Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Feb. 15th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting. Your time is up.

We will now proceed to Mr. Dhaliwal.

Mr. Dhaliwal, you will have five minutes for your round of questioning. Please proceed.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

First, I would like to thank both senior assistant deputy ministers for appearing.

I would also love to thank the IRCC and the MED call centres. They are the busiest offices. The way they have served us over the last six years or so is tremendously appreciated.

I'm going to follow on from the very important question of Ms. Kwan regarding whether the applicants ticked “French” by mistake or perhaps it was a departmental mistake.

How is the department going to fix the French and English dilemma that happened?

[Marian Campbell Jarvis]

Madam Chair, thank you very much for the question.

First, I'd like to note our commitment to the francophone immigration strategy to reach the target of 4.4% by 2023. We've undertaken a number of measures to increase francophone immigration going forward, for example changes in express entry where we have increased the points for francophone applicants, those who are bilingual or French-speaking. We think we are going to see some progress there.

There are other measures under way, for example with international students and with recruiting students. We work very closely with Global Affairs and Mobilité Francophone to support and enable francophone students to apply.

I hope that's helpful, Madam Chair.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Madam Chair, I don't think the assistant deputy minister got the question from either Ms. Kwan or me.

The question that we raised was that, either by mistake or by error of the department, some people applied for TR to PR under the French stream instead of the English stream. There are only a bunch of those applications.

How is the department going to fix that? That was my question, and I'm sure that was Ms. Kwan's question as well.

[Marian Campbell Jarvis]

I'm sorry, Madam Chair.

I thought I was responding to the other question that had been raised.

With respect to the case that has just been raised about the 60 students, this is something I will look into with my colleagues, unless Mr. Mills has more information about that. Certainly, we will be looking into that.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Thank you, kindly.

Madam Chair, I'm going to talk about the Delhi office.

I hear everything in India is open, but all I hear from the department is that they have only two immigration officers there and the embassy is closed. I'm hearing all those things.

I would like to know at what capacity the Delhi office is running right now.

[Daniel Mills]

Thank you for your question.

With respect to Delhi, I don't have the exact figures in front of me, but I know that everyone there can work at the mission or remotely. The only unit still affected by COVID‑19 is the one made up of locally hired staff.

Those folks, depending on where they are in the country, may not be able to come to the office, for obvious reasons. They also cannot work from home. We have limited capacity on that front, but rest assured that all the other employees are doing their best and working from home where possible. We have also redirected some workload from India to other parts of the world in order to help in our integrated network.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Madam Chair, earlier I asked this question of the minister. Some of the ethnic cooks are not available here in Canada. I have seen many restaurants, and in fact the association, looking for cooks. They made those applications almost two years ago, and they have not heard from the department.

How can they manage spending millions of dollars on their [Inaudible—Editor] and not opening those restaurants?

[Daniel Mills]

Certainly, the department is actively working to process all temporary worker applications. In 2021 alone, we processed over 600,000 temporary worker applications. That's really a—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Mr. Mills. The time is up.

This completes our second round of questioning. Because of the delay in voting, we have the services available to go on until 1:10, so we can have a third round of four minutes for Mr. Hallan and Mr. Ali, and two minutes for Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe and Ms. Kwan.

We will now proceed to Mr. Hallan.

Mr. Hallan, you will have four minutes for your round of questioning.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the officials for being here.

My question is based on the racism report. Was anyone fired after that report came out?

[Marian Campbell Jarvis]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question.

To my knowledge, no, but one thing I would note is that when we set up processes for complaints, often complaints do increase, and that starts to form a baseline for us to take action.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

Will this anti-racism report be made public?

[Marian Campbell Jarvis]

Madam Chair, I believe the report is on the Library and Archives website.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

No, I mean the.... You said that a task force was set up. Will findings in that report be made public?

[Marian Campbell Jarvis]

We have lots of information that we're looking at, and we'd be pleased to share our efforts, Madam Chair.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

Can we please have that tabled with the committee so that we know what's going on with that report? It was a very concerning report, and then we hear of the same type of racism being carried out in the Chinook program.

One of the officials mentioned that there is training going on for cultural sensitivity. Is that also put into the algorithms, which, as some people would say, have that racism built into them?

[Marian Campbell Jarvis]

Madam Chair, thank you very much for the question.

We may need a little bit more precision about the reports. We're certainly pleased to make information available about our anti-racism task force and our efforts under way.

With respect to the question about algorithms, I'm pleased to note that IRCC was one of the first departments, along with Treasury Board Secretariat, to develop a policy for advanced analytics. We have developed a playbook, and in that playbook we have a number of areas that we look at, including privacy as well as gender-based analysis.

On bias, we are very aware of—

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

With all due respect, we're hearing completely different testimony from witnesses who have appeared at this committee and who are saying that there is obvious racism that is being targeted toward those francophone people who are applying from Africa. It seems like those algorithms that are built in are obviously discriminating against them.

What layers of oversight are there for that Chinook program? Every one of the witnesses is calling for it to be paused.

[Marian Campbell Jarvis]

Madam Chair, with respect to that question....

I'm sorry. Is the member still speaking? My screen is corrupted.

[Daniel Mills]

Madam Chair, please let me answer the question.

As I mentioned, the Chinook tool does not use any advanced analytics.

It's not making any decisions.

Chinook is an application that simply rearranges information already in the system onto one page so that our employees don't need to click on multiple screens. It's not a tool that makes decisions. It does not use advanced analytics.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

Was any consulting done? All the witnesses had the same complaint that no consulting was done before the Chinook program was introduced.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting. Your time is up, Mr. Hallan.

We will now proceed to MP Ali.

Mr. Ali, you have four minutes for your round of questioning. Please proceed.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Madam Chair, I will be taking his time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Go ahead, Mr. Dhaliwal.