Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, there are certain anomalies, for sure. The situation in Turkey is primarily because of the closure of our office in Tehran. The office in Ankara was required to absorb that work from Tehran, which has skewed the delivery times for visitor visas in that office. I recently visited Ankara and I'm pleased to say that the processing times are coming down dramatically for both our Iranian clientele and our Turkish clientele.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  First of all, there are no targets for officers. It is entirely done on a case-by-case basis. The statistics we have and the percentages that I provide are purely a compilation of what that case-by-case exercise results in. You do see changes year by year in what those percentages might be within a visa office, and that is the result of a case-by-case study.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Let me begin and perhaps my colleague can add to my comments. There are a few things. First of all, I appreciate your comments about the professionalism of our visa officers overseas. I want to underline that. Second, in terms of the number of applications that individuals are to deal with, yes, it does vary, as I tried to suggest.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's an interesting question, and it's hard to give a very straightforward answer to it because it depends a little bit on the quality of the applications and the nature of the environment in which they are working. There are certain environments where the level of risk is very low.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  When anyone is refused a visa, it's after very careful consideration of all aspects of the application. Then the individual would be given a letter, which tends to be a template letter, that indicates the reason for that refusal.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are two avenues if one is refused a visa. The first is to submit a new application with additional information that might be used to render a different decision. That process is used quite extensively. The other alternative is an appeal to the federal court.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Fees were updated about 15 years ago. We have a differential fee. The fee for a multiple-entry visa is $150, and a single entry is $75. We determined that the actual cost at the moment for processing an application is approximately $106.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Certainly, that could be provided to you. It's readily available on our website, but we will provide it through the clerk.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We are rolling out for 29 countries and one territory at the moment. There has not been a decision made to go beyond that as yet. The process when someone is flying...first of all, the biometric is collected, normally at the visa application centre. Once that has been submitted, it's immediately deleted from the collection centre.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The fee for a regular visitor visa in the United States is $164. In the U.K., it's $126. Australia charges $120, and New Zealand, $143. We're certainly in the ballpark, and probably a little bit under what others are charging.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Essentially, 1.2 million visitor visas were issued last year, which was close to a 10% increase on the year before. We're seeing a very large increase, particularly in certain markets.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's the number of visitors who come to Canada each year, but a large number of those people do not require visitor visas.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. In all its operations, CIC maintains very transparent and accountable service commitments to all of our clients, including—of course—everyone who applies for a TRV. The department is committed to explain clearly to all applicants what they need to know and what they must do to apply for visas; to make decisions on eligibility and admissibility that are fair, reasonable and comprehensible; to treat all applicant with courtesy and respect; to protect everyone's personal information; to publish our processing times; and to respect our service standard, which is 14 days for visitor visas.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In many of those offices, what we are looking at is trying to reduce certain types of work, remove certain types of low-risk, straightforward work where we don't need local knowledge, particularly, and where we're able to do some of that work in other parts of the network. This is still a work in progress, but we're making very real strides.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Over the course of the last year, we have closed 10 visa offices abroad. There were no foreign service officers who were cut as a result, but there were a number of other positions cut in the process. In addition, about 233 locally engaged staff positions were cut. That's being offset by new ways of processing applications and centralization of a lot of work.