Citizenship and Immigration committee  The response could be quite long, so I'll pick some of the most unique best practices that we've learned over the years. It starts really with what we learned with our operation for Syrian refugees; that is, that our department now has a better-tuned ability to set up, very quickly, mobile processing centres.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure. There's also one other best practice that we've learned and it's called the hackathon. That's when you allow people, generally younger than me, who actually know computer systems, to sit down and actually—it's very exciting—devise ways to electronically work smarter and faster.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, we can.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, that is done in a completely different processing network.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I suspect there will be in a downstream effort if one were to draw that comparison. However, the most important point of the asylum seekers' experience at this stage, their journey towards possibly being accepted and then into settlement, is to get them as established as quickly as possible to help their settlement into Canadian society.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think I mentioned this last week and I'll just recap overall how we work with our American colleagues and how we are working with our American colleagues. We obviously enjoy a long-standing relationship with the Americans not just on immigration but on other parts of the immigration system, be it law enforcement, citizenship, even in the settlement world, and through non-government organizations.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Certainly. We've been using only IRCC resources. I believe we have brought some people back out of retirement, people who would like to work on a casual basis, but at the end of the day we have.... I'll mention quickly that we have reassigned 87 officers of various nature to Complexe Guy-Favreau and 58 officers to our Peel Street location.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Chair. I can, in fact. At our Complexe Guy-Favreau—that's our mobile temporary processing facility—we have a total of 87 staff, and 49 of those are administrative people, 33 are decision-makers, and there are five supervisors. Clearly, we have extended hours there. When we renovated our existing second floor office on Peel Street—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We did not take staff from any other departments outside IRCC.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can't break that down exactly, though I will say this. We took staff largely from our Montreal, Quebec, operations to surge up Guy-Favreau and Peel Street. But we also took certain decision-makers who had a lot of experience from our western and Ontario offices.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, at this stage we are able to manage with all the resources we have within the department. As I mentioned last week, we are moving individuals around, reassigning people, and taking very much the approach that we have in the overseas context where we send people out on temporary duty for six-week assignments from around our various processing networks.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There's always an impact when you move resources around. However, because we have multiple processing networks, we're able to disperse, and, in effect, diffuse any of the impacts. I've pulled some of the processing numbers and in fact our processing numbers are maintaining steady for different lines of business.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thus far we have around 13,000 what you would call “irregular arrivals” at ports of entry.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's roughly around 13,000, grand total.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Essentially, there are three different ways people come into Canada that add up to the grand total. If you take the grand total, around 34,000 right now—it changes every day, as you know—about 14,000 individuals have come through regular ports of entry, as well as airports, marine ports, and so on.