:
This is the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, meeting number 34, on Monday, November 29, 2010. The orders of the day are pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), a study of the 2010 fall report of the Auditor General of Canada, chapter 3, “Service Delivery at the Department of the Citizenship and Immigration Canada”. The second hour will be pursuant to Standing Order 32(5), the annual report to Parliament on immigration, 2010, referred to the committee on Monday, November 1, 2010.
We have some guests with us today, some witnesses on the Auditor General's report. I understand the Auditor General is out of the country or at least unavailable. We have Sylvain Ricard, who is the assistant auditor general, and Glenn Wheeler, who is the principal. Welcome to you.
Also at the table are officials from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration.
My understanding, Monsieur Ricard, is that you will give a short presentation. Then we will open it up for questions, which could include officials from the department.
Oh, they're going to do one, too. Okay. Well, then I will continue introducing you.
We have Neil Yeates, the deputy minister, Claudette Deschênes, the assistant deputy minister of operations, and Les Linklater, the assistant deputy minister, strategic and program policy.
So you're going to make a presentation, too. Well, that's good.
Monsieur Ricard, the floor is yours.
:
Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss chapter 3 of our 2010 fall report, service delivery. Joining me at the table is Glenn Wheeler, Principal, who was responsible for the audit.
All Canadians require the services of the federal government at one time or another, and research indicates that they expect high quality service. At the same time, the government must balance clients' needs with policy requirements and available resources.
Our audit looked at the practices used by three organizations —Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, and the Canada Revenue Agency —to set their service standards, monitor and report on their service performance, and act on this information to improve service quality.
[English]
We found that two organizations we examined, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency, have adequate practices in place to manage their service delivery, while a third, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, has yet to establish service standards for some of its major programs. We appreciate that the committee would like to focus today on the portion of the audit that examines Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
The department has been working to develop service standards since 2007. In April 2010 the department published a preliminary set of service standards and associated targets for four business signs. This set of standards is very limited, considering that the department provides more than 35 different services. There are no standards for some major services, for example, the citizenship program.
Without a complete set of standards, the department cannot comprehensively evaluate its service performance and may not be able to ensure a consistent level of service to its clients. In the absence of standards, the department was using operational data such as intake, output, processing time, and inventories to provide some indication of performance.
We recommend that the department ensure that all channels of communication provide consistent information on the time it takes to process applications for citizenship and requests for citizenship certificates, that it establish and communicate a comprehensive set of service standards for all key services it delivers, that it monitor and report on its service performance against these standards, and that it collect and analyze client feedback and complaints to identify systemic service issues.
[Translation]
The department has developed an action plan in response to our recommendation. In particular, we note that it plans to develop a comprehensive set of service standards and to begin reporting externally on them by spring 2013.
Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions. Thank you.
:
Good morning, Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Neil Yeates and I am Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
[English]
I'm accompanied by Claudette Deschênes and Les Linklater.
[Translation]
I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to speak today on the findings of chapter 3 in the Auditor General's report.
[English]
First, simply to make it clear, the department does agree with the Auditor General's recommendations related to adopting service standards and more generally improving service delivery. As the Auditor General observed in her report, the department has already taken some steps to improve our services to the public, both in Canada and overseas. But I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out to the committee that it is challenging for CIC to introduce timely service standards for business lines where we have no control over intake.
Our immigration plan sets limits on how many applications we will process in a year; however, in many immigration streams there is no limit on the number of people who can apply. We receive high volumes of applications, processing capacity is limited, and the levels plan determines, ultimately, how many people can be admitted each year. This can result in long delays while cases wait for active processing and it makes it difficult to set timely service standards.
I would also like to note that each case is processed on an individual basis in full accordance with the law. In order to ensure applications are processed accurately and fairly, this can take longer in some cases. Errors or incomplete information in forms, missing information, or other inconsistencies can cause further delays in processing a case. Despite these challenges, CIC remains committed to improving its services to applicants and our processing times. Indeed, we've made some recent progress.
