Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 25th, 2020

[Catrina Tapley]

I greatly appreciate the question. I'm from New Brunswick.

Is there a problem?

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

No, it's fine.

[Catrina Tapley]

We've made a change in our express entry system. We have given more points to candidates who speak French or are bilingual.

I think this will make a big difference for those coming through, particularly international students who come through Canadian institutions, and those additional points will help raise their point score within express entry and let them land, let them become permanent residents in Canada.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

It was mentioned several times that international students come to Canada. What more can be done to ensure that these students stay here and become permanent residents of Canada?

[Catrina Tapley]

Thank you for the question.

With the opportunity that the 401,000 target brings for us for next year, I think there are many things we can look at with respect to students in terms of pathways to permanent residence. We're analyzing those right now. However, I'll remind you that 25% of those economic immigrants who landed last year had been here as international students or had Canadian student experience, and I think that's really positive.

The other item, if may, Madam Chair, is the tremendous work we have done to try to make sure that students can continue to study in Canada and that their time continues to count to the post-graduation work permit. We work very closely with colleges and universities and with provinces and territories to find ways around this, so that we can maintain Canada as a destination of choice for international students.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you.

Can you talk a bit about the process for the provincial nominee program? For example, in Ontario, there are roughly 6,700 positions or placements, but in northern Ontario, we get 50. We get very few from the provincial nominee program; thus, we set up the national pilot project for immigration in rural areas. I want to thank the officials for doing that quickly in the last year or so.

Can you comment on the provincial nominee program and some of the limitations we have on that, and then, with respect to the comments on rural immigration, how we can expand that program?

[Catrina Tapley]

Madam Chair, thank you for that.

The provincial nominee programs continue to work really well. In this COVID time, where processing has been challenging—our border has closed—we are overprocessing, so to speak, around provincial nominee programs. I'm happy to see those numbers and to see how it's working. However, I believe that the member is correct. In many cases, the provincial nominee programs still create some problems with moving more immigrants and new Canadians out to rural communities and to smaller centres.

On the new pilot that we have in place, we are really pleased, and the first results are starting to come in now. We have a lot of experience with the Atlantic pilot. The first results under the rural and northern pilot are starting to come in, and they're very promising.

The next one to come will be the municipal nominee program. We've spent this period consulting and working with municipalities and PTs. I'm optimistic that we should be able to launch something soon, and to work with municipalities to have this up and running.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you for all the work you do.

I believe my time is up.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you, MP Serré.

We will now move on to Madame Normandin.

Madame Normandin, you have six minutes. The floor is yours.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses who are on site. I hope to have a little more clarity than I had for my last questions.

I'll come back to the issue of LMIAs. There is currently a directive on the Government of Canada website that says that if you are looking for a work permit for a restaurant or retail business in an area where the unemployment rate is over 6%, the application will not be processed.

Are you aware of any other areas that may soon be covered by the same ministerial directive?

[Catrina Tapley]

Madam Chair, I'm going to ask Ms. Campbell Jarvis to answer that.

[Marian Campbell Jarvis, Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic and Program Policy, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question.

In the COVID context, we are triaging how we are looking at the work permit application, starting, obviously, with health and other essential services. It doesn't mean that other work permits are not being looked at, but there is a triage in the pandemic context.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much.

My second question is about processing the IMM0006. We have heard that it takes 14 business days to process them, which then became 21 business days. When we call the immigration officers, they say that they don't have access to the files. As members of Parliament, we cannot have access to the information for our constituents.

Will the situation be resolved soon?

[Catrina Tapley]

Thank you for the question.

The standard is 14 days. I am sorry for any confusion that has been relayed to you on the part of the call centre. We are pleased that we have the service standard back within the 14 days. I think it's 11 days and eight days, depending on which category we're looking at.

We have had to create a special program to do this. We've received about 50,000 email inquiries or email applications for family reunification. Not each of those represents a specific case, but each of them needs to be looked at and examined. For us, part of the problem—or part of the opportunity—that this provides is that a lot of them deal with U.S. clients, who typically are not clients who come into the global case management system. We've had to stand up something special to be able to do this.

