Public Accounts Committee on April 13th, 2010

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you, Mr. Linklater.

Now, Mr. Shipley, please, five minutes.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, witnesses.

In terms of the temporary foreign worker program, I have to tell you how important that is in terms of the agriculture industry that sweeps across parts of Canada, particularly in my area. One of the issues coming up is that it's becoming so expensive in terms of Ontario's minimum wage being so high compared with other provinces. Also, there are some requirements that employers have to put in place in terms of the cost of having them come over.

Can you just explain and differentiate for me, please, a little bit the federal-provincial responsibilities, and then follow through with the employer compliance component of it? You've talked about the pilot projects, and those are coming in. That is great. First of all, if you could talk about the federal-provincial responsibilities, that would help me.

[Janice Charette]

I can start, Mr. Chair.

I'll talk about the employer responsibilities. I believe you're talking about the seasonal agricultural worker program element of the temporary foreign worker program overall.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Yes.

[Janice Charette]

Under the seasonal agricultural worker, which is, as I said, a component of the overall program, there are specific employer obligations. For example, an employer is expected to pay the temporary foreign worker's round trip transportation cost, including airfare and ground transport between wherever that seasonal agricultural worker is coming from--let's say, a Mexican farm worker--and the location of work.

Their employer is expected to pay the worker's immigration visa cost-recovery fee and provide seasonal housing that has been approved by the appropriate provincial or municipal body or private inspection service. That gets to your point about the federal versus the provincial responsibility. So we have the employer responsibility. The province actually looks at the state of the housing to make sure it's adequate.

We also expect that the employer will register the worker with workers' compensation and a private or provincial health insurance plan. So we have the expectation of registration, and the province actually runs the workers' compensation and the health insurance or otherwise a private insurance plan. The employment contract would be prepared outlining wages, duties, conditions, and that would be signed with the seasonal agricultural worker.

We've also put in place a program to provide to the workers who are coming in through this program information in multilingual format about their rights and what protections are in this country, including the description of the provincial responsibility with respect to labour standards. If there were issues, they would then have the contact information to get in touch with the responsible provincial authorities that largely are responsible for labour standards in that particular sector.

[Neil Yeates]

I might just add something from a CIC perspective. We process the visa applications. About 80% of workers are returning year after year. It's actually a fairly stable movement. From our perspective, it works quite well.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I'll shift gears a little bit here. You talk about the backlog. You want to get to what you called a working inventory. When do you see that happening?

Also, you have 129,000 under the new system. I guess this is the preamble to it. The AG has said it continues to go. What sort of timeline are you looking at for being able to get to a working inventory?

[Neil Yeates]

Eliminating the backlog is really going to depend on how we are able to balance the work with the incoming inventory. As far as the inventory of new applications goes, as I say, we are keeping up with that at the moment. It actually declined a little bit from September to December, so there is evidence that we are in fact keeping up with the incoming.

It's really going to depend on what a new set of ministerial instructions is going to do, the impact it will have on the incoming applications, and therefore the amount of processing capacity we will have to deal with the backlog itself. It will likely take several years to do that. We had the initial reduction of 40%, but that was related to the start-up, as the AG noted, of a new system. We'll have a much better sense once a second set of ministerial instructions is completed.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

You have fifteen seconds.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I have a quick one. Are we meeting the growing market demand for foreign workers?

[Neil Yeates]

I think we're finding at the moment that the levels plan we have, which we table every year in Parliament, grosso modo, is around the right level. It is supplemented with temporary foreign workers. In general, we would say yes. We'll see what happens in the future as our labour market demographics continue to change. We assess that every year, to set the levels.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you, Mr. Yeates.

