Public Accounts Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2010

[Neil Yeates]

There are perhaps two pieces that I can speak to there, Chair.

One is that yes, it's quite true, we take in fees; it's a significant amount of revenue each year. Those fees go to the consolidated revenue fund. They don't come directly to the department. We are obligated to take those fees in immediately and they are done based on costs.

In the case of the parents or grandparents class, in terms of the annual levels plan, we aim to admit about 18,000 per year and we currently have applications in the range of 145,000. We have seven years of work to do there. That, for us, is just the reality, or the boundaries of the annual levels plan. Therefore, yes, we are going to have a service standard in that case that will be several years long.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Thank you very much.

Monsieur Allen.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

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.

[Neil Yeates]

Very basically—and Madame Deschênes could speak further to this—it's really a system to allow people to check the status of their application, very simply.

Madame.

[Claudette Deschênes]

Yes. The other thing that the system permits us to do--and certainly in Canada we're already doing it--is that if we need something more to finalize your application, we can easily use that as a two-way communication to say that “you need to get us this document” or “we acknowledge receipt of this document that we asked you for”.

The My CIC account is part of our strategy. The other strategy is to make sure that all the applications are in the system so we can actually acknowledge them, because one of the problems we have is that sometimes it takes a long time for us to get them into the system.

The other thing we want to do is to tell clients that every x period of time—and it could be six months, it could be nine months—we will send them an update as to where they are in the process, because My CIC really works when you're actively processing a case. But we also know that cases sit awaiting their turn to be processed, so we need to find a way to reconfirm to the client that their application is in the queue and that it's likely to move into active processing at such-and-such a period so they do not go into the MPs' offices to ask for that information.

Then there are other things, of course, in terms of more precise processing times, so that people actually know how long it's going to take to get into the process.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

I have two questions that spring to mind from that.

One is my previous experience around when another department moved toward this interactivity of my account electronically, and what it does to folks who aren't quite as savvy, or who don't have the access. And I don't want to hear, quite frankly, what I've heard before, which is to “go to your public library”, because they'll simply line up at my office asking if I have a spare computer and if they can use it to access this from my office.

This becomes an issue that becomes a staffing issue, quite frankly, as offices actually start to shift personnel out, away from personal service and away from accepting paper, which you'll actually see at EI. It's illegal to refuse you paper, but try getting a piece of paper from EI. The laws says they must. They don't. I'm hoping we're not headed in that direction. I'll let you respond to that.

The other side of my concern with interactivity when it comes to the Internet is that it's a wonderful tool, except that it sets up what I call the McDonald's syndrome. I mean McDonald's not in the sense of “E-I-O”, the farm, but McDonald's of the golden arches, where one expects an instant return from an instant request. We end up with a system that gets inundated with folks who, once they have interconnectivity, continually send requests to you for updates, even though you're saying, “You're number Y and your waiting time is x”. They simply continue adding into it, and then they're looking for a response that they're not going to get, quite frankly. They will then come to us and say, “They're not responding to me and I sent in a request”. Since it's almost instant, they expect an instant reply.

The worst thing in the world about one of these is that when someone calls you electronically, they expect you to reply regardless of what you're doing. You may set up an unrealistic expectation of how quick you can actually do this. Have you thought about what you will do in reply to all of those bits and pieces of that interconnectivity?

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

You have three questions to answer in 45 seconds.

[Neil Yeates]

Again, I'll give just a quick response, and Claudette can add to this as well.

We have the call centre for people who don't have access to the Internet. In our experience, both in Canada and overseas, access to the Internet has been very good. It's higher than we might have expected, so we've been pleased with that. The call centre has its own challenges in terms of the volume of calls going in there.

We would agree with you. You're quite right that there is this dynamic about what people expect in terms of a response. In terms of the capacity of our system, some of that is not realistic. For people wanting to know where they are in every little step in the process, that's not possible. We really have to be clear, I think, with clients and the public and say, “You're in this block and that's the basically the best we can tell you”. Otherwise, we spend more time chasing around after individual applications for some small incremental step in the process, which is time consuming, as you know.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Saxton.

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to our witnesses for being here today.

My first questions are for the Office of the Auditor General.

When you talk about setting service standards and monitoring service performance, are you mostly talking about processing times or you also looking at other service standards? For example, how do you measure client feedback?

[Glenn Wheeler, Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada]

Processing times are one of the variables we would be expecting a department to consider as it's trying to establish a service standard. There are also other variables that departments must and do consider when they're trying to establish standards. They have to balance the cost of providing a service against the timeliness. As a department is trying to determine a service standard for a particular program or service, they need to consider how much funding they have available and how best to use it, while at the same time providing service in a meaningful way.

