Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 26th, 2015

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

They are on your own website.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

I'm talking about the service standards we have today.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Well, look. I have the numbers for refugees today from your website for the current processing times, and it says for refugees, government-assisted, 18.5 months; privately sponsored, 38.9 months. These are from your website as of yesterday, so I don't think you can be more up to date than that.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

And I'm telling you that half of our resettled refugees this year will come from Iraq and Syria. On average, I would say 80% of cases, we are dealing with in one year or less.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Right, and with all due respect, you're cherry-picking favourable cases. I'm giving you the overall numbers.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

No, I'm talking about—

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

I do have an alternative explanation. If you look at the processing times, they spike up in 2011. They go straight up after 2007. They spike up when you introduce the expenditure cuts under the strategic and operating review.

We've seen the effects of these cuts, and as your own backgrounder admitted, for citizen applications as well. A lot of this, I think, is resource-related, as the spike up starting in 2011 indicates. But your RPP doesn't indicate any new funding for this.

I'm at a loss to explain whether you care about these skyrocketing waiting times, or what, without the additional money, you propose to do about it.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

We have increased the budget of this department and we have certainly increased settlement funding on a grand scale since 2006. Those initiatives are working. We are bringing processing times downwards. On—

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

You're not bringing them down. I just read the numbers.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

We are. On citizenship—

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Minister, just wait a moment, please.

We have a point of order. The clock is stopped.

Mr. Menegakis.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, I think when a question is asked, the minister should be allotted the time to respond without being interrupted. That's respectful of any witness we have here.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

They're both interrupting each other, actually.

To both of you, the record can't hear when both of you are talking at the same time, so try to oblige each other.

Mr. McCallum, you have about a minute left.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Oh. I thought I was finished.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

No, you're never finished.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would come back to the same point. I don't know how the minister can keep saying the processing times are down when I've just read to him his own numbers saying that they are dramatically up since 2007.

When you've been in the government for nine long years, you cannot blame whatever action the government that left office almost 10 years ago might have taken. You have been there for nine long years. The record shows in each and every category a dramatic increase in these processing times. You can cherry-pick little cases where it might have been down, but overall your own departmental numbers show that they are dramatically and substantially up.

My question is this: what are you going to do about it?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Your time is now up, sir. You took a minute to ask a question.

Mr. Shory.

[Devinder Shory, Conservative, Calgary Northeast, AB]

Minister, thank you to you and to your officials.

I'll allow you to use some of my time to respond to Mr. McCallum's question, if you like.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thanks very much.

Mr. McCallum's remarks unfortunately demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge of the changes we've made to the immigration system. Processing times under our economic programs have not gone up. On the contrary, we introduced something called express entry, which has the fastest processing times ever for Canadian immigration, at six months or less.

I mentioned to you a candidate who had been processed in two weeks. This was never possible in the Liberals' time. It was not possible until now even under our government, because it took us some years to put this new system into place.

On citizenship we did have a backlog, and a growing backlog, because of strong immigration and because of a cumbersome system of approvals for citizenship—the three-step process and not enough resources. The Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, which passed last year, has had a huge impact. There were 260,000 new citizens last year, and close to that pace again this year. Processing times are plunging faster than we even expected in this area.

Yes, we do need to keep attacking backlogs in the family area—this is part of the Liberal legacy we inherited—and we will continue to do that. We've made progress on parents and grandparents under the action plan for faster family reunification. We will make more progress on spouses.

I'm not hiding the fact that processing times for spouses have gone up slightly, but we've demonstrated our ability to bring backlogs under control. For Mr. McCallum to say that we have larger backlogs and longer waiting times for the federal skilled worker program is absurd. We have reduced the backlog for that program, which had become essentially stuck under the Liberal government with a huge backlog and multiple-year waiting times for people who arrived in Canada under the Liberals without the ability to go to work in their chosen fields. That backlog has been reduced by 97%.

