I would name all of those issues. There's a summer movement of visitors, when our first priority becomes doing the visitors, and so the immigration line of business waits.

There are infrastructure issues involving missions. We may not be able to put more staff on, even though there's been a serious increase in applications. In Islamabad at one point there were problems of not being able to get off the compound. There are those types of things, things such as the civil war in Sri Lanka, the tsunami. Those are some of the things I think I would describe that make cases not the norm and therefore more difficult to process.

There are a number of requests from MPs for what's happening on a case, so you're now putting your efforts into answering queries. There are program integrity issues, wherein you have staff who are not doing decision-making but are making sure there's no malfeasance going on.

All of those things put together I think explain why some places take longer than others.

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

Just because you referenced it, let me ask whether the global case management will make it easier for members' offices to get information more quickly.

[Claudette Deschênes]

The thing with global case management is that right now 90% of the information we need to process cases is on the paper file. Now it will be in the electronic system, which will permit us to look at it no matter where we are and divide the decision-making. We'll be able to say that all the documents are there, but we need to interview to figure out whether that person has the experience, for instance, of a federal skilled worker. We may ask the mission to do just this interview.

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

Markham, in my riding, which is Oak Ridges—Markham, is the most ethnically diverse community in all of Canada. One thing that frustrates me and my staff the most is that it often takes the people we are helping a long time to get us the information we need in order to assist them. We get very frustrated at that. I can tell you that we also get frustrated as well with the movement of the definitions of some of the constituents who approach us with their situations. So I can sympathize with that.

What is the situation in those areas—there are a lot—

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Calandra, you have to hurry. You're way over.

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

Am I over?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Yes. How about we move on to Ms. Grewal?

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

No, you go ahead.

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

Can I go ahead? She is going to cede some time over to me.

She's enjoying the presentation so much that she has decided to let me go on.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Oh, okay. That's fine, if you agree to that.

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

In those areas where it's not easy for people to move around, it's not easy for security checks, or the mission might be far away and people don't have the resources to get to a mission, how can we do the process better? What do we do to make it easier for people in very difficult circumstances to get to us?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Some of the things we've put in place right now include the overseas visa application centres, which are mostly attached to the temporary visitor movement. In India, for example, we have a number of them. Apart from the two offices in Delhi and Chandigarh, we also have visa application centres throughout the country, which means that applicants don't have to line up in our mission in Delhi. They can go to the visa application centre and get the application sent to us. As we move forward, we want to explore the possibility of using these centres to help us do interviews; people wouldn't necessarily have to come to the mission, but instead might be able to go to somewhere closer, and we could use that facility to help us to do interviews.

We are continuing to explore possibilities. We want to continue toward a situation in which fewer interviews would be necessary because our criteria and our policy would be more evidence-based, and therefore in countries where the documentation existed to show that they met the criteria, we could expend fewer resources and focus those resources in other places.

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

Do I have more time?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

If you're using her time, you have lots of time.

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

Then I'd like to talk about fraud. Let's go a little bit further into some of the things that we're seeing on fraud and how we're starting to deal with some of the occurrences. I know we talked a bit about fraudulent documents earlier, and about how incredibly realistic they are in some areas. I bring this up only because a constituent of mine brought in a support letter to me that their relative had received from my office before I was actually elected, and it was remarkable. It had my signature, and, as I say, I wasn't actually the MP at the time, so somebody had obviously made a mistake.

How are we starting to deal with that, and how are we doing with identifying fraud? As well, you may have mentioned organized crime and how people are getting access to funds, which has to be a very big problem in certain areas of the world. How are we doing on that front?

[Claudette Deschênes]

We're putting a lot of effort into that. I think one of the things that we continue to want to do is make sure that our focus is on what is absolutely necessary. That's why we have worked very hard to integrate operations, because if documents are being used in one application in one country but then they decide to apply somewhere else, we need to make sure that the information is available throughout.

We've got a strategy, and again it's based on--I'm sounding like a broken record--rolling out global case management, which will permit us to do more. We have an anti-fraud and program integrity group that is looking at our entire lines of business from one continuum to another. We used to do a lot on visitors and immigrants. We're doing much more now on citizenship, and now we need to learn how to do that. We work with CBSA much more. Overseas we're targeting with the RCMP and local authorities to do more active prosecution that can be used to get our message out. We certainly are doing a lot more using the Internet in terms of providing advice. We are looking much more to providing self-service to clients so that they can apply without help, because sometimes help can be helpful and other times it can be constructing a file for them. We're going at it in many different ways at the moment.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you. That concludes the second round.

I have one quick question. Can you tell us the top five cities for long wait times around the world?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Do you mean for family class?