Public Accounts Committee on May 30th, 2019

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Good morning, everyone. This is meeting number 140 of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts for Thursday, May 30, 2019.

I would like to remind colleagues and guests at this committee today that we are being televised, so please, if you wouldn't mind—especially those in the audience as well—could you mute your phones? It would cause less disruption. Thank you.

We're here today in consideration of report 1, “Call Centres”, of the 2019 spring reports of the Auditor General of Canada.

We're pleased this morning to welcome many guests. First of all, from the Office of the Auditor General, we have Mr. Sylvain Ricard, our interim Auditor General of Canada, and Jean Goulet, principal. From the Treasury Board Secretariat, we have Mr. Alex Benay, chief information officer of the Government of Canada. From the Department of Employment and Social Development, we have Graham Flack, deputy minister of employment and social development, and Ms. Leslie MacLean, senior associate deputy minister of employment and social development and chief operating officer for Service Canada.

From the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, we have Ms. Lori MacDonald, acting deputy minister, and Harpreet Kochhar, assistant deputy minister, operations. From the Department of Veterans Affairs, we have General Walter Natynczyk, deputy minister. I'm glad to see that you made it here and your driver got you here safe and sound. We also have Michel Doiron, assistant deputy minister, service delivery. Last, from Shared Services Canada, we have Paul Glover, president, and Raj Thuppal, assistant deputy minister, networks, security and digital services.

We have a number of people to hear from first, but the one we always like hearing from before everyone else is our Auditor General.

Mr. Ricard, please.

[Sylvain Ricard, Interim Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for this opportunity to present the results of our recent audit report on call centres. Joining me today is Jean Goulet, the principal who was responsible for the audit.

In this audit, we looked at the call centres of three departments: Employment and Social Development Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and Veterans Affairs Canada. We also looked at whether the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat included call centres within the Government of Canada's service strategy and whether Shared Services Canada provided support to modernize call centres.

This audit is important because call centres are a key source of government information. This is especially true for people who are visually impaired, have intellectual or physical disabilities, do not have a computer or Internet access or the skills to use these technologies, or live in rural or remote regions and do not have high-speed Internet access or cannot easily get to a government office.

Canadians make millions of calls to the government every year to get the information they need to make time-sensitive, important decisions. For example, they may be calling to ensure that they receive benefits on time or to find out about the status of an application.

Overall, we found that getting through to government call centres took time and persistence. ln fact, we found that half of the 16 million Canadians who tried to speak with an agent could not do so. Seven million callers were redirected to an automated system, were told to visit the website, or were disconnected. ln addition, more than a million callers gave up waiting and hung up. And callers who did manage to get through to an agent sometimes had to wait up to a half an hour or longer.

We also found that service decisions were not driven by callers' needs. For example, departments did not offer callers the option of staying on the line or getting called back when an agent became available.

The way in which call centres set service standards was not relevant to Canadians, transparent or consistent. None of the call centres we audited had service standards on clients' likelihood of reaching an agent or on the accuracy of the answers they provided callers, and the call centre for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada did not have a standard on how long callers would have to wait to speak to an agent once they were in the queue. Without service standards, callers cannot know what level of service they can expect from call centres.

And the situation is unlikely to improve in the near future. The government's Clients First Service Strategy does not include call centres, though more than 25% of Canadians use the telephone to connect with the government. ln addition, after five years of a call centre modernization project, Shared Services Canada has managed to upgrade only 8 of 221 call centres, and it has no plan for the remaining 213.

We made five recommendations. All organizations have agreed with all of them and have shared their action plans with us.

Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions the committee may have.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Ricard.

We'll now move to Mr. Benay, the chief information officer of the Government of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat.

[Alex Benay, Chief Information Officer of the Government of Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the invitation to appear before your committee. I'll begin with a few brief remarks and I'll be happy to take any questions you may have.

My name is Alex Benay. l'm the Chief Information Officer of Canada at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.

I am responsible for providing strategic direction and for the implementation of policies relating to service, information management, information technology, security, privacy and access to information across the federal government.

The finding in the Auditor General's most recent report identified opportunities where Treasury Board policy direction can be strengthened to better support improvements to call centres. The Auditor General made several recommendations that will help the Government of Canada fulfill its commitment to improve service delivery to Canadians.

