Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, we interview when we can't satisfy ourselves, without an interview, that a relationship is genuine, that there are no admissibility concerns in the applicant's background, or that there are other factors that would not make them inadmissible under Canada's Immigration and Re

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The short answer to your question is yes, we have quite a comprehensive training program. We also have officers on staff, who have had previous experience on assignment in Pakistan. We have London-based locally engaged staff, who are of an ethnic or religious origin that would be

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, I'm sorry. I don't have that information at hand, but will undertake to provide that to you as soon as possible.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's difficult to answer a question like this, because there are so many variables involved. It may be that there are variations in the population that affect processing times in one region as opposed to another. There may be variations in our ability to use technology, because w

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the opportunity to address that issue. When the spousal cases were transferred to London back in 2014, some of those cases were already quite old in terms of the time they had sat in inventory. They weren't left behind; it simply was difficult for us to process the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In the case of the London files, we actually don't interview that often. We may, if there is a complex legal case or a legal element that has to be addressed or if there are issues surrounding the guardianship of children, but we don't interview often with respect to questions re

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Roughly, it's about 15%.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's in our family class priority categories. In the case of parents and grandparents, for example, we rarely, if ever, interview.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, you'll appreciate that I can't comment on a situation that is occurring with a caseload that I'm not involved in. I can tell you that in the case of Pakistan, we know there are some challenges in working with host country officials. We do our best to do verifications a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chairman, perhaps we could have a fuller explanation of what's meant by “blended family”.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would comment that our officers are well trained to interpret and apply the act and regulations as they're written. As far as making changes goes, I personally don't have any recommendations to make. I am aware that, back in 2010, a change was made to simplify that regulation a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If I may respond, Mr. Chair, it might be more efficient if we were able to provide this information in a consolidated fashion separately.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We haven't used that technique in the case of our Islamabad office. We find that, although technology works well in some locations in the world, it doesn't work well equally. We've just found it more effective to conduct interviews in person. As I mentioned, we send officers fou

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm afraid that I really can't give you a reliable answer to that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The calculation of how much work is involved with individual cases is actually quite complex. The straightforward cases can be processed with fewer resources than the more complex ones. We also have something that is uncontrollable that we have to factor into our workloads every