I'll be careful.
Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
I am pleased to have the opportunity to join you today for the first time. Since late September, I have held the position of Deputy Minister at the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. I do not have any formal remarks to make following the minister's presentation. However, with your permission, I will offer a few comments and thoughts on the good work my department is doing.
In addition to the very ambitious policy agenda that has been under way to ensure that our immigration activities are more responsive to our labour market needs and more nimble, I want to stress the level of effort that has been under way in the department to modernize the department's processes and activities. I'm very conscious of all your questions, on processing times, in particular.
We're very conscious of the fact that the world is changing at a rapid pace around us in terms of global restructuring, competitiveness, and the information revolution that is changing the traditional model of how we work. The objective of our modernization work has been to ensure that we are adapting and optimizing all aspects of our activities and business processes to be as effective and efficient as possible, and our relevance depends on this.
It means we've been looking at how we manage our workload, how we manage our workforce, and how we manage risk. Fundamental to this effort is making sure we move forward in a way that provides good client service while maintaining program integrity. So while it's still early days in this modernization journey of ours, we actually are in the process of implementing a number of measures that are bearing fruit, and I wanted to review a few them with you.
We've been developing new ways of processing by defining and separating the more routine and straightforward processing from the more complex through centralization of some functions. Our new global case management system, which provides a more advanced information system, makes it possible to move work across the network, which would not have been possible previously. The bottom line is that this is helping us to improve processing.
The department has also been deploying third-party service providers in the case of visa application centres around the world. By 2014 we will have over 130 VACs in 96 countries. The VACs provide improved client service by helping ensure that applications are complete, which reduces unnecessary delays or refusals.
I want to mention that I had a chance recently to visit one of our VACs in our missions abroad, and I'm astounded actually by the difference it makes in service delivery. I saw the photographs of the lineups that were weaving outside the door everyday outside our mission in Delhi, people waiting to submit their applications, and I saw the VAC in action as well. They have a service standard of a 10-minute wait time for people. They are not decision-makers; they basically help to receive the applications, make sure the applications are complete, that all the documents have been submitted. They package them, they triage them, and they submit the files to our mission. What that does for our visa officers in our missions is that they are focusing on the value-added work, which is actually reviewing applications to make decisions, rather than just doing the paper processing part of it. It's quite impressive and quite outstanding, and I think overall around the world this will actually ensure better service to clients.
We've also—oh, the time is up, sorry.