Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, I'd be happy to do that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Biometrics has proven itself over the years since it has been implemented by some of our partner countries. It's a way of anchoring an identity by matching certain biometric information, such as a photograph, fingerprints, or an iris scan, to biographical information like name, d

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It certainly allows information to be manipulated electronically, and to be shared across the network and accessible at many locations at the same time.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are possibilities for sharing information. There are certain elements of information that are shared now with other countries, most notably among the Five Country Conference partners: Canada, U.S., U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. I'm sure there are other possibilities t

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I have to admit that I'm not fully briefed on that initiative. I do know that in other countries where it's been used, and I'd assume it would be a similar sort of process in Canada, it's a way of establishing and verifying someone's identity before they get onto an aircraft or b

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The more confidence an official can have in the identity of an individual in front of them—confidence in knowing who that person is, in knowing that person's background and whether there is criminality in their past—and the more accessible that information is, the more reliable i

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. My name is Sharon Chomyn, and I am the director general of the international region. I'm pleased to appear before you today to talk about the security of Canada's immigration system and the important role our visa offices p

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the PNP applications will benefit from the same changes we are making to the larger processing machinery. As I mentioned last time I appeared before the committee, we have a modernization agenda we are rolling out quite enthusiastically, which will allow us to move work t

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can talk about some of the issues that have come up in the overseas context, but as David mentioned in the course of his contribution, the approval rate of these types of applications is 97%. It's really a very successful program from the perspective of being a streamlined move

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for that question. I represent the part of the department that's responsible for turning applications into visas, or at least we're responsible for the processing that's involved. We receive our target allocations, which we then communicate to the missions for their

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There's not a backlog overall. For example, next year—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No. What I mean is there can be faster and slower processing times at different missions, so there may be an inventory that's building up in a particular visa office, but nowhere near to the magnitude that exists in some of the other lines of business. Right now we're looking a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. I'm monopolizing everyone's time today, and I apologize for that, but I'd like to answer your question. The department is actually in the middle of a major modernization process in which we're looking at the technology that we use to process applications. We're looki

Citizenship and Immigration committee  This is something that we control from headquarters. There is a portion of the budget that's set aside every year for temporary duty assignments. These are officers we send overseas for a period of several weeks at a time, as opposed to officers who are stationed overseas for yea

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not a policy-maker. I represent a group that delivers policy as it's designed by the department and on the instructions of the minister. The eligibility requirements set out for this visa include the ability on the part of the sponsor or the host to support a parent, and the