Evidence of meeting #18 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was pandemic.
A video is available from Parliament.
5:55 p.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
Sure. Off the top of my head, I can say how many scored above 400, and that's over 70% of the applicants.
We can certainly get back to committee, Madam Chair, with the information the honourable member has sought.
5:55 p.m.
Conservative
Jasraj Singh Hallan Conservative Calgary Forest Lawn, AB
Yes, please. If we could get that tabled, I would appreciate that.
How does the most recent 27,000-plus draw distribution compare with the previous ones we've put out?
5:55 p.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
I'm not sure I understand the question. Is it in terms of distribution?
5:55 p.m.
Conservative
5:55 p.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
Is it distribution across a points range?
5:55 p.m.
Conservative
Jasraj Singh Hallan Conservative Calgary Forest Lawn, AB
Yes, when it comes to the scores, how does it compare to before?
5:55 p.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
Before, the honourable member was correct that in—
5:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Salma Zahid
I'm sorry for the interruption, Deputy Minister. The time is up. If you want to provide that information, you can provide it to the clerk.
5:55 p.m.
Conservative
Jasraj Singh Hallan Conservative Calgary Forest Lawn, AB
Yes, could we get that tabled, please? Thank you.
5:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Salma Zahid
We will end our round of questioning with Mr. Dhaliwal.
Mr. Dhaliwal, you will have three minutes for your questioning. Please proceed.
5:55 p.m.
Liberal
Sukh Dhaliwal Liberal Surrey—Newton, BC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
On this International Women's Day, to you, the leadership of our deputy minister and all women across the globe, happy International Women's Day. Thank you for all the great work that women do in our society every day.
Madam Deputy Minister, I'm going to carry on with my friend on the other side Mr. Saroya's question about the New Delhi office. With the very little staff that it has—and our office is the busiest in Canada when it comes to immigration cases—it is doing a great job. I have no questions about the work it has done during the pandemic. Our office was very impressed with the work it did.
What are you going to do to meet the requirements it has when it comes to staff levels? All the FC1 spousal applications and the FC4 PGP applications are paper applications.
March 8th, 2021 / 5:55 p.m.
Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
Thank you for your nice comments on International Women's Day.
For those paper applications that are coming in, I'm happy to talk about what we have done over the past year. The pandemic hit us hard. We sent staff home, particularly in our case processing centres. This was not a labour force that was equipped to work from home. As many of you know, we operate two shifts and sometimes three shifts a day in our case processing centres, where we have computer equipment that is bolted to the wall.
Getting this workforce equipped and able to work from home has been a struggle. I'm happy to say it is working well at the moment and finding the balance among the number of people we need in the office, in our case processing centres, to make sure we can smoothly work through those paper files, get them promoted into the system and then process them.
A lot of the delays and the challenges we saw mid-2020 have been overcome. It doesn't mean it's easy, but with the work around digitization of those files with Iron Mountain and the work around critical staff in all our case processing centres.... At Sydney, Cape Breton—Sydney, Nova Scotia—because it has been in a better COVID zone than some of the rest of our case processing centres, we've really been able to keep numbers, relatively speaking, high. All of that has played into being able to promote spousal and family class files, and work them through the system.
I'm confident, going forward—and that's what we've seen already on spousal files this year—that we're moving those files through at what was the pre-pandemic pace.
6 p.m.
Liberal
Sukh Dhaliwal Liberal Surrey—Newton, BC
Madam Deputy Minister, those 30,000 applications are the largest ever since 2006—
6 p.m.
Liberal
6 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Salma Zahid
Maybe next time.
With this, our round of questioning comes to an end. We will now have the vote on the supplementary estimates, as well as the main estimates.
I will begin with the vote on the supplementary estimates.
DEPARTMENT OF CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION
Vote 1c—Operating expenditures..........$7,770,160
Vote 5c—Capital expenditures..........$2,482,673
Vote 10c—Grants and contributions..........$58,648,000
Vote 15c—Debt forgiveness..........$1
Vote 20c—Debt write-off..........$311,847
(Votes 1c, 5c, 10c, 15c and 20c agreed to on division)
6 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Salma Zahid
Shall I report the votes on the supplementary estimates (C) to the House?
6 p.m.
Some hon. members
Agreed.
6 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Salma Zahid
Thank you.
Now we come to the voting on the main estimates, 2021-22.
DEPARTMENT OF CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION
Vote 1—Operating expenditures..........$1,276,918,158
Vote 5—Capital expenditures..........$32,934,299
Vote 10—Grants and contributions..........$1,690,568,408
(Votes 1, 5 to 10 agreed to on division)
IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEE BOARD
Vote 1—Program expenditures..........$255,954,529
(Vote 1 agreed to on division)
Shall I report the votes on the main estimates to the House?
6 p.m.
Some hon. members
Agreed.
6 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Salma Zahid
Before we end, I just want to clarify one thing with the members. VFS Global submitted written responses to questions and requests that were made by Ms. Kwan and Mr. Chiu in the meeting. I just want to have members' input as to whether the follow-up documents should be made public on the committee website.
Seeing no objections, we can make them public on the committee website.
With that, I thank the deputy minister and all the officials from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration for appearing before the committee.
Deputy Minister, happy International Women's Day, and thank you for all the work you are doing on behalf of Canadians. I know it has been a difficult year for everyone in terms of trying to adjust to new norms, but all your officials have been doing an amazing job so a big thank you to everyone.
Happy International Women's Day also to all the women committee members. Thank you for your leadership, and thank you for all you are doing on behalf of your communities. Many young girls are looking at you and seeing you represent them in the House of Commons in Ottawa.
The meeting is adjourned.