This year, CIC piloted initiatives that have shortened processing times for business visitors and many students through the business express program and the student partners program. It also accelerated processing of sponsorship applications from Canadian citizens and permanent residents who had close family members who were significantly affected by the earthquake in Haiti. As well, the global case management system, GCMS, is currently being rolled out overseas, and it will be implemented in all overseas missions by the end of March 2011. This will improve CIC's processing efficiencies, since staff will have access to an applicant's information in one integrated system.
[Translation]
In addition to improving our processing times, we have expanded our online services and increased the use of online applications, in order to provide more accessible and efficient services.
Our goal is to make it easier for people to apply online, by helping applicants overcome the often confusing information overload that may lead some to seek the services of an immigration consultant.
[English]
Expanding our online services has significantly improved the application process by providing more accessible and efficient services, and CIC intends to make all types of applications available online in the future. The department is also developing video tutorials that provide step-by-step instructions on completing application forms. We expect these videos will help increase the efficiency in processing applications, since they will help reduce the number of errors on the forms.
Our online services are now also available on a mobile site. This enables applicants to access our services whenever they are on the move, wherever they are in the world, and whenever is most convenient for them. Indeed, we are committed to establishing an online relationship between applicants and CIC through the use of electronic accounts, application forms, and status updates. This means we would be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The department has also entered the foray of social media to further engage applicants and the broader public. Through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, we've begun an ongoing dialogue with the public about our policies and programs. We are also publishing the most current processing times on the CIC website for applications in all immigration categories. This provides applicants with access to the most accurate and timely information available.
[Translation]
Despite making information more easily accessible for applicants, we understand that members of Parliament are often approached by their constituents for information on the status of their application. And CIC is looking to improve its immigration reference document intended specifically for senators and MPs.
By engaging applicants in an online relationship, CIC is empowering applicants and we are also improving our online services in other ways. For example, we are developing an interactive online tool that matches individuals with the immigration option that best suits them.
[English]
Based on the recommendations from the OAG's report, CIC also began work this year to improve our collection and analysis of feedback and complaints from applicants, and through our website we've begun online consultations on our current service standards to understand applicants' perceptions of these and the CIC's service declaration. We will also launch a survey of applicants by the end of this fiscal year, and the results should be available next year.
The results will inform future work on improving our service standards and setting new ones. We plan to report on these results publicly.
This year we introduced service declaration and service standards for four services, and we will implement a second phase of service standards on April 1, 2011. The second phase will incorporate the lessons learned so far, together with feedback from applicants from the implementation of phase 1 on April 1, 2010.
These are some of the ways we are working to improve service and address the Auditor General's recommendations. Ultimately, we aim to improve service standards for all of our key business lines.
I would be happy to respond to any questions you may have.
Thank you.
In my riding, I get approached, as many MPs do, by an awful lot of people who are unable to find out where their application is and how it's being processed. I explain to them that the reason they haven't heard back from CIC, or from the embassy, is that nothing has changed in their file. I usually add that if CIC had someone there to answer all the letters and requests for information that are sent in, there would be fewer people working on their files.
That sort of reflection leads me to wonder, and hopefully the people from the Auditor General's office can inform me, if not the others.... I like the idea of service standards. Who wouldn't want to make sure that Canadians and people interacting with the Government of Canada are getting the best quality of service possible? But given that there isn't any significant extra funding for improving service standards, where is the line between...? Are we actually going to improve service delivery? Will we be processing people's applications quicker by investing in service standards? That's what I'd like to hear from you all. Are we making things better for applicants? Will it be faster? Will it be more efficient for them once we have a better quality of engagement?
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to all of you for being here today.
In your report, as far as the audit is concerned, you raised the issue of consistency of service and the information which is provided, whether that information is provided online, on the phone, or by letter. I could not find any detailed information on whether you examined the consistency of services provided abroad. You talked about the various service points throughout the world.
As members of Parliament, we have several concerns, including this one: depending on the embassy we deal with in a given country, the information we are given will be more or less transparent, and the ease, speed and quality might vary, as well as the quality of the service we receive.
Is this simply a false perception on the part of members of Parliament? In other words, it seems that the service we receive varies greatly from one CIC office to the next, depending on where it is located. Perhaps you have also looked at this issue and concluded that the services provided throughout the world are uneven.
