Citizenship and Immigration Committee on March 27th, 2012

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

Thank you, Chair.

I would like to thank the minister for appearing here today.

Minister, following an evaluation of the Resettlement Assistance Program, funding for the program was increased by 3.4%. How will these additional funds be distributed amongst service providers and refugees?

I would also like to know exactly what amount will be allocated to the Interim Federal Health Program and whether this would represent an increase or a decrease.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

As I already stated, we have greatly increased expenses for settlement programs. In accordance with a requirement included in the Canada-Quebec Accord on Immigration, we are to increase our subsidies to Quebec according to the rate of growth in the federal budget. I believe that this year, the increase would be about $25 million. The amount transferred to Quebec for settlement services, which was about $100,000 a few years ago, has increased to $250,000.

As I also mentioned, we tripled the subsidies to other provinces for settlement services. These services are provided to six provinces by my department, and by the provinces themselves in Manitoba and British Columbia. The budget for these services provided elsewhere than in Quebec is currently around $600 million.

With respect to the Interim Federal Health Program, expenditures are higher every year as compared to those forecast in the budget because there are always many asylum seekers, as well as other clients. For the current year, that program's expenditures total $50 million.

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

Fine.

I would like to know if the list of eligible drugs under the Interim Federal Health Program is public, so that people who are covered by this program may see what is on the list as well as how much coverage they are entitled to, and so that pharmacists may know ahead of time which drugs are covered and which are not.

Currently, pharmacists learn that asylum seekers cannot be reimbursed for one medication or another only after having served these applicants and after those people have already spent the money. This represents a huge loss for them. How could we remedy this situation?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

I would like to add something to my last response. Currently, the total budget for the Interim Federal Health Program is $50 million, as I said. However, we expect current expenditures to be closer to $83.2 million.

As to the reimbursement for the cost of medication, I would ask Ms. Deschênes to speak to that.

[Claudette Deschênes, Assistant Deputy Minister, Operations, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

With respect to reimbursement, yes this information is public. I am aware that we have a problem. Most pharmacists in Canada deal directly with Medavie. We do have a problem, but under the current system, the problem you mentioned would not exist if we dealt directly with the company responsible for reimbursements.

We are currently working with these people to improve the situation, which has to some extent been created by their own pressures.

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

Is this list available? If so, at what level?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Yes, it is available, but the difficulty is that the list may change according to the client. For example, a drug may be covered because it is necessary for that client; if it is not medically necessary, it is not covered. This is why we encourage pharmacists to deal directly with the company.

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

Therefore, one must deal with that company to obtain the available list.

[Claudette Deschênes]

The company is responsible for reimbursements and it could immediately provide the information. Thus, the pharmacist would avoid having to wait for reimbursement after having issued something.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Mr. Menegakis.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Minister, thank you very much for appearing before us again today. With the number of times you've been here and certainly the number of times your officials from the department have been here, I think it speaks volumes. It really speaks to the credibility and the confidence you place in this committee. We appreciate you being here to respond to so many questions over a number of hours, over a number of meetings.

Minister, I know the department has been working to modernize its systems, specifically the global case management system, known as the GCMS. Can you update us on how this modernization is going?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Yes, thank you.

This has been a major project, actually going back several years. Just to give some context to you, colleagues, as I said the last time I appeared here, when I became minister I inherited the tail end of a really antiquated operational system in the department. This wasn't the fault of the public servants; it was, frankly, the fault of the lack of investment in information technology over years. We had basically a huge global paper-based system. So you can imagine in a mission like New Delhi storehouses filled with stockpiled, warehoused applications.

From time to time you're going to get additional operational resources available in one mission, but to move things around that would literally mean taking physical files in New Delhi, putting them in shipping containers and shipping them across the continent to Warsaw. It was ridiculous, with everyone making paper applications and sometimes documents getting lost. So the department realized that we had to move into the 21st century in terms of technology, which is why we went through a long process of development, of selection of the vendors, and finally got cabinet approval for a significant investment in global case management for a total of $300 million and change in 2006-2007.

Now I'm pleased to report that we are well into global implementation of the GCMS system. The deputy says it's finished. This basically opens us up to taking online electronic applications that go into the system, and these applications are accessible at any one of our offices around the world. That means if there's flexibility in one office, we can take applications that have been made in India and work on them in Ottawa, or vice-versa.

Claudette, would you like to supplement this?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Yes.

The only thing I would add is we continue to improve on this. So as we move refugee reform, we'll be adding another module. We are now connecting e-application and e-storage to that. So we will get to a point where all the information on this file is available, no matter where it is. And actually today files in China and in Mexico are being created overnight in Ottawa so that when the office opens they can actually work on the files and not spend time doing that.