Over the past few years, TBS has developed various policy instruments to help departments take a more client-centric approach to the design and delivery of services, including the development and publication of service standards. While we've made progress, we agree that there is still much work to be done.

l'm glad to say that we have already begun this work. Currently, the Treasury Board Secretariat is reviewing existing policy instruments, with the goal of identifying opportunities to strengthen policies to better support improved services through all service delivery channels, including call centres.

For example, we recently introduced a set of digital standards that will help guide departments and agencies in designing better services for Canadians. One of its key principles is to design and develop services with users in mind and to work with them to understand their needs and the problems we want to solve. While they may be called digital standards, they are, in fact, applicable to all the service delivery channels whether they are offered online, in person or by telephone.

In spring 2018, the government approved targeted amendments to the policy on the management of information technology and the policy on the management of information, setting the foundation for the long-term development of a comprehensive policy on service and digital for the Government of Canada.

This proposed policy will build on the client-centric principles of the current Policy on Service, and provide direction for the design and development of seamless, integrated services that meet the needs and expectations of the Canadian public.

We're also working on enhancing our existing guidance and tools to support the development and publication of clear and consistent client-centric service standards. Both the proposed new policy and its supporting directive and guidance will incorporate changes to ensure that government services have comprehensive and transparent client-centric standards, related targets and performance information for all service delivery channels in use, including call centres.

The Treasury Board Secretariat will continue to work with federal departments and agencies to ensure service standards for call centres are more consistent, meaningful and transparent to Canadians.

In closing, I look forward to your committee's report and recommendations on this important issue.

Thank you for your time, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Benay.

We'll now move to Mr. Flack, deputy minister of employment and social development.

Welcome.

[Graham Flack, Deputy Minister, Employment and Social Development, Department of Employment and Social Development]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Auditor General's report on call centres issued five recommendations, two of which were addressed to our department.

The first one states that we should review how we manage incoming calls to improve access to agents. The recommendation adds that the department should consider practices such as allowing callers to decide if they prefer to wait, use self-service options, or have the call centre call them back.

The second recommendation states that departments should set call centre service standards that are relevant to clients, and that we should consider client feedback in line with TBS Guidelines on Service Standards, as mentioned by Mr. Benay.

The recommendation adds that we should publish call centre service standards and performance results in a transparent and consistent way, and we should verify the results to confirm accuracy.

I will turn now to the first recommendation. There have been two limiters on our performance.

The first is outdated technology. Our legacy technology was limited in terms of having a hard cap on the number of people who could be put in the queue, which has resulted in callers being sent back to the interactive voice response system at peak times. It also didn't allow us to shift calls between our call centres to manage the load. You could have an individual who would be directed to one call centre, and once they were in that queue the technology did not allow us to shift them to one of our different call centres, which may have had agents available.

On this point, ESDC secured funding in budgets 2017 and 2019, which provided $27.3 million to migrate ESDC's call centres from this outdated technology to a modernized telephone system. As a result, we are well on our way to addressing the issues and are currently in the middle of migrating the new call centre platform that was procured by Shared Services Canada. The new platform is called the “hosted contact centre solution”, and it can provide the modern client-centric services Canadians should expect.

Over the last two years we have worked closely with Mr. Glover and his team at Shared Services Canada on the design, building and testing of the new technology.

We successfully migrated our Employer Contact Centre in October 2018, and we just migrated our Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security call centre on May 11th.

Two of our three call centres have successfully migrated to the new platform. For the employer contact centre, which was the first, they have had 100% accessibility to agents since early January. This means all callers are now able to access a queue to speak with our call centre agents.

Learning from those lessons, on May 11 we successfully migrated our second major set of call centres, that is, the CPP and OAS call centres. Again, we have near 100% accessibility since that migration has happened. Our employment insurance call centre will be migrated next. Extensive work is under way for this migration, which is planned for the fall of 2019.

The second limiter on our performance was a significant gap between the call demand volume and the funding for agents available to respond to those calls. Budgets 2016 and 2018 provided $200 million over five years to increase the number of EI call centre agents. As a result, we have seen significant improvements in both our accessibility to agents and our service standard.

In terms of accessibility, to give a sense, in 2015-16—before those recent investments—our accessibility level was 31%. That has risen to 66% in the most recent year, and, as we indicated, after we have successfully migrated the EI centre to the new platform, we expect that to dramatically improve as it has in our other two centres.

In terms of wait-time service standards, in 2015-16, we were at 37% for EI. We are currently, in 2018-19, at 67%, and, as a comparison, for our CPP and OAS standard—and the standard is 80%—we have been tracking at 76% in the most recent year.

