Public Accounts committee  Yes. We're sorting through what we would call our service channels. We tend to divide clients into different groups: tier one, tier two, and tier three. In tier one are people who just want very basic information. We would like to redirect as many of those clients as possible to the website self-serve for basic information.

Public Accounts committee  The department has actually been doing a lot of work on trying to re-engineer and redesign its services and bring technology on board. I mentioned GCMS, our big new case management system, which is getting into the implementation phase. Implementation is now well under way this year.

Public Accounts committee  Well, Chair, I think for the department, I can speak for my time here, and Claudette has worked for the department much longer than I have. But what I have seen just in terms of the history of the department is that there has always been a lot of change under way. The program has been changing.

Public Accounts committee  I think the biggest factor, the starting point, really, is how many people Canada wants to admit every year, and then you work backwards from there. How many applications would we need to take in order to provide a reasonable response time to people? Right now, by and large, our application system is completely open-ended, so we accept applications continuously.

Public Accounts committee  I think the short answer, Mr. Chair, is that we do have to divert some of our existing processing capacity when situations like Haiti arise. But we do our best to keep up with everything. Madame Deschênes actually had the lead on that, so maybe we could have her speak to the terrific work that was done.

Public Accounts committee  I don't think we have numbers with us from 20 and 10 years ago, but I can give you a rough approximation. The immigration levels that we're taking in now are somewhat higher than they were 10 and 20 years ago, so it would be 250,000 a year now. It was around 225,000 to 200,000 a while ago, and a bit less than 200,000 earlier.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. That is correct.

Public Accounts committee  We'll report every year on the progress we're making on our service standards. We'll report on phase 1 next spring.

Public Accounts committee  I'm sorry. We're not doing an outside report. We're reporting ourselves.

Public Accounts committee  There may have been a misunderstanding in the way it's worded. Excuse me, Chair. We're reporting ourselves.

Public Accounts committee  Well, as we were saying earlier, I think that one of the challenges we've had is trying to deal with challenging processing times across our lines of business. What we're committing to now is to basically transform those into sets of service standards, recognizing that we as a department are not going to be very happy with many of those processing times; they're longer than we would like them to be.

Public Accounts committee  It depends on the business line, Chair. We had some temporary funding for our citizenship processing. That was available last year and has been available a couple of times in the previous five years. This year, we reallocated resources internally, within the department, to put some additional resources into citizenship processing.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, that is a typical year for CIC. Some of our business lines continue to grow. The area of international students is an area where we are starting to see some significant growth, at about 10% a year. We think that's good news for Canada. This is part of our educational marketing.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, we think that is a factor in terms of tourism, but it has been growing over time. But yes, we're seeing a big spike in 2010, and we think that's part of the reason.

Public Accounts committee  Certainly. Earlier this year, we developed a service declaration in terms of what clients could expect from us. We did consult with clients in developing that and it has now been published. We have an e-mail feedback form in all our of missions overseas that clients can use. We do public opinion research.