Public Accounts Committee on Dec. 5th, 2023

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

I call this meeting to order.

Good morning, everyone.

Welcome to meeting 89 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(g), the committee is meeting this day to commence consideration of Report 9, Processing Applications for Permanent Residence—Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 2023 Reports 5 to 9 of the Auditor General of Canada.

I would like to welcome all our witnesses.

From the Office of the Auditor General, we have Karen Hogan, Auditor General; Carol McCalla, principal; and Erin Jellinek, director. From the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, we have Christiane Fox, deputy minister, and Marie-Josée Dorion, acting senior assistant deputy minister, service delivery.

It's nice to have you all back with us.

Ms. Hogan will open up with five minutes from the floor. Then we'll hear from Ms. Fox.

Ms. Hogan, you have the floor for five minutes, please.

[Karen Hogan, Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General]

Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our report on processing applications for permanent residence, which was tabled in the House of Commons on October 19, 2023. I would like to acknowledge that this hearing is taking place on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people. Joining me today are Carol McCalla and Erin Jellinek, who were responsible for the audit.

In this audit, we looked at whether Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada processed applications for permanent residency efficiently and promptly to support Canada’s economic, family reunification and humanitarian goals. Overall, we found that despite recent efforts to improve application processing times, most people were still waiting a long time for a decision, with the longest wait times for those applying to refugee programs. At the end of 2022, large backlogs remained across all eight permanent resident programs that we examined.

The department did not meet its service standards for prompt processing in any of the programs that we examined. It also had not established service standards for refugee programs, contrary to Treasury Board directives. People applying to refugee programs waited the longest, on average almost three years.

We also found that the expected processing times provided online did not consider the existing application volumes or backlogs. We recommended that the department be more transparent about how long applicants are likely to wait for a decision. This includes setting realistic and reliable service standards and expected processing times.

Despite a commitment in 2016 to better match workload with available staff, the department continued to assign applications to offices without evaluating whether they had enough staff to process them. While digital applications allowed the department to transfer aging applications to other offices better resourced to process them, it had no plans to do so. This leaves backlogged applications to age even further.

In 7 of the 8 permanent resident programs we examined, we found that certain countries of citizenship were overrepresented with respect to application backlogs. In addition, the department did not sufficiently monitor whether the use of its new automated eligibility-assessment tool produced different results for different groups of applicants. We found that applicants who received an eligibility pass from the tool also received faster decisions, while other applicants continued to wait a long time for a decision.

The department committed to addressing systemic barriers to applicants under its Anti-Racism Strategy. However, it had yet to take any steps to collect demographic information about applicants and monitor and correct disparities in processing applications. This is critical to identifying and removing systemic barriers across government programs.

This concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions the committee may have.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you once again.

Ms. Fox, you now have the floor for five minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Christiane Fox, Deputy Minister, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to appear before this committee alongside Madam Karen Hogan, the Auditor General.

Thank you, Madam Hogan, to you and your team, Carol and Erin, for the work you did on this chapter.

I also want to start by acknowledging that we're meeting today on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

I appreciate the chance to meet with you.

Immigration is crucial to our country's long-term success. To that end, this year Canada has already welcomed approximately 405,000 permanent residents as of October 31, 2023, up from about 388,000 during that same period in 2022. That positions us well to reach our target of welcoming 465,000 new permanent residents by the end of this year as we continue to implement the levels as part of the 2024-2026 immigration levels plan.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada recognizes that modernizing and strengthening elements of our immigration system is necessary to address the challenges associated with welcoming more people.

The Office of the Auditor General assessed our department’s efforts in 2022 to process permanent residence applications in support of the country’s economic, family reunification and humanitarian objectives. The resulting report recommends areas where improvements are needed to boost the efficiency, fairness and transparency of our immigration processes. We thank the Auditor General for her report, and take the concerns she raised seriously.

Over the last few years, we have prioritized improving processing times as part of our commitment to client service and building a stronger immigration system.