We've accomplished a lot. There's still a lot to do, but we're well on our way.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

The efficiencies appear obvious. I'm curious, however, about how moving to an electronic system has helped the department better understand trends. Would you care to comment on that?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

I suppose one advantage is that when we get electronic applications we can see where there are emerging volumes and respond to those accordingly. In the old system.... To give you an example, four or five years ago we saw this huge growth in both permanent and temporary resident applications out of the Philippines. To respond to that, you'd have to wait and see. Is it really a sustainable increase? Is it really happening over a long period of time? Then Claudette would have to decide, well, we're going to have to add personnel, we're going to physically have to put Canadian-based officers there, which, by the way, costs us a ton of money. It takes months to move them. They have to move them from another mission.

Now in the new GCMS-based system, if there's a spike in demand in one office, we can do a lot of the processing elsewhere, without moving people around at tremendous expense to the taxpayer. It just makes a lot more sense.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

How's my time, Mr. Chair?

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Oh, can I just add to that?

One other good point is this really reinforces integrity, because where we see, for example, people using the same crooked consultant or using the same bogus address or something, we can identify that electronically. Before, these were all separately in paper applications and it was much harder to identify patterns of fraud.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

That actually answers my question.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Mr. Dykstra.

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to touch back on the emphasis you've placed, Minister, and that the department has placed on the whole aspect of biometrics and their implementation. It's come up on a number of occasions--in the original study, the first study we did here at committee, but more specifically and almost on a regular basis in the second study in terms of the report we are doing on security regarding entrants coming into Canada and obviously our border system.

You emphasized it in your presentation with respect to a secure immigration system with integrity. Even in the main estimates we can see the aspect of biometrics is highlighted clearly there.

One of the things that sometimes changes within a budget or within a cycle is the inability to move as quickly as we'd like to. Biometrics in fact is one of those. It has taken a little bit of time to move forward. I wonder if you could comment on the on-time and on-track focus of the biometrics in terms of setup. Probably a bit more specifically, are the biometrics in fact on track financially and fiscally? Obviously it's an important issue that we not only implement this on a go-forward basis, but we do so in a way that's financially sound.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Thank you. It's a good question.

First, budget 2008 allocated $174 million in project funding for the first five years of biometrics. Some of that is what we call a frozen allotment. As we roll out the program, the government wants to ensure that it is done in an efficient way, so that's why we've decided to phase in the introduction of biometrics. So we are actually spending $123 million over six years.

Once the legislative authority is in place and we've done all of the technical work, we anticipate that we will launch the biometric requirement for temporary resident visa applicants in June of 2013, starting in a couple of dozen initial countries that are assessed on whether they're higher-risk countries from a security and immigration integrity point of view.

I suppose an argument could be made that we should have spent a lot more to do global rollout all at once, but this is very expensive. Countries like Australia and the U.K. have taken the phased approach to work out the kinks in the system before going global, so I think there's an argument for that.

There's also an argument that maybe this whole policy framework, this whole biometrics thing, should have been rolled out ten years ago, post-9/11, when the United States, Australia, and other responsible democracies got more serious about immigration security screening. But for whatever reason, the decision was made not to move biometrics forward a decade ago.

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

Moving on a little bit, one of the other areas that's still in relation to expenditures and backlog is the reduction that we've been able to make on the refugee side of things. Explicit under the guise of Bill C-11, there was an investment made to work in the coming year and years towards a reduction from a little over 60,000 to around 45,000. I wonder if you could comment on whether we are going to continue down that road in terms of moving down and trying to get the backlog down. I know that Bill C-31 does start to address it, but from a fiscal and financial perspective we'll have the wherewithal to be able to act on that.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Thank you.

The IRB is funded to make up to 25,000 asylum decisions per year. In any given year, if we get more than 25,000 asylum claims the backlog will go up. If we get fewer than 25,000 claims, it will go down. Fortunately, through the visa impositions on Mexico and the Czech Republic, plus additional resources to the IRB as a part of backlog reduction, it managed to see the backlog come down quite significantly, by almost 20,000 cases in the past two years. I am hopeful that the new faster and fairer asylum system we will put in place this fall following the presumptive adoption of Bill C-31 will discourage significant numbers of unfounded asylum claims, thereby reducing the intake of new claims and allowing us to further reduce the backlog.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Mr. Davies.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

To go back to the advertising campaign against crooked consultants, what percentage of that $4 million is being spent outside of Canada to run ads outside of Canada, if any?