Ms. Leslie MacLean at the Public Accounts Committee

On May 30th, 2019. See this statement in context.

May 30th, 2019 / 9:45 a.m.

Senior Associate Deputy Minister of Employment and Social Development and Chief Operating Officer for Service Canada, Department of Employment and Social Development

Leslie MacLean

I am going to start, and if Mr. Flack has something to add, I will give him the floor.

I would just like to talk about the progress we have made in terms of accessibility to our call centres for employment insurance, for example. Thanks to the investments Mr. Flack mentioned, we were able to increase our accessibility rate from 36% in 2015-2016 very quickly, and reached 65% in the past year.

This is therefore a fairly significant improvement curve, because we have been able, thanks to the investments, to add hundreds of new agents to better respond to Canadians' calls. I would add that the Auditor General did not consider the systems we have in place for self-service, a system where people do not need to talk to an agent.

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