Citizenship and Immigration committee  Chair, the dilemma we've had has not been not being aware of the impact on processing times. It's really been whether we have the resources within the department to maintain the staff, and that has gone up and down. Over the past few years we've received some temporary funding to provide us some short-term help on the volumes in citizenship, which have grown over time to be quite a bit greater than our basic capacity to process them, so processing times have gone up.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Not necessarily. On the temporary side, that tends to be fairly immediate. On the permanent side, we often get lags from one year to the next. So when we're doing visa issuance--as the members will know, we have many different immigration categories--we have to estimate what we call a wastage rate of visas that will not be taken up within that year.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think in that particular circumstance the key service standard would likely be the issuance of the visa. How that translates into the management of the levels plan is a bit of a different set of circumstances for us, but the service standard for the individual likely would be how long it would take to review and issue a visa, make a visa decision for the individual.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  On permanent immigration, people are applying knowing generally how long it's going to take for their application to be processed. I think the short answer to your question, generally, is no, because the processing time is often fairly lengthy.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, I think the dilemma the department has had is that when most people think of service standards, one of the key components is timeliness, in our case for processing an application. We've always had a dilemma that when you tell somebody it's going to take 32 months to process their application, they're not going to see that as a timely service standard, and we would fully understand that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't have that number with me, no.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Chair, that is exactly what we're trying to do, as has probably been referenced. What we refer to as a perfected application is in some ways the bane of our existence. As is being suggested, incomplete applications cause an enormous amount of work in the department, a ping-ponging back and forth that's not very helpful for anyone.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's a very good question, and it is actually what we're looking at right now. In our processing centre in Sydney, Nova Scotia, we do the initial intake for the federal skilled worker program. They do the front-end processing of all the cases to determine the initial eligibility.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Ms. Deschênes can probably answer that question.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chairman, there is no doubt that we face challenges once in a while, including problems with certain embassies in certain missions. These challenges vary all the time. On how we monitor that, we look at processing times across missions and lines of business. One of our dilemmas is to what extent we can expect processing times or a service standard to be the same in each mission around the world.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think that question hits the dilemma right on the head. We've been publishing processing times for many years. I think for most of the clients we deal with, that probably is the key metric as far as they're concerned. It's not the only one. We have qualitative dimensions of service standards in terms of how quickly we might respond to somebody, say in a call centre, in terms of answering the phone, or the nature of the interactions with our staff and whether they are professional, courteous, respectful, and those kinds of things.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Chair, if I may, we haven't received new funding for service standards per se, but we do have additional resources that are being used for federal skilled workers under the action plan for faster immigration. It has had that effect actually. Resources were put in to reduce the backlog of applications we had.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Good morning, Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Neil Yeates and I am Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. I'm accompanied by Claudette Deschênes and Les Linklater. I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to speak today on the findings of chapter 3 in the Auditor General's report.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, it does. That's why I indicated earlier, Chair, that when we convert our processing times across all of the lines--particularly the immigration business--and translate them into service standards, some of those are going to be quite lengthy because of the number of applications we have relative to the number of people we're able to admit each year.