Public Accounts committee  Well, I think one of the things that's a challenge for us is that we call them “processing times”, but actually very little of that period of time is actually spent processing the case; most of it is waiting in the queue to be processed. But we call it processing times because an individual wants to know how long it is going to take for their application to be dealt with.

Public Accounts committee  No. We said that we agreed with the Auditor General in terms of the recommendations that have been made.

Public Accounts committee  I'll start and then ask Madame Deschênes to follow up. We try to keep track of that fairly carefully. We are concerned when we start to see significant differences between missions. Things happen. The character of the applications does vary a lot from one mission to another. One part of the world may have very significant security review issues, for example, and may need to go for review through CSIS.

Public Accounts committee  One of our challenges has always been spikes in workload across our network, throughout the world and across Canada. We have not had a case management system that would allow us to share the workload in an efficient way. GCMS basically allows cases to be processed anywhere in the world, so if we have a situation in which we've had a caseload buildup, we could take the next available flexibility in the network and have them do processing work on those cases.

Public Accounts committee  Sure. Madame Deschênes.

Public Accounts committee  I'll ask Madame Deschênes to speak to those.

Public Accounts committee  Well, the big structural change in terms of our system is in moving away from an open intake system and setting limits on the number of applications we will accept by category every year. We've done that this year for federal skilled workers with the 20,000 that we have identified.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. As I say, we're doing two things. We have added some resources this year. We started in the summer. We're doing that and are looking at our ability to continue that on a permanent basis. We feel that we do need to make a permanent adjustment to our capacity for processing. That's part 1.

Public Accounts committee  In terms of processing times?

Public Accounts committee  We haven't landed on that, but we would like to reduce them very significantly. I can tell you historically where we've been. We've been in that four- to six-month time horizon on citizenship proofs and we would like to get back to that. We're at about nine months right now. We're in that 15- to 19-month range on grants, and for sure we'd like to reduce that to less than a year.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, within the next 12 months.

Public Accounts committee  In terms of citizenship processing, it is a combination of two things: increasing the capacity in our system, which we will look to do through reallocating resources in our department, and re-engineering. As the committee probably knows, our budget is frozen for the next two years, so we will look internally to do that.

Public Accounts committee  It's difficult, Chair, to put an absolute figure on that, but I think we are moving into a regime or a period of time, an era, in which we can fairly readily meet the processing requirements for the annual levels planned, for a clientele of 250,000. We've gone through periods of years when it was quite a challenge for us to meet that in terms of processing capacity around the world.

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  We think that an ideal processing time is in the six- to twelve-month time horizon. As the member has said, they do take into account how long it's going to take their application to be processed in terms of how they are interacting with our system. But information gets out of date.