[Devinder Shory, Conservative, Calgary Northeast, AB]

Thank you, Minister.

I want to expand on express entry while we are talking about this.

We know it is vital for the government to respond to labour market needs and work with employers to do so. I'd like you to explain how express entry is engaging employers. Was CIC in contact with industry leaders leading up to the launch of express entry, and were they interested at all?

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thank you very much for that question, Mr. Shory.

Let's register a note of caution with regard to our waiting times and our service standards. I know all of my colleagues on this side are very conscious of the fact that the numbers on our website, the way we post them, do not fully reflect the reality. They often reflect the worst-case scenario for privately sponsored refugees, for example, and the statistical picture for every one of our programs is actually more complicated and it's hard to express with one number.

An easy application, an application that's been properly filled out, as most of them are, moves forward quickly. One where we go back and forth with the applicant to find out more information to complete the application takes longer, and those worst-case scenarios are often reflected conservatively in the numbers we have on our website, but we're working on reflecting the reality.

Express entry has been a success not only because it's faster, not only because it ranks large numbers of potential immigrants before they apply—and we're talking about 30,000 who are in the pool right now—while we invite recent rounds to apply, between 1,000 and 1,500 roughly in the latest round.... We really are selecting from a large number of highly qualified people. What else is good about it is that we now, as of May 2015, have full functionality for the provinces and close to full functionality for businesses in Canada, which means they can see online the people who want to come to Canada as immigrants when they register with us.

We have had thousands, I think close to tens of thousands, of companies register as part of the Canada job bank to be able to see who is coming to Canada through express entry, to have the opportunity to recruit them as they come, and even connect with them before they're invited to come as immigrants. That is a huge benefit for us, because we in government do not want to be choosing exactly who comes. We know we need accountants and we know we need software engineers, but we're not the ones to decide whether out of 10 software engineers these two should come, or these three should come. It is the private sector, it is employers, who must make those decisions, because it's part of their competitive advantage to choose the right person.

Express entry allows them to do just that. As well, when there is an LMIA, which as I say for permanent immigration they can achieve free of charge, they can literally bring people if not to the front of the line, close to it, under express entry when a Canadian is not available to do the job. We anticipate under express entry many more immigrants coming to Canada who have jobs, who are going to work immediately, who have been recruited by employers, which was not the case in the past.

[Devinder Shory, Conservative, Calgary Northeast, AB]

Thank you, Minister.

As you know, the safety and security of Canadians is very important for me and all of us. In the main estimates for eTA you include $15 million to develop and implement this important initiative under the Canada-United States perimeter security and economic competitiveness action plan. This was in the budget implementation act last year and we had a chance to study it in this committee.

How will this system allow CIC to verify whether or not tourists pose a risk to the health, safety, and security of Canadians? How will eTA work?

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thank you so much.

This allows us to have a certain amount of information about those who are able to come to Canada visa free, and it looks like on the face of it, a burden, another obstacle to travel. It's actually a way of facilitating legitimate travel.

The United States has had this kind of system for several years now, and other partners have it. It's important that Canada have it, because not only does it give us that extra assurance that the large number of countries that don't, where visas are not required to come to Canada, are sending us people who are not criminals, who are not terrorists, who are not threats to Canada in some other respect, it also allows us to lift the visa requirement over time with other countries and with populations within countries that we know represent large populations of legitimate travellers. We want that to happen and it will happen, as you saw in economic action plan 2015, for Brazil, Mexico, Romania, and Bulgaria, but for other countries beyond that.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Ms. Mathyssen, we're now on five-minute rounds.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister. I have a number of questions.

My first has to do with CIC's modernization objectives. I have information that you're proceeding with the automation of passports and that renewals will be using passport numbers through the department's website. I'm wondering what the level of security is connected with that. How will the privacy of individuals be protected if they're going online? Is the data encrypted? What safeguards are in place in regard to the data?