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That's a very good question, and it is actually what we're looking at right now.
In our processing centre in Sydney, Nova Scotia, we do the initial intake for the federal skilled worker program. They do the front-end processing of all the cases to determine the initial eligibility.
We're now looking at whether we should be taking a certain type of those cases to final approval here in Canada in Sydney, rather than sending them back to the mission. If we do a bit of a triage by risk, that would allow us to sort cases in that way.
That's a very germane question, as we try to sort our way through our business in how we might reorganize the processing in our network around the world.
As committee members probably know, we are rolling out our new case management system, GCMS. It allows us to share the workload electronically and seamlessly around the world. Up to now, we've had to ship paper files around the world, which, as members can imagine, is very time consuming, expensive, and slow.
Chair, probably the biggest single factor for us as a department on the permanent immigration side is that, by and large, we do not control intake in terms of the number of applications to our programs, whereas on the output side, our annual levels plan determines how many people we will actually admit.
With an open-ended application system, it means we may get wide variations in demand for different parts of our program. That may far exceed the number of applicants we are able to allow to come into the country in any given year. That's probably the single biggest factor.
However, there are others. There are issues in different parts of the world dealing with security clearances, for example, where that may be a very significant issue. Those cases go to the RCMP and to CSIS. Depending on their complexity, they may take quite some time to be reviewed before they would come back to us for further processing. We also deal with health issues. All immigrants require an immigrant medical exam, to be cleared medically before they can come here. Again, in different parts of the world that may take quite some time to actually be available.
Fourth, and this was referred to earlier, it is going to depend on the individuals and how quickly they respond. We may issue instructions to a client to go and get a medical. The client might not do it at all, or they may take six months to do it. We don't know. We might remind them after a period of time, and we might close their file after a period of time if they haven't followed up.
So all of those are the kinds of factors that affect how quickly we deal with processing.
Chair, the global case management system is replacing a number of what we would call legacy systems. As members probably know, historically we have been a very paper-based system, in terms of the way we deal with files, and if you visit some of the missions around the world, you will see this enormous amount of paper, once you get inside the working part of the embassy.
GCMS is basically going to dramatically reduce the amount of paper that we need to deal with. It will allow us to shift workload seamlessly around the world, what we call our global network in Canada--missions around the world--and it will allow us to do that with a great deal of confidence that stuff is entered into our system only once, and then it can be accessed by users from around the world. We think the potential for efficiency gains there are huge, but they will also be more accurate. GCMS also allows us to do searches and things that we were not able to do before. To give an example, Chair, we're able to search common addresses. This is where we've come across residence fraud in citizenship applications. We've had 300 people claiming the same address. It was very, very difficult to make that kind of connection under all of the disparate systems we had before.
It's a very powerful system, from an information management point of view, but also very powerful from an individual case processing point of view, as was referenced earlier.
One other thing--
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I just wanted to make sure.
I'd like to ask Mr. Ricard a question.
You said, in your case study on Haiti, that the department had indicated that thanks to special measures that were passed, Canada had taken in, as of April 1, 2010, over 2,100 Haitians, more than 200 of which were children. That means that between January 12, when disaster struck, and April 1, Canada had welcomed 2,100 Haitians.
Is that actually what you found? Are these applications Canada received and assessed pursuant to the special measures?
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They were in the system and we were awaiting final authorization.
We really focused on cases that were already in the system. When those cases were dealt with, we then started working on others. In most of your ridings, people had not sent in applications. The first thing they had to do was therefore to obtain authorization from the Government of Quebec pursuant to the special program.
We only started receiving applications in the summer. Until October 29, we were receiving new applications. There are 1,137 people in the system including 167 for which documents were issued and 52 that settled in Canada.
Most of these applications only arrived in July, August and September. We are currently processing them, but the family class cases remain our priority. By definition, the cases from Quebec that were welcomed were not within the federal government's family class.
Thanks to all of you for being here, because then you answer some of the questions.
I visited Beijing, Hong Kong, and Manila. I had lengthy meetings with our CIC officials on site and listened to their challenges, because we're always asked why it takes so long for processing from those places.
