Evidence of meeting #70 for Public Accounts in the 39th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was service.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
No, we didn't, Chair, and that would be strictly a policy decision as well.
Liberal
David McGuinty Liberal Ottawa South, ON
Okay.
After the introduction of the WHTI in January—this is a question I get all the time—shouldn't a large spike in applications have been predictable?
Liberal
David McGuinty Liberal Ottawa South, ON
Shouldn't a large spike in applications have been predictable in advance of the WHTI announcement in January 2007?
Chief Executive Officer, Passport Canada
As I said at the beginning, our forecast was showing an increase of 6.6%. Out of that 6.6%, 4.4% could have been attributed to WHTI. That was the forecast. We ended up with 22%, and out of that 22%, 25% of the increase is related to the confusion surrounding the implementation date of the sea and land ruling. So that's half a million applications.
Liberal
David McGuinty Liberal Ottawa South, ON
Can you help the committee understand some other confusion around personnel? In February the minister announced that 500 new passport officers had been hired to deal with the backlog. Then, two months later, the minister admitted that not one of them was on the job. Can you help us understand where this is? How many of the 500 personnel have been hired? Where are they located? What are we to believe here?
Acting Director General, Security Bureau, Passport Canada
The minister announced that 500 employees were being hired, and we did a massive hiring to try to get the applications that were sitting in backlog in envelopes into the issuing system, opened, screened, so that if people at least hadn't filled out an application correctly, they could get the information back. Of those 500 people, 338 are in operations now. When you have an increase in volume and an increase in staff to the extent that we had, you also have to increase your number of people doing the hiring—your number of pay clerks, your number of financial clerks. So some of that hiring went to other parts of the organization to support operations. A number of people went into security, as an example.
There were 338 people hired. It's a revolving door. People come in, people leave. We hire 10 today, 8 leave tomorrow; we hire 12 tomorrow, 16 leave the next day. So it's a continual hiring cycle, and we're getting enormous support from the Public Service Commission to try to expedite that for us, but there will never be a static number.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Thank you, Mr. McGuinty. Thank you, Ms. Thomas.
Mr. Sweet, for seven minutes.
Conservative
David Sweet Conservative Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
One of the questions I have—because we've had some concern in this committee about some logic models that are built to determine future outcomes—is if in the past you've relied on the Conference Board of Canada and they gave you this 6.6% figure, what model have you developed to assess projections for next year?
Chief Executive Officer, Passport Canada
The Conference Board model is composed of three things. There are historical trends, numbers that come from our own statistical database. Then a macroeconomic factor is GDP. People are more affluent; they travel more and so on. Then there's a third component, which is basically a series of surveys they conduct on an ongoing basis to assess how many people intend to travel.
We took that model last year, and we missed the target, obviously. This year we took the same model and we invited a group of experts to review the model—actuaries from different departments, math professors from Ottawa U and other places. The model is being refined as we speak, according to some of the recommendations they have made.
Another thing we're doing is we're conducting a survey in June to basically measure Canadians' intentions to travel, not only to the United States but elsewhere in the world. One component we're also adding to the model, which was not there before, is asking people whether or not they want to acquire a passport only to travel or as an identity document. The passport is used more and more to get your health card and so on. So we may have people who will not apply for a passport because they're flying south or whatever but basically because it's a good ID document. That should give us a better measure of what we should expect next fall.
Conservative
David Sweet Conservative Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON
Is your fallback position going to be a minimum 22% increase?
Chief Executive Officer, Passport Canada
We basically have a model that has two things: the bottom line and then the risk component. The risk component is fairly significant. Basically, if the confusion surrounding WHTI remains, we should expect a fairly significant increase in the demand, which is a factor we did not consider to the appropriate extent in the past.
Conservative
David Sweet Conservative Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON
The five-year, ten-year conversation comes up a lot. Certainly one of the things we're concerned about is convenience, but the double-edged sword that you deal with is this service standard along with security. Although I like to have things convenient myself—we go through the same process—I also have grave concerns about security.
There are two things that I can readily observe if we went to a ten-year validity. First would be the person's physical features; certainly when they're young, they change substantially over ten years. Second—and on this I'm asking if I'm right or wrong—there'd also be an increased risk in a valid passport being out there that maybe was taken and someone wasn't even aware of it, because many people store them away. Now you've got a valid passport out there for this ten-year period, a passport someone could actually be using fraudulently, and you wouldn't have any way of knowing it. Is that true? Are there other security reasons that you don't go with a ten-year passport?
Acting Director General, Security Bureau, Passport Canada
It's absolutely true. Certainly when you issue a passport and change the design and it's a ten-year passport, you have ten years before that particular style of document is off the market. As we introduce new security features, they're replicated by people we wouldn't want doing that.
The other issue is that should there be a breach of the document, in a five-year cycle you can make changes and flood your market with the new style of document much more quickly. It's a much more responsive program for us. We want to keep the Canadian passport's integrity high and its profile as high. Therefore, being able to renew it very frequently is extremely important.
Conservative
David Sweet Conservative Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON
One of the concerns I had in reading this report was on page 13. It was about the fact that when the Auditor General did her first audit, people had access to the computer system who did not have a high enough security clearance.
By the way, congratulations on one of the best reports of improvement I've seen since I've been on this committee. But this was one of the places in which there was little to no improvement, and this is a highly sensitive issue. Can you tell me if you have made substantial progress since the Auditor General's report in making sure these people don't have these passwords and access to security levels that they haven't been cleared for?
