Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Feb. 19th, 2015

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Tell me about your presence in Prince Edward Island. That's where I'm from.

[Catrina Tapley]

And as I said yes, I wanted to make sure.... A lot of—

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Go ahead and correct it, if you wish.

[Catrina Tapley]

Pardon me?

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Go ahead and correct it. You said “yes”, and then you said “as I said yes”, and when I told you where I was from, you hesitated. Do you want to correct it?

[Catrina Tapley]

As I said yes, I was thinking about Prince Edward Island.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Yes.

[Catrina Tapley]

No, I don't believe that we have an office in Prince Edward Island, but I do believe that we have staff co-located with Service Canada in Prince Edward Island. I'll have to double-check on that, Madam Chair, but I do think we have staff co-located.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

I can help you. You have one employee who is inaccessible to the public. In terms of service delivery and in terms of people, anyone looking for any inquiries is directed to a website, a 1-800 number, a regional office, or the local member of Parliament.

In terms of your settlement programs....

How much time do I have? I just have one minute? Okay.

I want to talk about the demographic challenges that we face in the maritime provinces with regard to depopulation. You talked about dollars following settlement patterns. Where you don't have a presence in an area and people are leaving because of a lack of services, don't we really have a chicken-and-egg situation?

[Catrina Tapley]

Madam Chair, I would note a couple of things.

One is that we do have service provider organizations that provide services in Prince Edward Island, and in every province and territory in Canada, as a matter of fact, outside of Quebec. Quebec, as you know, manages its own settlement and integration program. There are service provider organizations in Prince Edward Island that provide services to newcomers who are there.

We work directly with provinces to work cooperatively on the programs that are provided.

The third thing I would note is that the provincial nominee program has been particularly helpful in directing more new arrivals away from Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

[Inaudible—Editor]...can't keep them—

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe]

I'm sorry, but I have to interrupt you.

Thank you, Mr. Casey.

Mr. Leung, you have the floor.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Let me address this issue of the split, the allocation of $600 million. How much of it goes to refugee resettlement services and how much of it goes to the regular stream of the other immigrant population?

[Catrina Tapley]

Madam Chair, there's a separate allocation for the refugee assistance program. It's about $55 million. Refugees are eligible for settlement services for that $600 million or so, but there is a separate envelope dedicated to specific supports for refugee assistance, including income in the first year and other supports around that.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

The $600 million, I gather from the prior discussion, would not include Quebec. Quebec has a separate pool. Could you give us a number for that, please?

[Catrina Tapley]

In the last fiscal year.... I'll back up just a bit. There is a separate accord between Canada and Quebec related to immigration. Under the accord, Canada provides a grant to the Province of Quebec in recognition of settlement services provided. It's based on a formula. The formula has a couple of different aspects to it, and I'm happy to speak to that. In the last fiscal year, it was about $340 million.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

I come from the private sector, where our measuring stick is often what is the right return for investment. Based on these figures and based on how many primary residents or immigrants we helped out, could you give me an idea of what the cost is per person assisted and also whether we tracked them within a year or two years of landing, say, to see how successful they are? Is that program in place as a measurement of our effectiveness?

[Catrina Tapley]

Madam Chair, we have recently built a new system called iCARE, immigrant contribution agreement reporting environment, that enables us to track on a per service, per immigrant, or per client basis how much we're spending on particular services. It's in the process of getting up and running now. It will allow us to track across different service provider organizations, too, in terms of how different services or the costs of different services relate from one area of the country or from one service provider organization to another. We certainly look carefully at those costs and how those are measured.

The other question is around how we track outcomes or improvements over one, two, three, and future years. We are blessed with good data in this department from the immigrant tax-filer database. We're able to track outcomes of immigrants over time. We're able to couple that a bit in a disaggregated way with those who've received services and those who haven't received services. It's not perfect, but it does give us a good approximation of where services have been effective and what the bump is between those who've received language training, for instance, and those who haven't received language training.

Ryhan, do you remember how much better people do if they've received services as opposed to if they haven't received services?