These improvements meant that we were able to increase the number of calls answered by agents from 3.4 million to 4.6 million annually. They also allowed us to reduce wait times to speak to an agent from an average of 14 minutes to seven minutes. While these improvements have been significant, and our average wait time is well below the 10-minute standard, we are not yet at our target of 80% of calls being answered within 10 minutes.

With respect to the other Auditor General recommendation impacting our department, ESDC has consulted with clients through multiple surveys to obtain their feedback. Overall, the feedback has been positive, with a majority of clients finding the wait time of under 10 minutes to be reasonable.

In our 2017-18 client experience survey, 82% of respondents said they were either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the overall quality of our services received through ESDC's specialized call centres. Currently the department is in the process of reviewing the preliminary results of the 2018-19 client experience survey, which will continue to track the performance of our specialized call centres and provide us valuable feedback on our performance from a user perspective.

With respect to the issue of verifying of results, we have high confidence in the accuracy of our results, given that the technology we use automatically tracks them. However, after the Auditor General's recommendation, we reviewed the data covered by the OAG, which consisted of more than 7.9 million calls from June 2018 to January 2019, and the review confirmed that our reporting results are extremely accurate, within plus or minus 0.05%.

Going forward, Employment and Social Development Canada, or ESDC, will enhance its publishing of call centre service standards and performance results through more frequent reporting. As well, ESDC will continue to set service standards that are relevant to clients, as encouraged by the Treasury Board Policy on Service.

We would now be happy to answer your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Flack.

We'll now turn to Ms. MacDonald, the acting deputy minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Welcome back.

[Lori MacDonald, Acting Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Mr. Chair, thank you for inviting me to address this committee once again.

Canada is an increasingly popular destination for people who want to move to or visit this country. Every year, IRCC interacts with millions of clients including applicants for electronic travel authorizations, visas, permanent residents, asylum, citizenship and passports. Over the last five years, we've seen a significant increase in the number of clients who are seeking support, both on the telephone and by email. In fact, the recent federal budget recognizes growing demand, allocating new funds for increasing the number of IRCC call centre agents.

As demand for our services continues to increase, we recognize the need to transform the way we work so we can serve clients faster and strengthen our immigration system for everyone. While the volume of applicants is growing across our business lines, so too are our clients' expectations of quick, streamlined and electronic services. This means we must communicate with them more clearly and more often and ensure that our processes are clear, efficient and easy for both applicants and our employees.

The Auditor General's report highlights three key concerns we must address: difficulty in reaching call centre agents, lengthy wait times before speaking to an agent, and a need for clear, client-focused service standards upon which to measure performance and results. The findings of this audit also confirm that we must deliver accessible, timely and quality service to ensure that the country remains globally competitive in attracting newcomers. Today I'd like to describe some of the changes we are making.

IRCC employees provide support to clients through three channels: telephone inquiries, email assistance through the online web form, and social media. In addition to these channels, the department is working to provide clients with enhanced self-service options online.

The client support centre plays a significant role in communicating with clients. Last fiscal year, its agents responded to over 1.6 million client inquiries by phone and email, an increase of more than 12% from the previous year.

To improve the call centre and overall client experience, we have taken a number of actions. For economic permanent resident programs, we are piloting a new callback feature to give clients who reach our telephone wait queue the option of having an agent call them back instead of having to wait on hold. We are testing this functionality with this client group before expanding the service to other programs. We have also improved self-service features through our interactive voice response telephone messaging. This makes it easier for callers to obtain general and case status information without having to speak to an agent.

Budget 2019 announced $42.9 million over two years for IRCC to provide clients with better access to support when they need it. This funding will allow us to hire more call centre agents and expand some local Canadian office hours in 2019, and to expand hours of operations at the client support centre in 2020. As well, IRCC has lowered its email response time, from 31 business days in June 2017 to less than five business days as of March 2019. The additional funding received in budget 2019 will help to further reduce this email response time.

We know that to really address call volumes we need to address the root of the problem. One of the key reasons that people call and utilize ATIP processes is for information on their case status. We also receive many calls from people inquiring about the renewal of their permanent residence cards. We are making progress in reducing processing times in almost all of our permanent residence streams and have recently brought processing times for permanent residence cards down considerably. We anticipate that the progress we are making in these key areas will help reduce call volumes.

IRCC continues to look for new ways to improve the client experience and provide access to information. To provide clients with the information they need and to strengthen online access, the department has taken steps to make it easier for clients to navigate our website and to submit their online applications 24 hours a day.