Incomplete applications are definitely one of the challenges. Also some of the places are in far-off islands or vast areas. It's very difficult to have them even come back to the offices. There are also the challenges of documentation because of fraud. That has probably made it even more complicated.
There are also cases where the applicant overseas actually really doesn't want to come yet. For some, the husbands, whose wives are working here, don't seem to want to come that fast. That is another challenge, that they will take time; they don't even want to respond yet.
There is also the medical examination. That's why some of our officials, for student visas, actually advise the students to take the medical exam anyway during the process, so they don't have to wait too long to come back.
My question is, what other major initiatives are you working on where we can anticipate seeing client improvements over the next few years?
You did mention quite a bit about the global case management system, but you didn't quite finish on that. So I'll ask you, Mr. Yeates, to comment further on that. In one case, we caught 28 marriage applications from the same small village in China. That's probably one of the things.
I can elaborate a bit further on some of the other things we're doing.
We've noted that we did publish a service declaration this spring. We also published the first set of service standards on exemptions for labour market opinions, on family class sponsorships, new permanent resident cards, and grants and contributions. So those are in place now, and we're monitoring those and will be reporting on those shortly.
We've also put in place e-mail feedback forms in each of the missions and on our website. We have redone the website. We did receive feedback from clients indicating that it was difficult to find correct information on the website, so we have redone it and updated it, and we'll continue to do that on an ongoing basis.
We also continue, in some of our specialized business lines, to seek very direct feedback from the people we are working with.
So we've basically broadened the scope of how we interact and bring information in from clients. I mentioned the broader survey we'll be doing later on this year.
On GCMS, Chair, as has been noted, the capability of the system does allow us to identify common addresses, the common use of consultants, say in mailing addresses; there is the issue of ghost consultants, which is a big issue around the world. That can be triggered when we see the use of a common mailing address. When that starts to appear a lot, you know people are using a consultant, whether that's declared or not. So the new system does have a lot of that kind of capacity, and it's really improving our fraud detection and prevention.
As has been noted, in some countries around the world, relationships of convenience, marriages of convenience, as they're called, false documentation--all those kinds of things are kind of endemic to what goes on in some of those countries. The information system is very helpful in making that much more readily obvious.
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I do. Thank you, Chair.
Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen.
[English]
I'd like to thank you again for inviting us here on the annual report to Parliament for 2010. As committee members will know, Canada has one of the most ambitious immigration programs in the world. The 2011 levels plan is broadly consistent with the 2009 and 2010 plans. We're planning to welcome between 240,000 and 265,000 new immigrants, supporting both our long-term economic needs and the shorter needs in our period of economic recovery.
At the same time, we'll be maintaining our commitment to family reunification and refugees, and we have raised the admission ranges for spouses, children, and refugees.
[Translation]
Today I wish to speak to how the department has developed a more responsive and flexible economic immigration program, as well as to how we have improved the overall efficiency and responsiveness of our immigration and refugee programs.
[English]
We are committed to finding new ways to meeting our immediate and longer-term labour market needs by attracting and retaining the most qualified and skilled workers that employers require. One of the actions we have introduced is a new avenue of immigration called the Canadian experience class. It was introduced in the fall of 2008. The CEC provides a pathway to permanent residence for certain skilled temporary foreign workers and international students with Canadian degrees and work experience. Because students and temporary foreign workers are spread broadly across Canada, the Canadian experience class is expected to distribute immigration across Canada more evenly.
We've also expanded the provincial nominee programs, which allow provinces and territories to address regional labour market needs by nominating workers for permanent residence. The PNP is intended to share the benefits of immigration across Canada. Twenty-five percent of economic immigrants are now destined for outside Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec, compared to only 11% in 1997. Admissions under this program have also more than tripled since 2005, and in 2009 alone, more than 30,000 provincial nominees and their families came to Canada. Currently, the number of provincial nominations is aligned with the request of all jurisdictions, and we anticipate slightly higher PNP admissions in 2011. Building on these achievements, amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act were introduced in November 2008 as part of the action plan for faster immigration. The action plan is a comprehensive series of improvements designed to speed up the processing of applications and make Canada's immigration system more closely aligned with and responsive to labour market needs. It included the first set of ministerial instructions for processing, on a priority basis, new federal skilled worker applicants who have the skills Canada needs.
