Public Accounts committee  Again, I'll give just a quick response, and Claudette can add to this as well. We have the call centre for people who don't have access to the Internet. In our experience, both in Canada and overseas, access to the Internet has been very good. It's higher than we might have expected, so we've been pleased with that.

Public Accounts committee  Very basically—and Madame Deschênes could speak further to this—it's really a system to allow people to check the status of their application, very simply. Madame.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. I can start and then Ms. Deschênes can add something. I can tell students that I as well studied political science, a very good thing to study. It's nice to see you here. First of all, we started with four areas in our initial service standards: labour market opinions, family class cases, permanent resident cards, and grants and contributions.

Public Accounts committee  Very basically, we've tabled an action plan with the committee chair. What we've laid out there is basically a three-phase approach to doing this. Phase 1 has included the service standards I referred to. The other two phases, which will incorporate the balance, will be done over the next three years.

Public Accounts committee  There are perhaps two pieces that I can speak to there, Chair. One is that yes, it's quite true, we take in fees; it's a significant amount of revenue each year. Those fees go to the consolidated revenue fund. They don't come directly to the department. We are obligated to take those fees in immediately and they are done based on costs.

Public Accounts committee  We certainly agree that the accuracy of the information is important. We made the change with the letters because those are computer generated and we had trouble with having to update those continuously. We thought it was better to send people to one more authoritative source. Yes, we do believe it's very important to make sure that information is as accurate as possible.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I think the issue fundamentally is.... I guess the good news story is that we've seen an increase in immigration over the past 10 years. Canada, as members will know, Mr. Chair, has a very high rate of naturalization, so the number of people applying to us has gone up fairly significantly.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I can start. First of all, it's certainly not our intent to outsource services to MPs' offices. We know you get a lot of inquiries on citizenship and immigration matters. Depending on what line of business you are dealing with, with respect to what we deliver, there are different avenues that can be accessed.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Neil Yeates, and I am Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. I am joined by Claudette Deschênes, Assistant Deputy Minister of Operations, at CIC. I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to speak.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I would add that I think we've made a lot of progress in the past couple of years, and I'm very optimistic the committee will see significant progress in the years ahead.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, I'd be pleased to, Chair. The evaluation committee we have, which I chair and Elizabeth Ruddick supports, meets about monthly now. We review all the terms of reference for our forthcoming studies, and this is very important for us, because it makes sure that the right questions are being asked within an evaluation.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, certainly, Chair. We are working to increase our FTEs, similar to Environment Canada. We had three back in 2004-05 and we're ramping up to 20. We think that is sufficient capacity for us. Our current five-year evaluation plan provides 100% coverage for all our grants and contribution programs.

Public Accounts committee  The evaluation committee has agreed that we are going to proceed. We've actually been in touch with someone to invite them to join our committee, so we're pleased with that.

Public Accounts committee  I can start off, Mr. Chair, speaking to the experience in CIC. We've been working on ramping up our evaluation capacity and function for several years. I noted in my opening remarks that in the management accountability framework we received an unacceptable rating in 2006. So that was well before the AG's work started on this.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I would add that it is true that this is a significant challenge for us. The data is often very expensive for us to collect. At CIC we have an income tax file that we created with Statistics Canada a number of years ago to track immigrant outcomes over time. So that has proven to be very useful for us in looking at economic outcomes for immigrants.