When a department provides a service, it is required by a Treasury Board policy to give an indication to Canadians of how long they can expect...what an expected service standard is. It is an essential requirement, and we made some recommendations to the department about that.
I think the most important thing that we found, however, is that the existing service standards are not reliable. The department has not met them for many years. Our recommendation centred around being more transparent with applicants to ensure that they understand how long the wait will actually be. The wait is long and refugees, who are arguably some of the most vulnerable, are waiting the longest—almost three years. While they have no service standard, they should at least understand how long they might wait.