Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Sept. 29th, 2011

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

When officers are making their decisions, I would imagine they may experience some hesitation and that a decision could be made collectively. Does that ever happen?

[Dawn Edlund]

Sorry, I did not hear that clearly.

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

If an officer has any doubts when making a decision in this situation or that situation, can that decision be made collectively, with other officers? Is that a possibility?

[Dawn Edlund]

Yes, officers can always consult one another to help them gain a clearer understanding, to share the facts and to ask other officers what they think. But at the end of the day, it is up to the officer in question to make the decision. He or she can consult co-workers to find out how things should work and so forth, but it is the individual officer....

It is also a matter of consistent decision making by officers. When they examine claims involving similar facts, we do want our officers to come to the same conclusion in one way or another—just as with Federal Court decisions. That is just as important as the guidelines we give to our officers.

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

I have another question about the number of officers in the points of service. Is the number of officers proportionate to the number of applications or is it based on the categories in question? How do you determine how much weight to give certain offices to ensure that there are enough officers to process the claims?

[Dawn Edlund]

That depends largely on the office space available, where our people work. Overseas, for instance, we have an office where we put as many officers as we could given the space available. If other concerns were to arise, we could look at what we could do with [Inaudible—Editor], things of that nature.

In terms of business planning and the levels plan, we look at what we are doing, where the oldest application backlogs are in the agencies, the overseas offices and those in Canada, how we can change the number of decision makers and whether files can be transferred from one place to another, as I said earlier. It depends on a whole slew of factors.

We also have a new system; we are trying to train our decision makers on a number of levels, so they can choose to be decision makers in one type of case one day and in another type of case the next. We do that at our Sydney processing centre. Take, for example, the people who deal with

citizenship grants. When there's big business they can do citizenship grants. Now we've cross-trained them to do citizenship proofs and permanent resident cards. So as the business levels go up and down, we can have our officers multi-task and do different types of decisions.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Mr. Leung.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'm impressed by the way you laid it out in a continuum. Can you identify for me the points where there are bottlenecks? One of the issues we need to address is the backlog. I can see that within that continuum there are a number of bottleneck issues that we have to deal with. Can you identify where those points are and perhaps offer your suggestions on how they could be solved?

[Les Linklater]

Certainly.

In using the term “bottleneck”, I think we have a system that requires more consistent application of intake controls so we know, with the levels planned in any given year, the intake that is required to be able to process and make decisions within a reasonable period that would then result in visas issued.

Frankly, the issue we have is limited space within the levels planned in any given year, based on our capacity to integrate and settle folks, and our ability to process a number of files on the permanent side versus inflows we also see on the temporary side. It's a function of finding the right balance between the various categories, as opposed to a bottleneck, if you will. It really is intake versus output.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

I appreciate that it's input, throughput, and output.

[Les Linklater]

Absolutely.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Let me ask this question another way. Is it a question of resources, space limitations, or just the sheer number of trained officers who can do the job? How should we address this issue, and what resources do we need to draw from?

[Les Linklater]

I think we've been able to demonstrate that with our modernization agenda we were able to deliver last year, for example, 280,000 permanent admissions, as well as many hundreds of thousands of temporary residents, students, and workers.

On the issues you see on backlogged development, it's not so much a question of resources as dealing with a finite amount of work in any given period. So with having more predictability in the system and being able to better plan how our resources are allocated, we do quite well now in terms of the flexibility that our new system allows us to move work around, as opposed to people, which was the issue in the past.

We have our larger offices in the areas where we have the biggest backlogs, such as New Delhi and London. That's where you see most of our resources pitched. It comes down to being able to parse out a certain amount of work per officer at any given time.

[Dawn Edlund]

I would add that it's also a question of how our applications are being processed. My colleague referred to the fact that with parents and grandparents we end up spending a fair amount of our processing time chasing after the applicants to get them to bring us the documents we need to make decisions on their files.

In citizenship and in parents and grandparents, we're moving more and more to a model where we call for a complete application up front so we have the right pieces of paper and fees paid. We don't babysit the application any more. If we don't get a complete application right up front, we send it back to you and you can start again. That process of babysitting files has added to our processing times, and we're becoming tougher on that. That's a part of the processing time that belongs to the applicant, not us, but we get stuck with it at the end of the day.

[Les Linklater]

There's the use of technology as well. We're moving to 2D bar codes, for example, where the forms are downloaded, filled out on a computer screen, and sent to us. They get dumped into our system, as opposed to clerks sitting in offices and transcribing from paper to the new electronic system.

As we look at leveraging our modernization funds and being able to advance, moving to an online application process, centralizing applications, and making sure the applicants are doing as much up-front work as possible before they even apply will help us see more efficiency.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Based on your explanation so far, it would appear that perhaps the only way we can address the backlog issue is to cut off the input side, because we know what our output is. Our output is approximately a quarter million processed in a year. The throughput you well addressed, so the only way to do it is at the input.

[Les Linklater]

That's a critical factor, and I think a longer-term planning horizon as well is something that would help us know earlier on what we would need in any given year and be able to adjust proactively.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Mr. Opitz.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

On that point, in backlog areas like London and New Delhi, are you able to surge staff to address some of those areas, “surge” meaning to double the staff for a temporary period of time?

[Dawn Edlund]

That's what I referred to in terms of temporary duty officers being sent out. Sometimes they are retired foreign service officers, for example. Sometimes they are staff from headquarters or the domestic regions who would get specific training and then be sent overseas to major pressure points to help reduce the areas that we see there.

We have from time to time been putting extra shifts on staff. We can't increase our physical footprint because we're stuck with that, so we're starting, in some places, to do shift work so that we have a longer processing day on any given date.

Those are the kinds of things that we're doing in terms of surge capacities.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

You have also described the new system that is coming online, that processing times are expected to come down to about a year.

Did you say that earlier?

[Dawn Edlund]

I believe my colleague mentioned the service standard for close family members or spouses, dependent children, etc. Our current service standard, established as of April last year, is that from the time a file starts at CPC Mississauga to the time the visa is issued is 12 months on 80% of the files.

We're working ourselves toward that. When we imposed that service standard we chose to make that service standard apply not only from applications made from April 1 last year forward, but also to all FC1 applications that were in the system. So we have some places that have very lengthy backlogs—we keep using the word “backlogs”—in that FC1 category. About 72% of applications are being processed in that 12-month period right now, and we have an operational plan for the beginning of April of the coming year to be up to that 80%.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

That's great.

On youth mobility, you mentioned 100,000 students per year. Are a lot of those based on youth mobility programs, or are they simply foreign students?

[Les Linklater]

No, those would be counted separately as foreign students, and the youth mobility would be temporary foreign workers.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Youth mobility counts as temporary foreign workers.