Today we are much further ahead, but there is still work to be done. Since the audit period, IRCC has made significant progress in reducing processing times and application backlogs including for the eight permanent residence program areas that were assessed by the Auditor General.

We have hired new employees to assist with processing and we continue our work towards digital applications and harnessing automation technologies to increase our processing capacity and efficiency.

In August of 2022, the department began publishing data on a monthly basis to inform the public about our ongoing efforts to reduce backlogs.

I am pleased to report that a number of our economic immigration programs are now processing applications within our service standards. We continue to work toward our goal of reducing overall backlogs and processing 80% of new applications within service standards, accounting for expected delays in complex cases.

However, with the high demand to come to Canada, it will not always be possible to achieve this goal, as the number of applications received annually exceeds Canada's planned admission targets set in the immigration levels plan. We have a managed migration system and we receive more applications than spaces for any given year.

That said, we will continue to address backlogs and improve the workload sharing in regions where backlogs exist by leveraging our global processing network and assigning local resources when they are needed.

Meanwhile, we are pleased to have made strides on recommendation number 6 in the AG's report. We recently opened the permanent residence online portal to private refugee sponsorship groups, and it will be expanded further, to some of our government-assisted refugee referral partners, on December 20.

With this expansion, we're improving convenience and efficiency for these groups to securely submit their applications and referrals.

The department has also been improving its policies and programs as a result of consultations with the public and stakeholders. As we did a cross-country consultation, in which I personally participated, I heard from businesses, academics, NGOs and clients about the challenges they faced with our system.

We released our report “An Immigration System for Canada's Future” earlier this fall. We are committed to continue building a more robust, effective and agile immigration system that is responsive to the most pressing challenges of our time so that Canada remains a welcoming and inclusive destination for people seeking to build new lives here.

We’re grateful for the feedback from the Office of the Auditor General, and appreciate this committee’s role in upholding the principles of accountability and transparency.

I am happy to take your questions.

Thank you very much, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

We'll now open up to questions.

We will turn to the opposition. Mr. Kmiec, you have the floor for six minutes, please.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

My first questions will be for the deputy minister.

What is the total inventory of applications, including those beyond service standards right now?

[Christiane Fox]

Mr. Chair, thank you for the question.

I think what we can indicate to you is that from January to October, the department made 6.2 million final decisions, so that's year to date. That's for TR, PR and citizenship. We have seven million expected for this year.Those are probably the total numbers.

In terms of how many of those for PR are within the service standard, I would say that as of October 2023, 55% are within the service standard for the PR program, which compares to 40% back in July 2022 at the time of the beginning of the audit.

I can also indicate, if it's helpful for the committee, where we were with the aid programs. None were in compliance of the service standard. Where we are now, we have significant progress to report. For federal skilled workers, we're now within service standards, so within six months or less. Right now, it's closer to five months.

We are down in the Quebec-selected skilled workers program. It was at 20 months at the time of the audit. It's at 13 months. We still need a bit of work to get into service standard, but we've made significant progress.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I'm sorry, Deputy, I'm just going to interrupt you, because I don't get all that much time, especially at this committee.

The AG's report said that for two of the programs, the PSR program and the GAR program, there were no service standards set. The AG's report says that the department said that there was “no plan” to make service standards. That's what it says in the AG's report.

In your detailed management action plan, it says that you have a plan. What changed between when the AG did the audit and said that the department said “it had no plan” to comply with Treasury Board directives to now, when there is a detailed plan that in fact has multistep processes and months in action? What changed between having no plan and having a plan now?

[Christiane Fox]

I think what I can say in response to that question is that when I joined the department in the summer of 2022, we were at a pretty high point of service backlogs and service challenges. The first thing we endeavoured to do was meet the service standards we had before we started to commit to shortening them and adding service standards to lines of business.