Mr. Christopherson, go ahead for five minutes, please.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

If I could, I just want to pick up on something Mr. Lee said in his opening remarks and emphasize the amount of constituency time spent on all matters of immigration right now. It is between 70% and 80% of the workload of constituency staff right now. At some point, we have to do something about this. It's unfair to the people who need the service because our staff have varying degrees of education, and we don't hire or pay for staff of the status needed to provide the kind of legal advice that's ultimately given. Whether or not someone's application gets moved along more quickly should not be determined by whether or not they were lucky enough to go to an office of someone like Mr. Lee, who has been elected for 25 years, or somebody in office for three months who doesn't even have an e-mail system in place, let alone is able to deal with complicated applications.

So I'm hoping that someday we'll do what was done in Ontario with workers' compensation. The same thing happened there with workers' compensation, as the workload on that got so big that members were actually going to appeal tribunals because there was no one else to help. It was taking up hours and days of MPPs' time. So they set up separate institutions, separate centres of advice, for both employers and employees on WCB matters so that the MPP's office would initially take it to a certain point and then hand it over to experts, who could pick it up and run with it. The system, for the most part, works well and achieved the goal of taking that workload out of the constituency offices, to let those offices deal with the myriad of other things that come into a provincial member's office.

I just put this idea out there for my colleagues. At some point, we have to get away from our constituency offices evolving into de facto sub-regional immigration offices. That's what they've become, and it's a huge problem. At some point, we have to come to grips with this.

Second, notwithstanding my friend Mr. Young's cheerleading for “team government”, the reality is that the backlog is still where it was 10 years ago. The AG said this morning it could take between eight and 25 years to get caught up; and as to the new process, we've already heard again from the AG that she has some concerns that we may be developing a systemic backlog down the road, if I'm not misinterpreting what she said. She's nodding, yes, that is indeed the point she made.

So this report is not glowing. There is some improvement being made, but by no means should anyone believe it's some fantastic solution, that once we passed the 2008 deadline, when the ministerial instructions came in, life was all hearts and flowers versus being awful before that. The situation is nowhere near that clean.

My last question, if I have time to slip it in, deals with the really important issue on page 38 of the Auditor General's report, the recognition of foreign credentials. It has become an ugly cliché in Canada that we have the smartest cab drivers in the world. It's an honourable profession, and so is delivering pizzas when you need to make a buck to put money on the table, but we can't afford to have doctors and engineers driving cabs, and the reason is they don't have recognition of their foreign credentials. I see a chart here indicating that we've spent $125 million in seven or eight years and the problem has not become any better.

What exactly are we going to do and when are we going to do something effective to put these new Canadians to work doing the jobs we need them to do, like providing health care?

[Janice Charette]

I'll start.

I guess I have two parts in my response to the points you're making, sir. One deals with information on the necessary qualifications that we need to provide to the individuals who want to come to Canada. With the launch of the Foreign Credentials Referral Office, housed at CIC, that information is being provided, both to newcomers who have already come to Canada as well as through our offices abroad. But that's only part of the answer, as you said.

The other piece of the puzzle is how we are working with the regulatory bodies and the professional associations to make sure that newcomers to Canada have a process to go through that recognizes both their educational and work experience credentials so they can understand where they'll be able to fit into the Canadian employment picture. There has been a framework agreed by all provinces and territories, along with the federal government, called the pan-Canadian framework for the assessment and recognition of foreign qualifications. That framework has all governments in the country committed to four principles: fairness, transparency, timeliness, and consistency. So when an individual who wants to come to Canada is actually going through one of these bodies to have their credentials recognized, they will know within a year whether their credentials will be recognized; and if not, because there's a gap they must fill, whether through course work, work experience, or examinations, they will know.

Finally, the third piece of this is that if they're not going to have their credentials recognized and they have not been able to fill a gap, what other occupations may be available to them?

This framework was agreed in November 30, 2009, and we're going through a process of identifying priority occupations to implement it, largely reflecting where the greatest labour market demand is. So all governments are working towards identifying our first set of occupations for December of this year.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Charette.

And now Mr. Dreeshen, please.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being here today.

I'd like to speak to Mr. Yeates about the global case management system. You mentioned that when you look at the second release, you'll be able to look at detecting and preventing fraud. I wonder if you could talk about that for a moment and let us know what problems you've seen and what types of solutions you feel will be addressed with that particular system.