Acting Director General, Security Bureau, Passport Canada
There are two distinct issues. First, people with access to the issuing system or with access to blank passports—our secure assets—have all been cleared to secret. There is 100% verification on that element of it.
The second element—the passwords within the system and user access accounts within the system—is the issue I addressed previously in saying that we're putting in an automatic system. Right now we have a manual verification monthly to ensure that old expired accounts are no longer in the system and that therefore it can't be accessed by somebody who shouldn't be using it.
Conservative
David Sweet Conservative Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON
I was pleased to know that you signed memorandums of understanding with the police services. Also, on page 14 in section 5.45, in 2005 Passport Canada had 73,000 entries on its watch list, and then, wow, one year later, 147,000 entries. Are we making some headway? Do you expect that to double again? Are we making some headway in making sure we're starting to get a handle on who all the security risks in this country are, and we're starting to have a good record of it?
Acting Director General, Security Bureau, Passport Canada
I don't see our watch list growing to the same extent, because any information we get would be in a different format. What we received was a download of information on people who are currently incarcerated and should not be able to apply for a passport. That changes every day. We have a data exchange with Correctional Service Canada.
Should we be getting other information—for example, through the CPIC system—it would be a data-matching system as opposed to a download into our system, but it would effectively address your concern, and we are working on that. We are a partner in an intergovernmental project to address that problem.
Conservative
David Sweet Conservative Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON
I have a final question for you. The Auditor General notes a concern on page 19 in section 5.64, that although you are ready for WHTI at the national level, at the local level there seemed to be little to no strategic preparation for it. Has that changed? I already gave you the question about your logic model in terms of an upcoming surge. Has that changed as well at the local service level?
Chief Executive Officer, Passport Canada
For people applying at a Passport Canada office at the local level, the service standards are back to normal. If you go to a Passport Canada counter, you should get your passport within ten days. We're back to standards.
With regard to preparation at the local level, we have asked for a work plan from each of our local offices. The problem is that it's very difficult to forecast the increase in demand in Mississauga, Brampton, or in Edmonton. We're looking at the national level and then trying to segregate the level of passport activity by province. Is it a province where the demographic is changing, and so on? It's not refined enough to provide us with very specific forecasts for each of our offices.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Thank you, Mr. Sweet.
Before we go to the second round, I have one question I want to pursue with Mr. Cossette.
First of all, I want to congratulate the agency for the progress being made. I'm certain the office had a very difficult winter. You've worked under very difficult circumstances.
But I can't underestimate the stress this has caused every member of Parliament and their staff. It has been a very difficult issue in their regions. I come from a province that doesn't have a passport office. The people have to go to another province at considerable expense, which is similar to Monsieur Roy's situation.
The typical example we deal with is a couple or a family. They go to the website and read “20 days”. They book their flight and apply for a passport two and a half months beforehand. And then they wait, and they wait, and they wait. About a week or ten days before their trip, they get nervous. There's no way you can get through on the toll-free line. There's no way to communicate with your department.
Who do they scream at? They go to the only avenue available to them: their local MP. They line up at the office. They're there at 8 a.m. They're there all the time. They're calling and asking where their passport is. They've paid their money. They've booked their vacation. They've paid their deposits. It's extremely stressful in that situation. This went on all winter.
It seems to me that if your website posted the 20 days and people relied on those assurances, there's a legal liability there if those people lost their trips.
But that's the past. It was very, very stressful.
The larger issue here, and Mr. Sweet touched on it, is dealing with the western hemisphere travel initiative. It was land and sea that we dealt with last winter. According to the best information we have, we're going to a land-based initiative sometime in 2008.
Every border town right across Canada, for example, Windsor, St. Catherines, and St. Stephen, has people who cross the border every day for cigarettes, entertainment, and to go to ball games. Your Conference Board model predicted a 6.3% increase.... It's horrendous what I predict this next round to be.
I would like to receive assurances from you to the Canadian people. Does Passport Canada have any idea what's going to happen when the land-based WHTI provisions come into effect? Are you prepared to meet that? It's going to be a very, very serious issue when it hits us.
Chief Executive Officer, Passport Canada
In terms of getting ready for the next season, the first thing we're doing is refining the model so we have something to work with. We are being very conservative in the sense that we're basing our model on the high risk when it comes to the volume that may come in.
Right now we're going through a major hiring process to double our capacity to process the mail-in applications. During the winter there were long lineups at passport offices, but the service standard was much better than for people who were mailing their application. We are putting a very significant effort into increasing our capacity to process mail-in applications. In fact, we have rented two facilities in order to double our capacity to process the mail.
We're also increasing the capacity at the local level by hiring people and adding evening shifts so that people can basically receive applicants during the day and process the applications at night. We are trying to significantly increase the capacity of the organization.
As I was saying before, if we could get the passport to people who are mailing in their application within an acceptable standard, we hope that would solve much of the pressure on MPs' offices.
In the long term, we really think that increasing our mailing capacity and diminishing the requirement of Canadians to meet passport officials face to face should lead to a much better situation than what occurred last year.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
So I take it you are assuring Canadians that what happened last winter will not happen in 2008?
Chief Executive Officer, Passport Canada
We're monitoring the demand as well as we can. The demand is not receding right now, but we're building toward being able to deliver a significant increase in demand next fall.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Okay.
We're going to go to the next round, colleagues, for three minutes each. I'm going to have to be firm on the time.
Ms. Sgro, three minutes.