Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't pretend to be an IT specialist, but IRCC works very closely with Shared Services Canada to ensure there is a robust system in place to manage any cyber-attacks. We're very conscious that the GCMS platform, the global case management system platform, is something which has to be very carefully protected, and there's been no indication thus far that there have been any attacks.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It does not apply to all categories, but to a very significant number of them. It would be all temporary resident, all permanent resident, permanent resident card categories, and it would be the citizenship program as well. It does not apply to the passport program, or at least to the vast majority of the passport program, at this time.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, in terms of citizenship, in fact, we're exceeding it. The processing times at the moment are 10 months. As I said earlier, the consequences are that we look very carefully at it to see what's going wrong and why we're not meeting those standards, and we do everything we can to ensure that we do get back within the service standard.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If there are matters of security and those sorts of issues, they will involve dealing with our partner at CBSA. It is a matter of working with them, and generally they certainly respond very well within service standards. There are certain cases that are outliers, which is certainly unfortunate for those individuals, but overwhelmingly they do meet service standards.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Certainly we're looking very carefully at anything we can learn from outside partners or outside sources. We've looked at something like that with regard to tracing it. The immigration process is not quite as straightforward, of course. A number of different factors are involved, which makes it a little more complicated than just mapping out where a parcel is.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The electronic travel authorization program has been a huge initiative for the department and for our partner, CBSA. It's a joint piece with CBSA. We're responsible for the eTA application process, and there are over 2.5 million people around the world who have obtained an eTA since it went live.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Constantly, there's very regular contact with the airlines, both with all the airlines together and then individual airlines as well.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I might just add that when we did do the family class design challenge, in looking at that, we did look at the language that's available for the spousal application. That's one of the reasons we completely redid all of the spousal application, the guides and so on, which will be available on our website next week.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You're absolutely right. Some of the work that has been done abroad is very valuable. We have contracted out some of this work. There are cultural orientation sessions, particularly for refugees, but also for others who are coming. They're not available everywhere, but they are available in an increasing number of places around the world.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's a resource issue, and I think they're something we're growing gradually as well.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, certainly it's an issue that we continually try to address, to give the best information we can and to give clarity about our decision-making. There's nothing automatic about it. We look at a variety of different factors in an application to decide what will be there or not.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It was always intended that the express entry would start off slowly and build. That's what we're seeing. We had cases that were residual cases from the old program. Increasingly, those are being finished, and they will be finished pretty much entirely by the end of 2016, so we will see entirely from express entry for the federal skilled worker program...and, yes, we are maintaining the six-month processing time.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The website is something that we're very conscious we really need to address. We're doing an awful lot of work on that. It's an evergreen thing. We revisited and then redid the website a couple of years ago. That was a major step in the right direction, but it's time we looked at it.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Indeed, Mr. Chair, that is absolutely correct. What was Passport Canada at the time became the passport program of IRCC in July 2013. One of the reasons for that was to modernize the program and to make the passport program more accessible to Canadians and so on. In general, the success of the passport program is quite remarkable.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We have a very robust list of service standards and a very long list of them for the various lines of business. For some we do not have service standards for a variety of reasons, but for the vast majority we do have them. We take those very seriously indeed. Overall we are meeting those service standards.