Human Resources committee  We are currently expanding our collaboration between Service Canada and Veterans Affairs Canada. There are Veterans Affairs Canada staff in our service centres to take in applications, but not to process them. It is the department that is responsible for processing applications.

Human Resources committee  We can certainly take that suggestion on. We've implemented a new reconsideration phase, as you may know, within EI, where we do that initial review and we give the client the result of that review. We can certainly undertake to look at the quality of the instructions around the

Government Operations committee  I'm afraid I don't have those statistics on hand, but certainly they're available. I'd be happy to provide them to the committee.

Government Operations committee  Part of our strategic review, as I noted earlier, our plan, is to achieve savings equivalent to 600 full-time equivalent jobs over the course of three years. Those are through automation and efficiencies. Those aren't simply cuts. There's actually a strategy with various releases

Government Operations committee  It's important to distinguish between the front-counter Service Canada Centre presence and the back-office processing capacity. When you were referring to the job reductions over the next two or three years in Montague, that is back-office claims processing, which works on a nati

Government Operations committee  Thank you for that question. This was indeed a huge challenge. Normally, to make a change of this magnitude and complexity affecting this many people would take quite a number of months to do, to reprogram the systems. We came up with some innovative ways. I don't want to get in

Government Operations committee  Thank you for that question. We have made service excellence the cornerstone of the strategy for Service Canada for the last several years. It's been a bit of a transformation for the organization to go from being specialists in a given program to being more generalists in the d

Government Operations committee  There is a requirement for initial application for the guaranteed income supplement, but for the last number of years, I believe the last two or three years, we've had an automatic renewal. So once you've entered the GIS system, there is a process through which, based on CRA tax

Government Operations committee  We have a very active program. In fact, in advance of people's 65th birthday we have a major outreach campaign to send out presumptive applications to people who we know might be eligible. So to the extent that we have data that there are individuals approaching their 65th birthd

Government Operations committee  That's something we would have to follow up on. I'd be happy to follow up. I can get the answer from colleagues in Service Canada and provide that to you.

Government Operations committee  It was between 600,000 and 700,000 GIS recipients.

Government Operations committee  I'm afraid I don't have all the details on the work we're doing on Access Key, but it's an issue we are certainly actively working on within the organization. We're looking to align the different systems with government-wide authentication processes. There are discussions across

Government Operations committee  I'd be happy to speak to the question of service delivery. The announcement you're referring to on about 600 positions does not impact call centres. That is a modernization agenda that will unfold over the next three years, this being the first year. The vast majority of that wil

Government Operations committee  This was a measure that we implemented in short order following the budget. We actually got it implemented in time for the July payment for seniors. What it does over the course of the year is increase the GIS payment by approximately $600 for a single recipient and $840 for a co

Human Resources committee  The modernization agenda that we've outlined is to take us from 40% up to 70% automation.