Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to all of you who've come here today.
I noticed, Mr. Yeates, that you referenced what you call a “My CIC” account. I'm assuming that it's somewhat modelled on...I know it's now called the EI system, but it's the old UIC to me. I never believed in “employment insurance”, unless of course you were paying someone to let you keep your job. EI has a similar type of thing that you can access.
But my experience with that system—I'm making an assumption and I'm going to let you clarify if they're going to be modelled somewhat similarly in context--is that the intent of what that account intended to do is nowhere near the reality of what it actually does. It was going to actually let you turn your account on and off. In other words, you applied for EI, went back to work, and then went back out on EI. You could actually turn it on. That was the intention of the pilot program that I actually was involved in at one point when I worked for the union. It has never materialized. It's really an application intake process and a reporting process, period. It's not much more than that.
My question is, if you're using that as somewhat of a model, how much faith should we be placing in an account that starts out looking like it's the cure-all and becomes nothing more than an intake process that doesn't really help clients any more than that they've sent in an application...? As Mr. Bains said earlier, and as I'm sure the rest of my colleagues will acknowledge, they line up at our doors. I'm not suggesting that you outsourced it on purpose, but I'm here to tell you that you outsourced it to us. That's perhaps not on purpose, but you've simply outsourced it to us, because that's where they show up.
I think all of our staff would probably indicate to you that we spend somewhere between 40% and 60% of our day actually doing immigration. I don't think that's what we thought we were going to do when we set up, but that's our reality, so we're actually sharing your burden here. Perhaps you can tell me a little bit about what you intend to do with the My CIC account.