[Translation]
Mr. Chair, these are just some of the ways we have made our economic immigration program more flexible and responsive to our labour market needs.
The action plan also entails a series of administrative measures to help draw down the backlog and decrease processing time of applications, and it has already reduced the backlog of federal skilled workers.
[English]
As of September 2010, the backlog of federal skilled worker applications has been reduced by 47%, and processing times have dramatically improved. l'm pleased to report to the committee that 80% of all final decisions on applications received since November 2008 are being made within 12 months or less. In June 2010, the minister introduced new instructions. As with the first set, the objectives for the new ministerial instructions are to allow CIC to keep the intake of applications in line with our processing capacity, to reduce application backlogs and processing times, and to respond to key national labour market needs.
The new ministerial instructions also introduced a cap on the number of new federal skilled worker applications that will be considered for processing. A cap is a key step towards making our immigration system more modern and responsive, since it allows CIC to better align application intake with our processing capacity and labour market demand. To improve and expedite the processing of applications in all categories, we are currently considering a number of options to move forward with the use of biometrics for immigration purposes. Given the growing prevalence and sophistication in identity theft and identity fraud, the use of biometrics is also necessary to reduce abuse and ensure the safety and security of Canadians.
This past year we also continued to uphold our long-standing and proud humanitarian tradition by offering protection in Canada to more than 22,000 refugees in 2009, including more than 12,000 refugees resettled from abroad. Working with the international community, we resettled close to 1,000 Bhutanese in 2009 as part of our multi-year commitment to bring to Canada up to 5,000 Bhutanese refugees who have been living in UN camps in Nepal. In response to ongoing appeals for additional resettlement support to the displaced Iraqi population, we resettled more than 4,000 Iraqi refugees last year. In addition, we pursued reforms to improve Canada's asylum system, culminating in the introduction in March 2010 and subsequent passage into law in June 2010 of the Balanced Refugee Reform Act. The act's implementation will mean faster protection for those who truly need it and quicker removal of those who do not.
[Translation]
I am also pleased to report that the Citizenship Study Guide, Discover Canada, has become one of the government of Canada's most in demand publications. Since it was launched in November 2009, almost 300,000 copies were requested from CIC and a special audio version of the guide, made available in April, has received more than 122,000 visits.
Finally, I am pleased that we will soon see the first results from the Pan-Canadian Framework for the Assessment and Recognition of Foreign Qualifications. In December, processes will be in place to assess, within one year of application, credentials for 10 regulated occupations, including registered nurses, engineers and pharmacists.
[English]
Chair, those are some of the ways we've developed a more responsive and flexible economic immigration program. The department will continue to explore ways to improve the flexibility, responsiveness, and efficiency of our immigration and refugee systems.
Thank you. I'd be pleased to answer any questions you might have.
It interests me, though, that of 7,000 accepted and identified as refugees, we have more than half that number of family members brought over. That's obviously a very significant number, and a path where, in many cases, one person who comes to Canada is trying to bring over their family that is in a similar situation.
Thank you for clarifying that the immigration stream is entirely independent of the refugee stream. I think that's something that is important to have on record here.
I'll pass it for now. Thank you.
In your statement, you touched on accomplishments over the past few years and indicated what is coming in future. Among other things, you referred to the refugee issue. You mentioned that this Parliament had adopted the Balanced Refugee Reform Act in March 2010, a matter in which this committee was actively involved. There was, in fact, unanimous consensus on the issue.
I remember very well all the work that had been ongoing for a long time. I gathered that the department had been working on the issue for a very long time. You had informed us, during your various appearances before this committee, of the ideas that you intended to present. We were entitled to some rather detailed briefings. The department was really prepared and we could see where it was heading.
The House is currently examining Bill . We have not seen anything about this bill and we have yet to have any briefings that are as detailed as those we were given previously. I know that you cannot discuss the political aspect. The minister will answer questions on that issue.
What prompted the department to say that, yes, Parliament needs to adopt this bill and provide for these special measures for people who arrive in groups?
:
Certainly, Chair. Maybe I will start, and then ADM Linklater can carry on.