Another thing that goes into the whole issue of service standards is consulting with clients. We know that in various places in the report one of the ways departments can identify good service standards is to consult with clients to get a sense of what's important to them. Those are some of the issues that go into....

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

I think one can measure service standards in several ways. One is quantitative, in the sense of measuring processing times, and perhaps the number of complaints that one gets, but one can also look at qualitative standards. Is this something you consider when you're measuring service standards? Are there qualitative measures as well?

[Glenn Wheeler]

When we're looking at what departments are doing to establish service standards, we would certainly be looking to see whether they have looked at whether they're looking at the qualitative aspects of service. So there are the quantitative aspects of the service and also the qualitative aspects. As I mentioned earlier, soliciting feedback from clients and conducting focus groups, as we talk about in the audit report, is one way for departments to identify what matters to clients, which all goes into the mix of developing service standards.

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Can you share with the committee some of the service standards CRA and HRSDC have used? Are there some lessons to be learned, some positive results from those two departments?

[Glenn Wheeler]

Mr. Chair, I can speak to a couple of examples.

In the case of the Canada Revenue Agency, we note in the audit report that they did a lot of work 10 years back or so to identify what clients wanted and needed in terms of the main services they provide to Canadians. As a result of that, some of the standards identified include answering the phone within two minutes, 90% of the time, when someone calls one of their 1-800 numbers. That's an example of where a department has taken into consideration what clients want.

A second quick example is from HRSDC. They heard from Canadians across the country that while the Service Canada centres are an excellent way to obtain services, often the hours the centres kept didn't allow Canadians who work during the day to get there. What HRSDC did in response to that information it was receiving from Canadians was to extend the hours of Service Canada centres. That way, it modified its services to better provide information to Canadians. Those are two examples of where departments listened to what Canadians were saying and made adjustments.

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Thank you for those examples.

My next questions are for CIC. The report notes that in the 2008-09 fiscal year, CIC authorized 247,000 people to live in Canada as permanent residents—almost a quarter of a million people. It processed applications for over 1.5 million visitors and also granted citizenship to 186,000 individuals. Those are significant numbers. Is that a typical year for CIC?

[Neil Yeates]

Yes, that is a typical year for CIC. Some of our business lines continue to grow. The area of international students is an area where we are starting to see some significant growth, at about 10% a year. We think that's good news for Canada. This is part of our educational marketing. That's good.

We've seen growth in temporary foreign workers. It tends to follow the economic cycle, but over 10 years it has grown fairly substantially. The temporary movement is high.

There is growth in visitors from certain countries, such as India and China. We've never exceeded 100,000 visitors from China. It's typically in the 90,000 area, but we expect that this year there will be 135,000 visitors from China. There is massive growth in particular missions.

It's all part of the challenge we have in trying to manage our workload across a global network. So yes, it's growing, it's growing over time, and in some particular areas of the world, It's growing very, very substantially.

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Is the increase in China partly due to receiving the approved destination status?

[Neil Yeates]

Yes, we think that is a factor in terms of tourism, but it has been growing over time. But yes, we're seeing a big spike in 2010, and we think that's part of the reason.

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Thank you.

Can you share with the committee some of the ways in which you are responding to the OAG's recommendations?

[Neil Yeates]

Certainly. Earlier this year, we developed a service declaration in terms of what clients could expect from us. We did consult with clients in developing that and it has now been published.

We have an e-mail feedback form in all our of missions overseas that clients can use. We do public opinion research. We monitor our website quite carefully and look at the feedback we get through that. Then, more broadly, we've tabled a plan with the committee to develop service standards for all our lines of business over the next three years.

What that means for us, essentially, is sorting through all the channels through which we communicate with clients. We mentioned the web and the development of a My CIC account. But it also means sorting through the role of our call centre. Right now, we receive a lot more calls than we are able to handle in a timely way. A fair number of those calls are for routine information that's available on the website, so we'd really like to redirect more people to the website and keep the call centre for people who have very case-specific requests that require the intervention of the staff.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joe Volpe]

Thank you, Mr. Yeates.

Thank you very much.

I'm going to go to the second round.

Monsieur D'Amours.

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

Thank you. Mr. Chairman. Thanks to the people who are before us this morning.

First, I would like to speak to Mr. Yeates. I believe you told the Office of the Auditor General that you wanted to submit an outside report on your service standards in the spring of 2013. Is that correct?

[Neil Yeates]

Yes. That is correct.

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

That's good; I wanted an answer as brief as a "yes", as you've given.

How much time do you need when an outside audit has to be conducted? How much time is necessary for an outside audit to be done? Are we talking about two months, six months, a year?