[Neil Yeates]

Thank you very much.

The global case management system will basically house all of the cases that we process. It allows us to do searches, for example, on common addresses. Members may be aware of some situations where 200 people used the same address. It's been an issue in citizenship applications, and GCMS, which we've had in place for citizenship since 2004, allows us to detect that. When we only had mission-based or individual-based information systems, there was no real easy way to do that, so this is a huge advantage for us.

The second piece is really being able to move our caseload around the world in a seamless way. Right now we have to literally shift files around the world, which is not a very easy thing to do. It's time consuming and so on. This system will allow somebody in one mission to process cases from another mission, if they have some extra time. This really is going to allow us to be more efficient and to better use the resources we have. Demand comes and goes at missions around the world. It's not quick to try to shift people around the world at the different missions, so having an information system that allows us to process people from anywhere is going to make a huge difference.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Do you have any predictions of how much of the backlog is due to the types of issues you've just presented?

[Neil Yeates]

I think it's been essentially having a system that has accepted a large number of applications that are way more than we've had processing capacity for and way more than we've actually set out in the annual levels plan. So you put those two things together and de facto you're going to end up with a backlog.

Certainly, the system can be made more efficient, and that's really what we're trying to do. It's hard for us to put a number on that, but we feel it's critical for us going forward to have a modern case management processing system that will allow us to deal with workload and work flow.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

We hear about unscrupulous immigration consultants and that type of thing. Again, looking at the backlog, which is created sometimes by the extra effort and research you have to put in, in order to manage those particular cases, would getting a handle on that help with the backlog as well?

[Neil Yeates]

Yes, it's certainly part of the overall puzzle. As members would know, there are many aspects to the immigration system in terms of dealing with applications and third-party consultants. As you may know, the minister has announced plans to come forward with some legislative and regulatory amendments this spring to strengthen that regime.

We find, unfortunately, that fraud is endemic in the immigration business. There are huge issues overseas with ghost consultants charging people fees for services they probably don't actually need and promising things they can't get. Our new case management system will allow us to better track that, look at trends, and see what's in front of us. That's going to be a continuing challenge for us.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you, Mr. Dreeshen.

Now, Madam Fry.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I note that the Attorney General and everyone has asked the question here about the fact that the backlog has doubled since 2000. Most of the people present here know that in 2004 I was specifically given the title and the job to deal with seven departments, including the two departments here--HRSDC and CIC--to find a way to deal with foreign credentials and foreign-trained workers, whether it was a local backlog here or whether it was people who intended to come. We had set up a plan.

One part, to deal with this backlog of people and to deal with people coming in the future--to fast-forward them--was a portal. The money had been set for this portal. It was going to be a portal in which all jurisdictions--provinces, municipalities, trades, trade unions, universities, credentialling bodies--were going to find a way to let people know before they even came here about whether they were ready to come in and what they needed there. It was plugged in so that it would happen. I want to know what happened to that.

Secondly, it says here that there wasn't an “appropriate” amount of information about retention of nominees from the PNP program. I know that during our discussions for a whole year with provinces, they identified that many provinces brought in nominees and that they left after a year to go to three big cities--Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. We know that data was there. Why is it said that it isn't there?

Finally, I would like to know this: what about that whole plan that was set up, the five-point plan that was funded, that had gone through cabinet, that had begun to work specifically on physicians to deal with the pan-Canadian strategy? What happened to that? Why are we now, six years later, deciding that none of this is happening and that none of that--the data, the information, the plan--was set in place?

I want to know what happened. I need to know that, because we were no longer in government in 2005.

I'm not pointing a finger. I know that you had the information to advise this particular government on what had been planned to be done. I just don't know what happened here.

[Neil Yeates]

I can start off, Member.

You're quite right that foreign credential recognition has proven to be a very difficult set of issues to deal with. We would agree that getting a lot of the services overseas is critical here so that people can know, before they come to Canada, what the status of their credentials is likely to be.