Priority number one was around trying to get through this crisis of backlog and get to more normal service standards. Part two aligned exactly with where the AG recommended that we go, which was to look at service standards for all our lines of business, including GARs and PSRs, and I can speak to some of the challenges around that—

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I'm going to interrupt you again, Deputy Minister.

[Christiane Fox]

It is part of the plan. It is part of the immigration levels, and we are moving forward on setting service standards.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

You have a plan right now, but then who told the AG's office there was no plan to comply with Treasury Board directives? Was it the previous deputy minister?

[Christiane Fox]

I'm not sure exactly who would have had that conversation from my team, but what I can say is that we are committed to look at service standards for the refugee program, including our GARs and PSRs, and that is stated in the immigration levels plan.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

In my discussions with the AG's office—I have an email from them—I had questions about the continuing use of those global case management system codes of former employees. In a pool of 6,000 that they looked at, there are 57 codes still in use.

There were 57 applications identified. Two of the applications were submitted in November of 2018. Those are the oldest. Those were four and a half years old at the time of the Auditor General's review in April 2023. One application was made in 2019, which means it was four years old. The majority of the other applications were submitted in 2022.

I thought they had stopped assigning GCMS codes to old employee numbers. In the case of at least one person who has been waiting patiently since November 2018, that's four and a half years. Is there an error rate because it's still happening in their drop-down menus or something, and people are assigning them to the wrong ones? Is this practice of assigning them to former employees who are not there continuing in the department?

We were told that the AG's office was told this is a management technique being used by different offices to simply manage their workload, but four and a half years is a long time to wait to have your application considered. It just looks like this application may have been completely forgotten.

[Christiane Fox]

I think that at the time of the use of GCMS numbers, because they were assigned to perhaps an older employee, it didn't mean that a new person couldn't come in to take a look at that code, so I'm not going to comment specifically on the 2018 case.

I think what I have found in my role in this department is that there are times when a file has been sitting for a long time and it gets to my attention either because of direct client outreach or because the issue is raised by a member of Parliament, and we dig into it. At times it's also because we notice that there could be a missing document. There could be an abandoned file or a security check that's not complete, or there could be a material change in the application such that it requires more time.

I can't speak to the 2018 case you've brought forward, but what I can say is that those numbers are.... I don't think they're in use any more, and we took that to account last year when this first surfaced, so I don't think they're being assigned to that number at this point in time today. That was a change that was made about eight months ago.

Is that fair, a year ago...?

[Marie-Josée Dorion, Acting Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Service Delivery, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Yes. Maybe I can just jump in.

We did use the GCMS user IDs that were inactive, as you're saying, Deputy, but then what we're doing is making sure that we're running the queries on a regular basis now so we don't have those cases.

If there's anything left in the system, we've developed queries to make sure we pull them out to take action on them. We do have a bit of management in how we're assigning files in the system, but we're taking measures not to forget files, if that's your question.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you. That is the time.

I'm turning now to Ms. Khalid. You have the floor for six minutes, please.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

Thank you, Ms. Hogan, for a really good report. I think it's important for us to realize the challenges that we go through.

With IRCC, oftentimes—and my own constituency office being an example—we become the last resort for people who are trying to resolve their issues. In my own constituency office, I have at least 300 families who are waiting for decisions on files that have now become backlogged, I would say, in the system.

I'll also take this opportunity to give a big shout-out to my team in my office, to Kristina especially, who does a lot of the work in my constituency office in that respect.

One of the big challenges we hear from our constituents that is addressed in this report as well is that some applications that are very similar to each other will get processed within 20 months, while others will go on for years and some will get processed within six months. I'm wondering if you can help me understand a bit about how these applications that are so similar are prioritized and why that discrepancy is there.

[Christiane Fox]

Thank you very much for the question.

I think that part of perhaps some of the discrepancies can be explained in terms of how, for the permanent residency programs, we have a points system based on express entry, and I think that over the last year we are in a position now, more than we have been in the past, to actually do targeted draws around specific skill sets that the country may need: health human resources, STEM, and skilled workers in some of the construction trades. As a result of that, there's a points allocation system for permanent residency, and someone may be drawn out faster as a result of the skill sets they can bring to the country, which could explain discrepancies.

