Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Jeannette Meunier-McKay, and I am the national president of the Canada Employment and Immigration Union, a component of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. Amongst our 20,000 members are the workers at the Sydney, Nova Scotia, case pro

Citizenship and Immigration committee  People immigrating to Canada, new Canadian citizens, and Canadian citizens in general should be entitled to prompt service from their government in providing the much needed permanent resident cards or citizenship cards or proofs of citizenship. They should not have to pay throug

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We've always maintained that the good business model is to have dependable staff, which creates continuity within the organization. When you bring in people on different projects where they're only in part-time or as a term, you lose that expertise when these people are gone. So

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We go by the list of the membership we have. We can count them, and 83 terms were being let go. Then there are casual workers. Casual workers within the federal government are supposed to be there for only a certain number of days--I think now it's gone up to 90 days--so once the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's a cut. It appears in the federal budget that has just been presented. We can't get away from it. Additional funding was granted so we could try to eliminate the backlog. As a result of this cut, here's where we stand.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think in the last five or six years it has spiralled up and down. There's a lot of use of terms and maybe casuals, so that does create a problem, because it's not just the issue of being understaffed. The workload continues to come in. The workload doesn't stop, so there's alwa

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If you look at the last 10 years, the staffing overall in the immigration department has gone down quite a lot. Even in the early nineties, when there were some cuts--federal departments all had to face cuts and there was a cut in the overall public service--Immigration was one o

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's not in front of me, but I can certainly tell you that we know, just within our membership lists--it's been around since 1996--that staffing levels have gone down. If we have to go back and get it for every year, we can go back to our membership lists and do that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There's full-time involved, where they're not replaced when they retire.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are both.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Correct. How can you not?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  They're hired to do a workload and process citizenship and permanent residency cards. Citizenship cards and permanent residency cards still exist and they still come in, whether they're done by a full-time person or a term person.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll respond to that. And please don't misquote me again, because I never said our term employees were not qualified employees. What I said is that when our terms are let go and you have to rehire off the street, you're back into a training mode. I respect our term employees, our

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, they do.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In some cases I think there is some of that assumption, that they will be kept because of the workload that's there and the number of applications that come in on a daily basis. So there is an assumption that even though they might have signed a letter that--