Public Accounts Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2010

[Neil Yeates]

We'll report every year on the progress we're making on our service standards. We'll report on phase 1 next spring.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Mr. Yeates, I'm asking you how much time is needed for you to be able to get an outside report. When you request an outside report, it's an outside firm that prepares it. How much time does it take for you to get a report?

[Neil Yeates]

I'm sorry. We're not doing an outside report. We're reporting ourselves.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Okay.

[Neil Yeates]

There may have been a misunderstanding in the way it's worded. Excuse me, Chair. We're reporting ourselves.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Could the Office of the Auditor General clarify that point? In the comments you made, Mr. Ricard, you said that an outside report on its performance against its standards would be prepared by the spring of 2013. You say the department has developed an action plan. That's in your statement.

[Sylvain Ricard]

The department is referring to the fact that it would like to publish a report by 2013, not have an outside audit conducted.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

All right.

[Sylvain Ricard]

The idea is to make the information available to the public.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

I have a problem with something, Mr. Yeates. Let's suppose you publish the report by 2013, as you would like to do. You would nevertheless have taken three years to establish roughly four out of 35 standards.

Now you're presenting your action plan and you say that each of phases 2 and 3, individually, will be done within six months. It's acknowledged that more than four standards will be established under phase 2 and that more than four standards will be established under phase 3.

You'll understand that what you're presenting to us this morning seems quite optimistic. However, I'm skeptical. You'll need three years to develop four standards, but you're going to put on a burst of energy every six months and establish about a dozen—12 or 15 standards, depending on the situation—so that you can ultimately prepare a report.

Don't you think that's presenting matters in a somewhat optimistic light and that we'll ultimately be disappointed with the department's performance again? You have to be realistic. You haven't been able to do this, and suddenly you're going to do it.

[Neil Yeates]

Well, as we were saying earlier, I think that one of the challenges we've had is trying to deal with challenging processing times across our lines of business. What we're committing to now is to basically transform those into sets of service standards, recognizing that we as a department are not going to be very happy with many of those processing times; they're longer than we would like them to be.

Our program is always changing. We're doing reforms and making changes to the programs. Things happen around the world, and that has made it challenging, I think, for this department to take on service standards. But basically we've made the decision that we need to proceed, we need to get these into place for better or for worse, and we need to get on with it. That essentially is the point that we've come to, Chair.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

When you mentioned earlier that you had additional funds from time to time to enable you to provide adequate service, you said it was occasional, which means that it happens once in a while.

Did you in fact say that you no longer have those additional amounts?

[Neil Yeates]

It depends on the business line, Chair.

We had some temporary funding for our citizenship processing. That was available last year and has been available a couple of times in the previous five years. This year, we reallocated resources internally, within the department, to put some additional resources into citizenship processing.

We do have the action plan for faster immigration, which is dealing with the federal skilled worker program. That continues for a multi-year period.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

You mentioned that you go on Facebook and so on. I don't know whether you know it, Mr. Yeates, but the number of characters that can be used to write a message on Twitter is relatively limited. It's extremely small. I don't know what kind of messages you'll be able to send people. I don't know whether you're aware of the number of characters you can use to write a message on Twitter, but note that, to inform a client, the message could be short. Don't you think so? That's my first point.

Second, for those who don't have access to the Internet—and that was mentioned earlier—do you guarantee that you'll nevertheless send them a letter as part of the service after six months? Will those people nevertheless receive a letter?

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Mr. D'Amours, I'm afraid you've kind of cut him off, so perhaps he may want to incorporate his answers, because some of it might have been actually rhetorical in the question.

You might want to do that as you go forward.

Mr. Kramp.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Welcome to all.

If I may, I will certainly respond to the courtesy of Madame Faille. I absolutely will acknowledge, in the presence of my colleagues here, that while we do have an occasional difference of opinion or philosophical approach, for the most part Madame Faille comes here unbelievably well prepared, and we somehow find an accommodation to portray and exhibit results here, rather than sometimes the embarrassment that is normally seen in question period, which honestly is not a reflection of the work we do here.

Madame Faille, thank you.

Now I'll go to our colleagues here, and to our guests, perhaps to the CIC and Mr. Yeates or Madame Deschênes.

It was mentioned, of course, that regular processes are one thing, but in a humanitarian crisis, whether it's Haiti or a tsunami, your services were called upon to sort of do above and beyond.... Now, when you do that, do regular processes suffer? Do we start to fall behind in our regular processing or are you able to accommodate that with extra budget and/or extra allotment?

[Neil Yeates]

I think the short answer, Mr. Chair, is that we do have to divert some of our existing processing capacity when situations like Haiti arise. But we do our best to keep up with everything.