We now have close to 100 decision-makers working on this. We have increased overtime considerably around this to make sure that those service standards stay within the time.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much.

My next question is very specific. If, however, you don't have the answer now, I would very much appreciate a written answer in the future.

If I look at the statistics for 2019, I see that approximately 20,000 applications for permanent residence were processed per month in the economic class, which includes Quebec skilled workers. During the crisis, in April, the number of applications went from 20,000 to 1,000. Then, in May, the situation improved to almost 6,000 applications. In June, almost 10,000 applications were processed, but the number subsequently dropped to 2,000.

Why did the processing of skilled worker applications for permanent residence stopped?

[Catrina Tapley]

Thank you for the question.

I will ask Mr. Mills to answer it.

[Daniel Mills]

Thank you for the question.

Actually, we have not stopped processing Quebec's applications. When we resumed our activities in May and June, we were ready to finalize a lot of decisions and files, because we were processing a lot of applications before the pandemic, as you mentioned. Many were therefore almost fully processed and we were able to complete them when we resumed our activities. That is why there was a significant increase at the beginning.

Subsequently, with the reintegration into the workplace during the summer and the amount of paper files, we had to reorganize our resources and limit the number of people who could be physically on site and there was a drop in productivity.

However, I can assure you that all files in Quebec are being processed at the pace that our capacity allows.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much.

As for the fact that employees were unable to work, I know that the members could not hear cases until July and August. Since they received their full pay in spite of everything, was it suggested or requested that those who had accumulated vacation or sick leave use it first during the crisis?

[Catrina Tapley]

Thank you for the question.

Just to be clear, when it comes to the Immigration and Refugee Board, it's arm's length from IRCC. Therefore, I'll leave that for another time, when you have Mr. Wex before you.

From our own perspective, we have worked hard to make sure that employees are equipped and able—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Madame Tapley, I am sorry for interrupting. Your time is up, so we will have to move on to Ms. Kwan now.

Ms. Kwan, you have six minutes.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

First, I wonder if the deputy can advise me. Have all the offices, locally and abroad, resumed their operations, and which offices are not operating at their capacity from prior to the pandemic?

[Catrina Tapley]

Thanks for the question.

I'll start domestically, in Canada. All our offices have resumed operations, but as you can imagine, it fluctuates up and down and we don't all have in-person capacity at the same level as pre-pandemic. For example, in Vancouver, we're at about 30% capacity of people working in the office. The rest have now been equipped to work from home and we're working through that.

We've resumed some of our in-person services, but just this week we've had to make some changes and adjust our protocols for those who have now moved within critical zones. For employees working in our Mississauga office or working in Calgary or Edmonton, we've now had to reduce our footprint for in-person offices that are—

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Perhaps the deputy can provide a list to the committee so that we know what offices are at what capacity, doing what, and who's working at home and who's working at the office. Thank you.

Of course, part of the issue is that the applications need to be taken from the mailroom and then input into the system. Is there a dedicated stream of people who are doing that work for all the different mailrooms?

[Catrina Tapley]

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer is, boy, would I ever love a system that was able to digitize files so that we could move them around more quickly, but we have people back in. We are moving through the accumulated files that have been there that are paper-based files. We have also reached out to add some additional capacity by a third party to help us PDF-fy, or digitize, those files so that we can move them around the network more seamlessly and also work on them from home.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you.

I want to follow up on my question to the minister on the expired PR cards. He seemed not to understand my question.

My situation is that when people's expired PR cards are not being renewed and they are here in Canada, if they need to go visit loved ones who are dying and very ill, they are reluctant to leave the country, for obvious reasons. There seems not to be an ability to process these applications quickly. There's no urgent processing, because they can't get through the mailroom, and even if they do, my constituents have been told that they have to have a plane ticket in order to get their application expedited.

What can we do about that?