Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Oct. 4th, 2016

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

Not right now there isn't, but we could look at it.

I just want to say a couple of things.

We have become a little more lenient than the previous government on Bill C-6, when we said that the language test would not apply to those 55 to 64, whereas previously it did; on the grounds that, while language is really important, older people don't always come the country with perfect English, but their children and certainly their grandchildren do have perfect English. We were a little more on the liberal side, shall we say, the small-l liberal side, on the language issue on that. Although, I have to acknowledge that there's a whole lot of evidence suggesting that skill in English or French is a critical determinant of economic success in Canada, so we haven't really changed too much of what the Conservatives did on language or what the previous Liberal governments may have done. We've changed a little bit, but we accept the premise that success and competence in language is an important criterion of success. We don't apply that to spouses, but when we're talking about economic immigrants, whom we expect to make a contribution to the economy, we have to take an account of the factors that we think will make them successful. Language is one of them. I don't really see how it's discriminatory. The same consideration applies to any group whose first language is not English.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

I guess my follow-up question on that would be; is there actually some report that reflects the change in the impact that it might have had on those who actually end up becoming a permanent resident? Before, it used to be Italian, Spanish, and Polish, and then, all of a sudden, it changed to Burmese and a whole slew of other things. Has there been a study on that or do we have the numbers on the implication of that?

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

Actually, I don't know. Does anybody know?

[Robert Orr]

A partial answer to your question perhaps is that we do track very carefully the nationalities that do apply and are successful coming to Canada. Yes, that changes over time, but there are a variety of factors that result in that change. As you know, we apply a universal policy and we're absolutely committed to that universal policy, so the same criteria applies to everyone.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Okay, thank you.

And then my second—

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Fifteen seconds.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Well, then, thank you very much, Minister, for coming here today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Ms Kwan, three minutes.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

This is a question around immigration levels. I know that the minister has embarked on a series of consultations, and we anticipate some changes with various categories in terms of changes to the applications. Would that come with changes to immigration levels as well, more specifically, an increase in immigration levels, in order to enhance the number of permanent residence applications?

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

I'm sorry, I didn't understand your question. If we have more immigrants, then what?

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

If the minister is embarking on these consultations, and you're going to relax the permanent residence applications' point system process—let's say students, for example, that the minister talked about—are you also going to, then, increase the numbers under the immigration levels to absorb those changes?

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

It`s conceivable, but what we are saying is that we think that international students make an especially valuable contribution to Canada. If we give them more points under express entry, it would mean a higher percentage of all the express entry people that we accept would be international students. Even if the numbers stayed the same, a higher percentage would be students and some other group would be less. However, if we also increase the numbers, then we could have more students and maybe the same number of other people, but I think the two things are conceptually different. More points for students means more students whether—

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you, Minister. I guess we'll just wait for the numbers.

Can I ask a question, then, on refugee applications? The minister spoke about having a meeting with his provincial and territorial counterparts. I'm wondering whether, in that discussion, the minister will raise the issue of the need to increase welfare rates, because the reality is that they are deficient, for refugees and non-refugees alike.

In fact, I would invite the minister to join a welfare food challenge, coming up on October 16, whereby we will undertake, for one week, to be on the welfare rate for the food portion and see how difficult it is. I tried it last year and almost fainted. I'm not kidding; I almost fainted because of that.

I wonder whether that will be a topic for the minister, and whether he will join the welfare food challenge this year.

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

I'll consider it, but I can tell you it is very unlikely that I will suggest to the provinces that they increase their welfare rates. As much as it might be a good thing, it is none of my business, really. It is purely a matter of provincial decision-making and jurisdiction.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Chair—

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

I'd like to thank the minister for appearing before our committee today. It's always a pleasure to have you here, Minister.

I will now suspend for two minutes to allow the minister and his staff to leave. Of course, the department officials will remain for the second hour of our committee hearing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

The meeting will now resume.

Ms. Dzerowicz, you have seven minutes, please.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks very much to the departmental officials for staying another hour.

I have a few questions for you. The first is related to third parties that we use. I'll use the case of a wonderful Portuguese woman whose mother applied to come here five years ago. Everything's gone perfectly with her application: payments have been made, there have been no issues, and she has gone through the whole process. We're five years later—they applied when she was 76, and she's now 81—and we are told that it's a security check that is holding up her application right now, that it's done with a third party, and that no one can possibly know the timeline for it. It may take up to another five years. I'd like to understand how we are holding our third parties to account. Do we not have some service standards with them?

[Robert Orr]

I can't comment, obviously, on a particular case and what the circumstances are there. How security screening is normally done is that it would start initially with officers of IRCC, but we work closely with CBSA on this, and a number of its partners. But it's with CBSA that we do that.

There are some service standards for certain types of applications, and so on. This certainly is outside the norm, and I don't know what the situation is on that particular one. That is definitely outside the norm.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Okay, there are some service standards. Are those published anywhere? I don't know whether to raise a red flag because it seems so ridiculous, or whether it is just within normal range. I don't know when I should be sort of jumping up and down.

[Robert Orr]

I don't know. On the case you have identified there, it does suggest to me that you should be raising a red flag. That does not sound normal.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

In terms of service standards, they're not published anywhere. They're just something that's worked with in the department.

[Robert Orr]

That's correct.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

That actually leads to my second question. How does the department evaluate how well it is providing services to the public? Is there a series of metrics that is used around customer satisfaction or wait times, or are there some training metrics around having a consistent level of service that's provided across the board, across Canada? I guess there are two types of metrics. Is there any way that the department is evaluating whether it's actually providing good service to Canadians? And two, is there some sort of evaluation on how well the services are being delivered by your department across Canada?

[Robert Orr]

There are a number of points there that I would like to mention. We take performance management extremely seriously, and we do have a number of metrics that we measure ourselves against. One of the most obvious would be the service standards that we do have for the various lines of business. All the key lines of business have very definite service standards, which are published. Overwhelmingly, we do meet those service standards. That is one point.

We also do things like client service surveys to have a better indication of what works and what is not working. When we get feedback from our call centre, when we get feedback from emails and so on that come in, we take all of that very seriously and try to improve what we can.

One of the key things, for instance, that we're doing at the moment is a serious review of the kits and the forms on the spousal application form, because currently they're cumbersome. I think we would all acknowledge that, so we're trying to come up with ways to simplify them. We can't do everything all at once, but we're starting with the spouses, and we're starting also with the temporary resident applications.

There are these sorts of things that we are continually doing to try to improve. The Minister mentioned the website as well. That's another mechanism. We did do a major review and it was brought up to date a couple of years ago, but now it needs to be done yet again. There's constantly a series of things that we're doing. We have a client service strategy, which outlines the various things that we are going to do in the next few months, few years, and so on.

So there are a number of measures to manage our interrelationship with the clients and to ensure that we're always improving.