I would also note that we work very closely with our security partners, and at times what may appear to be a very similar case application can in fact be very different in the context of the information provided by the client, so it is hard to determine the measure between the two.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

I appreciate that you said that, because oftentimes when we call in to find out what the challenges are, the constituent will call to try to get to the bottom of why their application is not moving forward. There's a major lack of transparency, a lack of information, and that often leads to people filing for ATIPs just to get that basic information.

Why can't we provide better information to people as their files are ongoing? If you're saying that discrepancies are based on what type of jobs we're looking for, what types of resources we're looking for, why can't we tell that to these really frustrated people who are waiting months and years for some kind of closure in their applications?

[Christiane Fox]

Thank you. I think you're absolutely right. I would agree with you entirely in this context. When people are unsure about their file, they call the client centre. They email someone. They email their MP. They may file an ATIP. It creates a lot more stress in the system overall.

How we've attempted to address that is obviously by trying to improve the client centre, and the call centre experience in particular. We're trying to improve the backlog of web forms that existed during COVID. We're launching status trackers so that people can go online and take a look at where their application stands in the system. We've launched that for family class, citizenship, express entry and TRV applications, and for study and work permits. We're hopeful that when they go online and see their status, people will be aware of where they stand, although that sometimes causes concern. Someone will say, “I've gone into my portal. I'm still in this phase. Can you explain why I'm still in this phase?”

At least we're beginning to use digital technologies so that clients can access their information and track it in real time.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you.

With respect to digital technologies, I understand artificial intelligence is now being used more and more to process applications.

How does that play with recommendation 9.36, especially with respect to refugee programs, the anti-racism strategy and how applications are processed?

[Christiane Fox]

I think we have to utilize the technology. For instance, in the call centre, we've adopted robotic processing so that the triaging of documents coming in is not done manually. They're set up in a system so that an officer looking at a case will have all the documents uploaded in one place, versus grabbing them from the various locations they may be in. Using automation, from that standpoint, is helpful.

In the context of the AG report, I would say that what we try to do is.... There are some cases that are more complex than others. That is the nature of the immigration system. I think we need to do a better job of reporting, and we hope that by using automation to triage the processing, we make it easier for officers to review the files they are reviewing. For the more straightforward applications, the benefit is that it's faster. However, it can also benefit the other, more complex cases in the system. We have more people allocated to doing those files if we're using automation technologies to help with the more straightforward ones.

Where the AG's report is helpful to us.... Her team indicated that we need to explain and report on how we do all cases. All people benefit from automation, not just those who fall into the automation categories. The resource allocation distribution that we can do is a benefit for all clients. We just need to demonstrate that clearly.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Sinclair-Desgagné, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, Bloc, Terrebonne, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for joining us. Thanks to the Office of the Auditor General and to the Auditor General for her very good work, as usual, and for this very interesting report.

To sum up the situation, Madam Auditor General, you have found that there are many deficiencies at the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, specifically with regard to processing times and follow‑up. There appears to be a lack of governance to ensure that processing times are reduced and that people who have chosen Canada or Quebec as their new home are appropriately welcomed.

Everyone who appears before this committee tells us that progress is being made and everything's improving. Well, if that's the case, so much the better. However, I see a major problem in the fact that the department is incapable of processing applications within an acceptable period of time, whereas Canada is currently taking in many immigrants, nearly half a million this year, and immigration targets will be the same for the next few years.

Ms. Fox, how do you think you'll be able to reconcile those two observations? We have an energetic immigration policy on the one hand and a department that can't process all applications on the other.

First of all, do you have the tools you need to get the job done, or are you going to get them? Will they be implemented, given that we just learned from the Auditor General's opening remarks that automated tools haven't been properly used?

How will you be able to manage that, Ms. Fox?