Promoting self-service online for clients has been a priority. Our online help centre has over 1,100 questions and answers to top inquiries. We assure our web content is easy to use and understand, by writing in plain language at about a grade 8 reading level. We also optimize our web content to ensure it ranks high in search results, making it easier to find information. I think it's important to note as well that, before we launch new tools on our web templates, we do usability testing with people outside our departments and with clients.

Tracking the progress of case information is a high priority for many of our clients. To this end, we are testing new ways to better display case status information, to communicate processing times and to allow clients to track the progress of their applications. Our overall goal is to help clients with simple inquiries to access the information they need online, reduce their need to speak to an agent and, therefore, give agents a greater ability to focus on more complex cases.

IRCC is also working to finalize and publish service standards for its client support centre in our support services to make the department more accountable in its actions.

Before closing, allow me to note our actions to strengthen our ability to address a new and rapidly growing development: the substantial increase of social medial inquiries. In 2018, IRCC answered more than 130,000 social media general inquiries, seven times the total of the previous year and something we expect to continue to increase.

To help us manage these increasing volumes on social media, last fall we launched Quaid, a social media chatbot that responds to clients' general questions about immigration and citizenship. Quaid uses artificial intelligence to answer general questions from our clients on Facebook Messenger and continues to learn as it engages with people. Although this project is in its early stages, we expect Quaid will become more sophisticated with time and will improve our ability to interact with our clients.

Providing excellent client service is imperative so that Canada continues to remain globally competitive to attract visitors, students, skilled workers and new Canadians, the people who directly contribute to our overall economic, cultural and social prosperity. We will continue to act on our vision to transform how we interact with clients and provide the best possible support in the long term.

I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Ms. MacDonald.

We'll now turn to General Natynczyk, the deputy minister for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

[General, Retired) Walter Natynczyk (Deputy Minister, Department of Veterans Affairs]

Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen, good morning.

I appreciate the opportunity to appear today to address ways to improve our services to our veterans.

Our mission at Veterans Affairs is to enable the well-being of our veterans and their families, as well as commemorating the service and the sacrifice of all those who wore the uniform of Canada's armed forces.

As such, we appreciate the attention the Office of the Auditor General has brought to the services that we provide.

The bottom line up front is that the department accepts all of the recommendations and will develop a comprehensive action plan to implement all of the recommendations as soon as contracting and technology will allow. We appreciate how important it is for veterans to be able to communicate with the department in the ways and means they choose. We provide a broad range of options. They may choose a toll-free telephone service access through our website, through web-based My VAC Account secure messaging, over social media or by visiting in person any one of our 38 offices across the country.

lt is gratifying to see the number of veterans, both young and more experienced, connecting with the department through the online services offered on 'My VAC Account'. Through it, veterans can apply online for benefits and services, upload documents to complete their applications, track the status of their applications, view summaries of their benefits, and connect directly and securely with staff.

My VAC Account, which is our online web service, provided service for over 91,000 veteran users as of this past April, including serving members and veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces, veterans of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police and all of their family members. Monthly traffic is about 160,000 log-ins and continues to grow month over month.

Still, our national contact service network remains an important means for many of our veteran clients to communicate with the department. Our latest results show that 79% of calls are answered by an agent and that the average wait time for our clients is about five minutes. Clearly there is room for improvement, and we are committed to doing so.

Turning to service standards, it should be noted that the department regularly reviews our objectives to understand what we're doing right, and where we need to improve. Our 2017 External Service Standard Review found that our service standards were appropriate. Therefore the tasks at hand are to up our game, focus on improving processes, and reduce turnaround times.

We agree with the recommendations on service standards in the Auditor General's report and will seek veteran feedback when planning any future changes to service standards. In the near term, we are pursuing an approach to employ post-phone call survey responses to measure veteran satisfaction.

The Auditor General's report found that we did not always consider the needs of our veteran clients when making decisions about call centre services. One specific example is with respect to teletype service. When the department stopped offering a teletypewriter service for the hearing disabled, there was no indication from our records as to the rationale for this cut in service, nor whether there was consultation with veterans. This is not appropriate service.

As such, we are reversing the decision to ensure that all veterans, regardless of their injuries, can access our call services. We are also committed to ensuring that veterans with hearing difficulties can communicate with the national contact centre network.

