Industry Committee on June 17th, 2022

[Sarah Hayward]

No. That's an average for all work permits, and it is moving downwards.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

From a timeline point of view, when would you expect to be back to meeting the standards, based on your best estimation?

[Sarah Hayward]

We have been putting a lot of different plans into motion. We hope to be back within service standards before the end of 2022.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Great. Thank you.

Can you advise us on whether or not a lot of employees are still working from home at this point, or is everyone back at the office now?

[Sarah Hayward]

All of our employees are able to work, and we are working in a hybrid formation at this point. Some people are working from a distance, in their homes, and other people are in the office where it's needed.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Do you do an analysis, for people who are working from home, that looks at their Internet? Do you do Internet speed tests or look at their Internet access and see what upgrades might be applicable, if they're even applicable, where they live? Is that a process you do when you have people working from home?

[Philip Somogyvari]

Perhaps I can jump in, Chair.

We generally deal with that on an employee-by-employee basis in terms of what challenges they may be facing with regard to connectivity. I think the best place is for the supervisor of that particular employee to work through whether the employee would need to work in a bricks and mortar environment or whether there are other workarounds to ensure that the employee can be productive based on their connectivity.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you.

Just to give an example here, I can work from home. I can bring a laptop or my Surface home, but everything is slower. I have reasonably good Internet, but opening a PDF attachment is considerably slower. Lots of times, if I have a heavy load of emails and things like that, I'll go to the office because everything is just so much faster. Everything is hard-wired, whether it's in Ottawa or back at my constituency.

I'm wondering if some of these efficiency time increases are all volume-related or if they're related to the fact that everything can be slower when people are working from home. You're not hard-wired into the system and you maybe don't have all of the information you would normally have access to, such as files and things like that.

[Sarah Hayward]

It is all volume-driven. COVID caused a lot of pressures with the border closures and people being unable to immediately go into the office and reach paper applications. Since that time, we have done great strides to digitize our applications and get them into our global case management system so that they can be processed anywhere in the world. It is in all contexts volume-driven, trying to get through the inventories that grew exponentially and get back to regular processing times.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, Madam Gray.

Before moving to MP Gaheer, I will grant myself just one question following up on one of the questions that Madam Gray just asked. I don't think there was a clear answer, but do you have any idea of the proportion of employees at IRCC working remotely versus employees working on location?

[Sarah Hayward]

I don't have exact statistics on who is working where. I can say that overseas 98% of our missions are open, 97% of our visa application centres are open and offering biometrics, and 99% of our panel physician clinics around the world are also open. All our IRCC offices and service providers within Canada are open, but currently they are limited to a 30% in-person capacity for both employees and clients.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you.

I'll move now to MP Gaheer for five minutes.

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for making time for this committee.

My questions are mostly for the witnesses from IRCC, and I appreciate your time. I know you're fielding a lot of questions. As everyone's made very clear, Canada's facing a labour shortage. The riding that I represent actually has the second-largest concentration of businesses in Canada. The first is downtown Toronto. A lot of these businesses are facing shortages with regard to skilled trades.

What are we doing to attract and retain skilled workers in the trades? Are these programs being marketed? Do people actually know about these programs if they're available?

[Philip Somogyvari]

Thank you, Chair, very much. We don't mind taking questions.

With respect to trades, in fact we do have the federal skilled trades program. This is within express entry. Due to efforts to calibrate our intake to our output, the intake of federal skilled trades has been on pause, but if we look back to prior to the pause, if we look back to 2019, we would actually do separate federal skilled trades invitation rounds to ensure that those who were qualified in the trades program could be invited to apply for permanent residence. As I mentioned before, in July we'll be reopening express entry.

Also, I must say that quite a few tradespeople come in not within the federal skilled trades program but in programs such as the Canada experience class and the federal skilled worker class. I believe the percentage, although my colleague can correct me, was close to 40% of those qualified in trades within express entry were, in fact, coming in through those programs. There are several avenues.

As well, I would mention, as I said before, through the provincial nominee program, which not only has streams that can basically bring in tradespeople and tradespeople with employment, they could do so within the context of their particular regional or provincial labour market.

Thank you.

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

Great. Thank you.

My next question, also for IRCC, is in regard to international students. I know the federal government is in charge of bringing international students to Canada. Is there anything that IRCC can offer once the students are actually here to accommodate them? Is that the function of the IRCC, or is that provincial?

[Philip Somogyvari]

Generally once students arrive in Canada, they of course would go to study at their post-secondary education institution, or in some cases secondary schools, for the sake of discussion for PSE. I know many of those post-secondary institutions have supports, given the high percentages of international students on their campuses.

Generally with respect to your question, I think it's quite limited in terms of any additional supports that IRCC provides to international students per se, although the institutions that they go to or that they study at are part of a list of designated learning institutions, so in that respect, the federal government does have oversight over where the students study.

Lastly, based on the nature of the program, part of the initial screens of perspective students would also be their ability to sustain themselves while they're in Canada studying.

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

That's great. Thank you.

My last question, also for IRCC, is again in regard to international students. We're taking in a record number, obviously, of international students. Do we have the capacity to take in this many?

Is there a conversation that happens between different levels of government on “this is the housing we have, this is health care, this is food...”? Do those conversations happen when we set the target for the number of international students that we'll bring into the country?

[Philip Somogyvari]

Thanks for the question.

In fact, the international student program is demand-driven, so there is no cap on applications for study permits per se.

It's demand-driven and, in fact, moreover, they do tend to, in very large numbers, apply for permanent residence through express entry, often based on their ability to find work through a post-graduate work permit thereafter.

To answer the question directly, there are no caps on the intake of international students. Many of them reside in residence as well.

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Lemire, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. van Raalte, last spring the committee conducted a study on competitiveness in Canada. In June 2021, parliamentarians took part in a historic vote on a bill that later received royal assent. By the end of June, it'll have been a year since this historic vote took place. By passing Bill C‑208, parliamentarians corrected a tax injustice long-tolerated within the federal government. The bill grants small businesses, particularly family farms and fishing corporations, the same tax rate on the sale of their business whether it is sold to a family member or to a third party.

However, on June 30 and July 19, 2021, the Minister of Finance issued a press release announcing her intention to delay the entry into force of these changes until January 1, 2022, due to concerns with the wording of the bill. It is now June and there has been no update. Ms. Freeland committed to providing further clarification, yet when we asked her about the matter at the Standing Committee on Finance, she was unable to provide an answer.

Can you tell us if you have any clarification on the implementation of this legislation? People are awaiting news. When will that happen?

[James van Raalte]

Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair.

The honest answer is that it would be under the purview of the Department of Finance. Tax policy and tax regulation are not the responsibility of Treasury Board Secretariat.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Very well.

Mr. Chair, I feel I may have taken advantage of my colleagues' generosity, so I'm going to stop now out of respect for them.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

It's up to you. We still have time.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

In that case, I'll continue, because I have other questions.

I'd like to turn to the officials from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration.

You implied earlier that employers are not all classified in the same way. Is there any chance the inspections process could be random rather than systematic? How can we speed up the process?

If you're determined to carry out inspections, perhaps you could issue certificates to good employers who've already gone through the process in order to reduce processing times.

How can we reduce processing times to make things less cumbersome than they are now?