Madame Deschênes actually had the lead on that, so maybe we could have her speak to the terrific work that was done.

[Claudette Deschênes]

Definitely. Because in a crisis we normally need experienced officers or experienced resources, we do divert resources. We will often get some additional money to cover travel costs or accommodation costs to put a team in place. But really, in the short term, we need to move resources because we do not have a special task fore to deal with a crisis situation.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

Perhaps I'll go again to the actual backlog at immigration. There are a lot of numbers bandied about--close to a million dollars, $30,000--and there are a lot of differences over the years. Can you give us the progression from 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and today as to what the approximate numbers were and what the timelines for processing expectation would be and are?

[Neil Yeates]

I don't think we have numbers with us from 20 and 10 years ago, but I can give you a rough approximation. The immigration levels that we're taking in now are somewhat higher than they were 10 and 20 years ago, so it would be 250,000 a year now. It was around 225,000 to 200,000 a while ago, and a bit less than 200,000 earlier. Again, the levels plan.... So you take that 250,000 and split it between all of the different categories that we admit, from family class to skilled workers. Also, provincial nominees have really grown now in terms of a program. It used to be at less than 500 and now it is at about 40,000, so there's a big, big change there.

For refugees, those numbers for refugees tend to fluctuate over time as the circumstances around the world change.

We've seen some very significant progress on federal skilled workers. Before we started the action plan for immigration, we had a backlog of around 640,000 cases, and we're down to about 340,000 cases now. We've made very substantial progress on that. We have used what we call “ministerial instructions” to limit the number of applications we will accept to specific occupations that are seen to be in demand across Canada. That's one of the tools we've used to control intake, which is really critical for us in terms of responding to people's applications in a timely way.

[Daryl Kramp, Conservative, Prince Edward—Hastings, ON]

In order to move forward and potentially some day hopefully even eliminate a waiting period so we can deal with things--but of course that's pie in the sky--what would it require? Obviously, money, a budget to staff this, would be one of the components, but of course money isn't everything. What about the expertise? What about the security concerns that we face in today's world and the facilities...? Are these other factors at play? Where would you rank these factors?

[Neil Yeates]

I think the biggest factor, the starting point, really, is how many people Canada wants to admit every year, and then you work backwards from there. How many applications would we need to take in order to provide a reasonable response time to people? Right now, by and large, our application system is completely open-ended, so we accept applications continuously.

I think if we want to respond to people in a timely way, for us we would say that typically a six- to twelve month period would be reasonable, given security clearances, health and medicals, and things that need to be done. Grosso modo, we think that would be reasonable. Then we would need to restrict the number of applications we accept in any one year. In fact, we've just done that for the federal skilled worker program. We've set a cap of 20,000 applications that we will accept. This puts us much more in the realm of the number of applications we can review and process in a one-year period.

But that, from my perspective, is the key.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Thank you.

Monsieur Nadeau.

[Richard Nadeau, Bloc, Gatineau, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My question is for the representatives of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. I understand that you're overwhelmed. We read in the report that there are overwhelming situations.

One-third of the citizen files at my constituency office in Gatineau concern immigration in all its forms. This morning I was talking to my colleague from Ottawa—Vanier about the urban constituencies. Three-quarters of his files concern immigration and citizenship.

I'd like to get an answer from you. If you can't give it to me today, I would like a written response at some other time.

Why is the Citizenship and Immigration Canada office in Gatineau only open two hours a week? I repeat: two hours a week. I'm going to say it in Latin as well: two hours a week.

We know there are special immigration agreements in Quebec. People go to the Ottawa office and come back to my office because there are specific issues. We have to have this service. I'm about to tell Citizenship and Immigration Canada that, if they want to have an office in my office, that's not a problem for me, provided the office is open longer in order to process all the applications.

Is there a rule? Is it an exception that the office is open only two hours a week in Gatineau? I'd like to understand your point of view on this matter and with regard to the processing of applications?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Part of our challenge is to see how we can use the resources to really expedite the case-related process. The Gatineau office is open only two hours a week because we can take advantage of those hours to answer very specific questions from applicants. We have to find a mechanism to get very specific answers for the people who come to see us.

We're then faced with a number of questions: Is the information available? Is there a way to do it effectively in order to provide clients with the information they need, without our office necessarily being open eight hours? Because that might not be a good use of resources. During the remaining six hours, we can make decisions and move files forward.

That's somewhat our strategy. The idea is to see how we can do the job better. Among other things, we want to get a better understanding of the dynamic of MPs' offices so that we can have a system that will help them receive fewer clients and so that we can provide information more effectively.