With this goal in mind, we are extending our teletypewriter services that are currently in place for the veterans who are in crisis but with hearing difficulties to all the types of the calls handled by our call centre. We have identified a teletypewriter solution that seamlessly integrates with our current suite of equipment and will implement it in partnership with Shared Services Canada by the end of March 2020 or sooner, if at all possible.

Going forward, we also commit to considering the input of those we serve when making any plans that will affect veterans.

Members of the committee, Veterans Affairs Canada's mission is to support the well-being of our veterans. We are committed to improving our performance to be veteran-centric and strive for service excellence.

I thank the Office of the Auditor General for so clearly showing us how we could better serve our veterans and their families. Veterans Affairs Canada has already embarked on addressing all the recommendations in the report.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, sir.

We'll now move to the opening statement from Mr. Paul Glover, president of Shared Services Canada.

[Paul Glover, President, Shared Services Canada]

Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to speak to the committee and answer your questions concerning the Auditor General's report focused on call centres.

As I'm sure you are aware, Shared Services delivers a wide range of IT services to departments that support the delivery of government programs and services, including call centres.

Since arriving at Shared Services, I've had the pleasure and opportunity to meet with employees from across the country who are doing amazing work delivering those services. Through their hard work, we've been making important progress.

Over the last number of years, we've closed over 200 outdated data centres and opened three new, large, state-of-the-art ones that are more efficient, more reliable and more secure. These modern, enterprise data centres provide our clients with modern IT infrastructure that improves their services and program delivery.

Just last month, Shared Services Canada announced a renewed agreement between us and Microsoft Canada on a new suite of modern digital communication tools for public service. Through this agreement, we will provide over 400,000 federal public servants in over 100 departments with a suite of Office 365 tools that will enable them to deliver timely and citizen-centred services to Canadians.

We're putting a renewed focus on strengthening our IT infrastructure to ensure that it is secure and reliable and that it responds to the needs of Canadians. These initiatives will help improve the services we provide to departments, including the topic we're here to discuss today.

We acknowledge, as the Auditor General reported, that Shared Services is responsible for providing and maintaining the IT infrastructure, including the call centres for all 221 federal departments. This includes call centres internal to government and those that service the public.

Through the hosted contact call centre project, we are making critical citizen-facing call centres more flexible and accessible. We are currently migrating eight contact call centres that make up nearly 50% of all the calls the Government of Canada receives. Seven out of these eight contact call centres have been successfully migrated, and we're continuing to work with the departments to ensure that the service is working for them and for the people who call them.

Turning to the Auditor General's report, we accept the recommendation in the report, and I am pleased to say that we are already hard at work on the items noted in the report. Allow me to provide a few updates.

We agree with the Auditor General's recommendation that Shared Services Canada should consult with the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada to ensure that our call centre modernization initiative is in line with the secretariat's government-wide approach to services. Supported by a third party assessment of the hosted contact call centre solution, we determined that not all of the 221 call centres require a full-featured, high-availability system that can handle sensitive information. In short, different call centres have different requirements. That is why we've revised our strategy, from implementing a single solution that will address all contact call centre requirements to one that ensures a best-fit solution in terms of cost and requirements.

The assessment concluded that the hosted contact call centre solution would meet the requirements for the government's most complex contact centres. The Canada Revenue Agency and the Employment and Social Development Canada call centres were chosen to migrate first, as they are the most complex public-facing contact centres and the systems most urgently in need of attention.

To ensure that moving forward we have a clear understanding of the requirements for the remaining call centres, we are working with our partners to provide information such as call volume as well as the security profile of the information they are exchanging with Canadians. This is an important part of our next steps, to help us understand which systems will be right for which call centres and to ensure we provision the appropriate technology. We expect to have all of this data collected by the end of June.

At the same time, we are assessing options to modernize centres that are running on older technologies or with contracts that are expiring in the next few months. The updated plan will take into consideration contract end dates, end-of-life technology and departmental readiness to ensure that migrations are prioritized appropriately and executed successfully.

We are working with federal organizations to support existing services while modern solutions are being implemented. We are also working with departments to update their inventory for the remaining contact call centres and their requirements to identify the most cost-effective solutions for modernization. We are well on track to deliver this strategy by next month.

By the fall, our goal is to have established a prioritized list of contact call centres to be modernized based on the factors I have explained today such as the age of the centres, the number of outages, the call volumes and the sensitivity of the information they deal with.

Our goal is to provide technology supporting improved customer response, improved experiences and more reliability, including for those with accessibility requirements.

