Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll be careful. Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I am pleased to have the opportunity to join you today for the first time. Since late September, I have held the position of Deputy Minister at the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. I do not have an

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question. I'd just say that the process of moving out.... It is a contractual arrangement we have with these visa application centres. This is a model that has been used by a number of other countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The intention of the government is to actually move forward with the expression of interest system in early 2015. I think the government has indicated January 2015, so we are actually putting in place the systems and managing our workload inventory in such a manner that we would

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, the efforts that we've made to date have basically reduced the inventory by almost 50%, so we actually have been making headway with the inventory of parent and grandparent applications. The government has also announced additional funding of $44 million over two years

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I may ask my colleagues to join in. As I said, I certainly witnessed first-hand the benefits of the visa application centres. Certainly, we will be in many more locations than we could possibly be in our own missions abroad. From a client service point of view, there's a very ri

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question. Just for clarification, the transfer from the Canada Border Services Agency in the supplementary estimates is basically a cost from decommissioning an old, what we called, field operation support system, and integrating it fully with our global case m

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If I can just clarify, Mr. Chair, the majority of refugee claimants and successful refugees continue to qualify for services, for hospital and doctor services. The intention of the program was that services and benefits should not be provided at a level more than Canadians would

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If they're a rejected claimant. That's unless, as I say, there are public health or public safety issues. We understand that with any kind of a transition in a program it can create confusion about what services are covered, what benefits are covered. To respond to that, we actu

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Could I just add to that? Under the government's evaluation policy as directed and guided by Treasury Board, every department is required to perform evaluations. That certainly was an activity of the department well before 2011 in an ongoing process whereby we evaluate each indiv

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, normally when you have an interdepartmental initiative involving a number of departments, usually at the outset of the initiative it's clearly determined at the policy stage which department is the lead department. Part of that process, both on the policy process and a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It should. Every department should report on its programs in terms of the DPR, and the performance achieved.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The nature of the contracts that we have for the visa application centres, in fact, includes very stringent provisions related to the protection of information, the management of information, and the security of that information. So we have to be satisfied that the contractor has

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not aware of that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The commitment that the government made to parents and grandparents was to admit 50,000 over a two-year period. At this point in time, our indications on where we are to date are that we are on track to meeting 50,000 over that two-year period. As I say, you have to look at it

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As I responded earlier, the commitment is to 50,000 over two years, and we are confident that certainly the number of admissions in 2013 will lead to a 50,000 commitment over that two-year period.