Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Oct. 18th, 2011

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

And that translates into how they communicate with us. We are dealing with all of those people who are in the queue already, let alone people who want to come. I think you mentioned 100 million people want to come to Canada. I can understand why, but there are only so many people we can properly admit on an annual basis.

I would have thought—and I think you have answered part of this—that there has to be some combination of perhaps an increase in the number of people we admit and a revisit of the criteria, to make it a little more stringent and less easy for people to feel they can come to Canada. Maybe it's a combination of a pause or a moratorium, although I know some people don't like to hear those words—and neither do I, for that matter, but something needs to be done in order to deal with the backlog and get back to a faster and more efficient system.

The other side is that the easier it is to admit people, the more applications we are going to get. People around the world are looking for a better place to live, and Canada, I would think, would be at the top of their list.

Could you give us a sense of how you allocate staff around the world when you have surges or spikes? We know we have a higher number of applicants from certain countries. How do you transfer people around the world to deal with those volumes?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Right.

It used to be that we really had to depend on moving people to the spikes. That of course meant our flexibility was impaired, because it depends on the physical plant, which depends on the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the embassies, and the locations they have.

Every year we look at what the trend is, where we are going, what are the backlogs, and within our resource base we will often reallocate and move people around. For us, in the longer term, this is about leveraging our network and looking at our network in a more virtual fashion. With the global case management, we can start thinking about doing certain things in a centralized fashion in Canada, and only have certain parts of the decision made where you need local expertise.

Of course we also readjust our staff based on visitor trends. For example, when the Canadian tourism industry decided to make Brazil one of our key countries, all of a sudden we were seeing tourism out of Brazil triple, and that means more staff is needed to address that. We send temporary duty and also create emergency positions for short periods of time.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you very much.

Do I still have some time?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

No, you are finished.

Mr. Kellway, we finally, after two hours, give you the right to speak.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that very much, as well as your opening remarks to the committee. I am excited to be here and look forward to working with all of you in a constructive manner.

I would like to thank Mr. Linklater and Ms. Deschênes for coming today and providing such thorough, informative, and patient responses to our questions.

I get the honour to be the last one to test your patience today. I will do so with a very basic question. When and why did this backlog actually start?

[Les Linklater]

I would say it's a question in two parts and an answer in two parts. With the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, there were no controls up until 2008 that would allow the limit of intake of applications, and there was a clear obligation within the law that every application received had to be processed to a final decision, whether positive or negative.

In the past, prior to 2002, there was different weighting provided to occupations for skilled workers that essentially allowed them to be processed or not. The process for regulating intake was much more flexible and was frequently used to ensure that backlogs didn't accumulate.

Where we did get into some problems was with the change between the previous act and the current act, where there was a court decision that essentially forced the department to assess skilled worker applicants under both the old and the new system. While this was beneficial for purposes of evaluation, it did cause a considerable draw on our resources and helped to start this notion that backlogs are part of the way we do business.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Okay.

In all of the discussion today, including your opening remarks, Mr. Linklater, the thing that caught my attention is the issue of skilled workers and the backlog there.

Let me start with this. I take it that the purpose of having a special category of skilled workers is really to resolve existing or anticipated shortages of certain skills or human resources in the Canadian labour market as it exists. Is that correct?

[Les Linklater]

That is correct in part. The human capital model, prior to 2008, did not have an occupational filter that allowed any and all professionals to apply. With ministerial instructions, we looked at how to be more responsive to critical labour market needs back in 2008, thinking about areas where there were, based on evidence, demonstrations of structural shortages in the labour market. That really drove our thinking around the development of that list of 38 occupations.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

That is what caught my attention, because when I look at the ministerial instructions that were brought in to deal with the backlog, the criterion that seems to be applied, in terms of the instructions, is really a kind of management or administrative criterion. What strikes me is a kind of disconnect between the instructions that have come forward and the very purpose of having a skilled worker category in the first place.

When I was looking at your opening remarks, I saw that the instructions allowed the minister to limit intake to a line with capacity to process applications. Then I hear the language about managing intake and all of the rest of that. Could you respond to what I am hearing there and whether there is, in fact, this disconnect between the very purpose of having skilled workers and our efforts just to clear this backlog?

[Les Linklater]

My view of ministerial instructions is that they are very much in part about addressing critical labour market needs. That's why, working with HRSDC, provinces, territories, and stakeholders, we came up with the list of 38 occupations. This narrowed it from a completely open field to areas where we felt the need was most acute for the labour market at the national level. We recognize that there are other tools, like the provincial nominee program, to address specific regional needs, and, for employers, the arranged employment scheme—which has no intake control at this point—which allows employers to identify key people from overseas who are qualified to do jobs that they have on offer in Canada and who, again, are put into immediate process.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Mr. Linklater and Madame Deschênes. You've given us an excellent briefing and I thank you again.

This meeting is adjourned.