This concludes my opening statement.

I would now be happy to take questions from the members of the committee.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Glover.

We're going to move into questions very quickly.

I would remind our guests and our committee that we are going to have about 55 minutes of questioning. We have some other business at the tail end of this meeting that we must address.

Without further ado, we'll move to Mr. Arseneault.

Mr. Arsenault, you have the floor for five minutes.

[René Arseneault, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Mr. Chair, you are strict. It's as though I were sitting in front of the biggest and most appetizing buffet on the planet and I only have five minutes to choose what I want to eat!

I will begin with the representatives of the Auditor General's Office.

Mr. Ricard, we see each other often and I always ask you one question. This time, right off the top, I will ask you whether, before preparing this report, you did any prior comparative studies.

[Sylvain Ricard]

No, not in connection with this audit.

[René Arseneault, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Whenever I ask you that, the answer is no, and I understand that.

I'm going to make an analogy. Let's say one of my children got a mark of 70% on his report card. I would not be all that satisfied, but if, two months after having punished him—and don't worry, I don't do that—I learned that the class average was 60%, I would have another perspective.

Would there be a way, for future reports, of making comparisons with similar countries, without allocating considerable human or financial resources to this? Would that be possible?

[Sylvain Ricard]

Sometimes we make such comparisons, but not always. The benchmark is the service standard established by the government. In this case, many sectors do not have a service standard.

[René Arseneault, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

I understand, but the government's standard may not lend itself to comparisons.

[Sylvain Ricard]

Yes, absolutely, but that would be another verification that would have to be done. That's not what we checked.

[René Arseneault, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

All right.

[Sylvain Ricard]

I take note of what you just mentioned.

[René Arseneault, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

I'm planting a seed in the garden. I like to know how things are going elsewhere to see if we really are all that late and careless.

According to the Auditor General's report, Veterans Affairs Canada is the champion for call centres. Again, the criticism was made that we should have a standard that may not be higher, but that compares to... In fact, I'm not sure what we're up against. Five minutes to answer the calls, I think that's great in 2019.

According to the figures provided in the tables in your report, I understand that 32% of callers hang up in 30 seconds. I wonder what advice these people could give us or the consultation we could conduct to determine the standard that should apply to veterans' calls, for example.

[Sylvain Ricard]

Again, I understand the point you're making. It can always be useful to have points of comparison. In this case, for us, the point of comparison was the service standard, and there was none. There is a Treasury Board requirement that this is essential to be able to manage the service being provided and to be transparent to callers, so that they know what they can expect.

[René Arseneault, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

All right, but I think that, as Canadians, we are in a void. When we compare ourselves, most of the time, we console ourselves. Anyway, that's a criticism I'm making in passing.

I only have five minutes and that's too little.

Ms. MacDonald, according to the Auditor General's report, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada continues to be the department that is lagging a little behind and whose service seems the least efficient and most frustrating for people. We are talking about a 30-minute wait time. It may seem like a long time, but if someone has to take their car to get to a service centre, if there is one in their area, it takes more than 30 minutes, of course.

How did we get here? Before you answer me, I will draw a parallel with paragraph 1.37 of the auditor's report. It appears that the accumulation of delays is due to the budget cuts made by the previous government in 2012. Is this really the case? Explain to me how delays are accumulating at such an alarming rate.

[Lori MacDonald]

Over the past seven years there has been a number of factors that have impacted our call rate at the call centre. Certainly, there were cuts in 2012. There was reorganization. There were significant issues from a technology perspective, and on top of that, we had dramatically increasing volume rates. As programs change, the volume of calls and answer rates go up. Introducing new programs into the system, on top of the volume of clients coming into the country, has an impact on our call rate.

As a result of that, we've tried to break that down and deconstruct it in terms of what issues are most impacting us, what people are calling about and how we manage the volume beyond just answering the phone. This is why we've gone to things like email responses, telephone inquiries, call-back options, as well as looking at how we can use social media to respond to people's general inquiries.

One thing we found is that people are using the call centre to ask questions of a very general nature. That's required us to turn to our website to try to improve that, so that we can have a positive impact on the volume of our calls, and reduce that. Then we can introduce new technology, as indicated in my opening comments, around using artificial intelligence to serve clients in a better way.

We're trying to move from just a telephone call to a multi-pronged approach that serves clients to meet their needs, regardless of the kind of information that they're looking for, in a way that has a positive impact on the volume of calls.