[Ryhan Mansour, Acting Director, Horizontal Policy and Programs, Integration - Foreign Credentials Referral Office, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Madam Chair, that actually is something that we really look forward to implementing as of this year. In 2015-16 we will be implementing a new client outcome survey. Essentially a survey will be sent to every individual who receives one of the CIC funded services, to be able to track them in time over the following two years so that we can compare their outcomes using the data from the IMDB, which is the taxpayers reported data, and make a correlation and somewhat of an attribution to those who have taken our services.

We are happy to have this in place and very much look forward to getting this new data starting next year, because it is built on the practice and the experience that we've had with pre-arrival services. We have done this for several years now—since 2007, I believe—with pre-arrival services, where we have seen that those who have taken CIC funded services pre-arrival do significantly better once they are in Canada, for instance, in the rate of employment, and at level....

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Let me just fine-tune that question a bit more.

For the resettlement funding, how do we distinguish between those immigrants who come in who we try to put in an employment placement versus those who are here as economic migrants and yet create their own jobs by investing in their own future? How do we distinguish between those two pools?

[Catrina Tapley]

Madam Chair, I should say that our settlement services are open to all permanent residents. Our terms and conditions are such that we don't fund settlement services for citizens, nor do we do it for temporary residents. It's focused on permanent residents.

There are a number of people who never avail themselves of our services. The principal applicant who comes in with a job offer, good community connections, and who is quickly established may never touch our services, because they have a good pathway to integration and a job is very helpful.

What we find is that dependants of that principal applicant will avail themselves of our settlement services—a spouse, working-age or older children if they are there, parents or grandparents, if they've come in. They may avail themselves of our settlement services as well. So it tends to be self-selected that way.

We do some needs assessment in terms of those who come in, but those who have a pretty good path are doing well on their own.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe]

Thank you, Mr. Leung. Your time is over.

Madam Mathyssen, you have the floor.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you very much for being here.

I'm very interested in your expertise, because I have a number of questions which relate to what we find in my office every day.

The first question has to do with the Syrian refugees. The government has announced that we're going to see 10,000 refugees. The problem seems to be the resources allocated to process these government-sponsored refugees. We haven't heard that the government has declared the situation in Syria a crisis for people on the ground. When government-sponsored refugees get here, they're charged for the travel. In the case of many of these folks, they're arriving here in a desperate situation. Why are they being charged for their travel?

Also, what kind of process is in place in order to make sure that those 10,000 Syrian refugees actually get here? Are the resources available? I'm hearing that they're not.

[Catrina Tapley]

Madam Chair, I'll start, and then I'll ask my colleague Monsieur Gionet to fill in a bit here as well.

Resources are in place to resettle the government's commitment of 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next three years. We have a matching centre. We work with other organizations to bring these refugees in. They are selected in one of three ways: as government-assisted refugees, as privately sponsored refugees, or as something called the blended visa officer referral program, but that one's pretty small. Most of them will come in as either privately sponsored refugees or government-assisted refugees.

Madam Chair, the government offers small repayable loans to refugees to cover the cost of travel, and they're repaid over a small period of time with a very high repayment rate. I'll comment briefly on outcomes for refugees. Outcomes for refugees don't tend to be as good as for other immigrants who are coming, but we do see a small difference between those who are privately sponsored refugees and those who are government-assisted refugees. In the short-term, privately sponsored refugees have better outcomes than government-assisted refugees, although the two catch up with one another over time.

Monsieur Gionet.

[Jean-Marc Gionet, Acting Director General, Refugee Affairs, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Madam Chair, there's not to much to add to what Ms. Tapley indicated, but maybe there's just one point of clarification in terms of the resources being in place and the priority that we accord to the Syrian refugees. They are being prioritized for processing. We are seeing some faster processing for the Syrian cases especially coming out of our office in Beirut. We've seen the number of arrivals increasing. There is a recognition of the seriousness of the situation, and as I indicated, cases are being prioritized.