Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name is Jeannette Meunier-McKay, and I am the national president of the Canada Employment and Immigration Union, a component of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
Amongst our 20,000 members are the workers at the Sydney, Nova Scotia, case processing centre of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. With me, as Mr. Tilson said, I have Wilf MacKinnon, the president of our Sydney local and a worker in the case processing centre, and Alan Lennon, our staff coordinator.
The presentation I will make will be our view of the effects of the loss of jobs in Sydney on the Canadian public, and we'll be happy to answer questions after.
The Sydney CPC has two permanent lines of business: permanent resident cards and citizenship. There is also a pilot project called the foreign skilled worker centralized intake office. It is important to keep in mind that within the Sydney operation, many positions are filled by individuals who are acting in positions other than their substantive positions. So when, for example, people are let go from a mailroom, it may appear that they are being replaced, but they are being replaced by workers returning to their substantive positions and vacating higher-level positions. Therefore, it is critical to keep in mind the overall level of staffing in each of the Sydney lines of business and not be misled by a shell game of moving workers around in order to appear to have addressed critical staff shortages.
Within Citizenship, the centre processes applications for citizenship and applications for proof of citizenship. All applications for citizenship go first to the Sydney centre. The mail is received by clerical workers, who open, sort, and stream the mail to appropriate lines of production. Applications are checked by agents for completeness, signature, dates, documentation, residency requirements, and so on. Sometimes clients are contacted directly to ensure the completeness of the file.
Once Sydney is satisfied with the file, it is sent to a local CIC office, where testing is administered and citizenship oaths are administered and a new citizen receives their card. The above process can't occur until Citizenship in Sydney has done the work. Only then is the file returned to Sydney for archiving. The Citizenship mailroom staff is being reduced from 45 to seven, although it may be the case that individuals who are acting in other positions will be returning to the mailroom.
In any case, the reduction of staff at this initial stage will slow down the flow of applications for citizenship into production. In addition, 13 positions are being reduced in the unit that actually produces the citizenship cards. The result will be that permanent residents will have to wait longer to get their citizenship documents and therefore will have to wait longer to begin to reunite their families and to become full participants in Canada. Given that at present it takes 18 months to two years to process a citizenship application, it should be unacceptable to increase, and not decrease, the processing time.
For those who are granted permanent residency in Canada, they require a permanent resident card, which is the only acceptable proof of permanent resident status in Canada. Applications for such cards arrive in Sydney from various ports of entry as immigrants land in Canada and take up residency. They are initially processed through the PRC mailroom, where they are opened, sorted, and streamed. Electronic requests for cards are created and sent to Canada Bank Note, which produces the cards.
Permanent resident cards are typically valid for five years. Renewal applications go through the PRC mailroom and then to the agents, who review the application and residency requirements and, if all right, make the request for a new card. Without this card, permanent residents do not, for practical reasons, have status within Canada. Without it, they cannot apply for or renew social insurance number cards, provincial health services, and so on.
On average, 3,500 applications are received a week and, after several years of overtime and extra shifts, the inventory available at any given time in the centre is 25,000 to 30,000 applications for processing.
The cutbacks in the mailroom for the line of business from 15 to five are mirrored by a cut in the agent community from 36 to 20 or some other combination of cutbacks in the mailroom and in the agent community. The cutting of the staff complement means that any re-juggling of staff will not get around the obvious conclusion—lower production levels and longer waits for individuals needing this vital piece of identification.
The foreign skilled workers pilot project deals with applications within the economic class of immigrants. It is a program that was set up to allow prospective permanent residents access to faster processing if they can prove they have training and experience in any of the 38 targeted, high-demand occupations. According to the Toronto Star of March 29, 2010, there are 600,000 applicants in the system with waiting times of seven to eight years. To facilitate processing, an agent in Sydney reviews the application, and provides the applicant with either a negative assessment, effectively stopping the process, or a positive assessment, which allows the applicant the opportunity to make their case to an officer at a visa post overseas.
There are plans to let go 22 workers from this project. In addition, a significant number of the workers in this project are permanent employees of the other business lines in Sydney and are 'on loan' to this project. Obviously, if there are lay-offs in the other business lines, then there will be reason to return these individuals to their substantive positions compounding the effect of lay-offs to the foreign skilled workers section. If for some reason such staff are not returned, then the negative impact on the other business lines will be even more significant.
It is also worth noting that Sydney and Cape Breton have serious economic problems, and the jobs at the case processing centre contribute significantly to the economic lifeblood of the community. While we would not advocate job loss in any community in Canada, it seems unnecessary to focus the loss of jobs on the CIC in Sydney, given the area's economic history and situation. Clearly, the federal public service is in trouble across the country. The proposed freeze on departmental budgets means that costs, including staff, will have to be cut back to incorporate rising costs for departments. This will affect the level of public service available for Canadians. There is simply no way around that fact given the parameters laid out in the budget. However, increasing wait times for immigrants and permanent residents should not be a viable public policy initiative, even in times of belt tightening and federal deficits.
It is our belief that Sydney CPC should be staffed at a level appropriate to the immigration and citizenship workload it is expected to process. The present practice of understaffing and then relying on special allocations of money to hire contract workers to nibble at the backlogs, which nonetheless continue for years at unacceptably high levels, is simply inexcusable.