Citizenship and Immigration committee  In general, family class applications have a very high approval rate, so I am sorry to hear that you have a number of instances of what you believe are disingenuous refusals. We do request a lot of documents, and if we are not satisfied, if the officers making the decision in th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As part of the fall economic statement, the department was given several million dollars in order to work on processing times and backlogs, and a significant portion of this money is being dedicated to reducing the TRV backlog, particularly as it pertains to files coming out of I

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can respond, Madam Chair. Chinook is a processing tool, and advanced analytics are different entities. Chinook is simply a triage tool that we use to pull information from GCMS. An officer says, “I would like to pull information X Y, and Z” and then puts it in an easy to read

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Thank you for the question, Madam Chair. Absolutely, for each of our advanced analytic lines of business there is a decision tree chart, as it were, and a governance structure. It would be different depending on the line of business and the type of advanced analytics. We ca

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Depending on the part of the country you are in, you are subject to the same regulations and the same laws when you are applying to come to Canada as a student. You are correct that right now we are seeing higher refusal rates from African countries for those destined to study in

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In terms of switching streams, I do not have those statistics at my fingertips, but what I do know is that overall, approval rates have significantly increased over the past couple of years. I think they are up almost threefold between 2016 and 2019 in terms of approval rates for

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question, and I apologize. I don't think I understood the question correctly. We are committed to a fair and non-discriminatory application of immigration laws. Volumes of temporary resident, visa and study permit applications from Africa have tri

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, there are.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, absolutely, we can get more clarity. However, Madam Chair, I think I misunderstood the question. It is true that African students have a higher refusal rate than other top source countries of students coming to Canada. The most common reasons for refusals include applicants

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Just to be clear, Chinook is a tool that's designed to simplify the visual representation of information that is in GCMS, the global case management system.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Absolutely.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It is simply a system that an officer uses to make a decision. If we were to implement a quality assurance framework, which we have, it is on our officer's decisions. It would not be on the Chinook system itself, because Chinook does not keep any privacy information. It does not

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, absolutely. We can provide the background on the QA. I think that was asked previously by one of the members, so Madam Chair, that would be no problem. In terms of reconsideration of quality assurance decisions, it depends on the line of business. There are different mechan