As members know, the bill received royal assent in early July, so we've now been working hard with our partners at CSIS, the RCMP, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Public Safety to implement the new regime.
As you know, as members, it's a very complicated system. There's a whole series of things that we're working on: updated regulations, new rules at the Immigration and Refugee Board.... They're starting consultations on that, by the way. New staff are being hired. The IRB is moving from governor-in-council appointees, as you would know, to civil servant decision-makers. They're finalizing the job descriptions and the staffing strategies for those positions as they set up the RPD, the Refugee Protection Division. They're also setting up the Refugee Appeal Division, which is new. They will be GIC appointees, so they're working on the strategy for getting that up and running. We're working on the interoperability of all of our computer systems between the different agencies, because there are some improvements we need to make there.
In CIC, we are coordinating this effort between all of these partner departments. We're working on trying to reduce the backlog for our humanitarian and compassionate cases and for our pre-removal risk assessment cases as well.
Those are simply a few of the components that are in train for this very complex set of machinery that is the refugee determination system.
I want to follow up a little bit on your commitment from 2009, in terms of offering protection to more than 22,000 refugees here, including more than 12,000 who've resettled from abroad. One of the things we did as a government, and it was supported in the House by all opposition parties, was pass Bill , which committed to an additional 2,500 refugees on a yearly basis to our current obligations to the UN.
I do want to get an understanding of this because I think it needs to be clarified. Those refugees, whether they be Bhutanese or whether they be Iraqi, are in fact already approved and it's been indicated, from a UN perspective and from a worldwide perspective, that they are true refugees.
Chair, as members will know, we did do a very major revision of the citizenship guide called “Discover Canada”. It is I think a much more comprehensive document than the previous version, and we redeveloped the citizenship test to match the new guide. It remains a multiple-choice test, but it is more difficult than the previous test. However, if one studies the guide, we wouldn't expect people to have difficulty with it. We are monitoring it quite carefully. We've made some revisions as we go along. We track responses to individual questions, and if we find a question is not hitting the mark, then we go back and look at it, whether it's being adequately covered in the guide or not, whether the question is worded in a way perhaps that people are not understanding in the way we thought they might. We will continue to make those changes as we go along.
The guide itself has proven enormously popular. I referenced that we've sent out hundreds of thousands of copies. It's been downloaded on the web a couple of hundred thousand times. We have an audio guide as well that people can download. It has proven to be immensely popular as well.
We are encouraging its use among teachers and students. We've developed a corner of our website for teachers and students, and the citizenship material is there. As I say, we were surprised at what the public response and the take-up has been to that material.
I'm going to pick up on some of my concerns around the cap, which I alluded to in an earlier question. But first I'd like to get a little clarification on something Mr. Dykstra referred to.
He referred to the UN convention refugees as “true refugees”—the fact that they have been identified and analyzed by the UN. In many cases, as you explained, it has been in protracted situations in horrible circumstances in large refugee camps around the world.
Could you tell me, by Canadian law, for a refugee who is a convention refugee or a refugee who shows up at an airport and declares they are seeking asylum...? Once they've been determined by our Canadian processes to be refugees, is there a difference between a convention refugee and a refugee arriving by boat, by air, by plane?
:
Thank you very much. It is important to get that clear.
On my question about the cap, which I was referring to earlier, the backlog was reduced because...from the time the first directive was brought in narrowing the field of workers, that allowed you a little more leeway to get through the existing backlog without adding to it the same size of backlog. However, here is my concern about the cap. Are we refusing people who simply do not qualify because they're not in the right professional stream, or are we not processing their application because, for example, we've already reached some quota number of engineers from India, so we know we're not going to accept any more, and therefore we turn them away, without actually even looking at their application, even though their application, had it arrived earlier in the year, would have been processed and possibly accepted?
:
Chair, unfortunately, there are elements of all of those in our system. We have the people we would call pre-C-50, so pre-ministerial instructions. That is the big backlog I referenced. There are no occupational restrictions on that. They were all processed according to the points system, and they still will be. We still have 340,000 to go. So that is that group.
“Ministerial instructions 1”, as we refer to them, were the first set of occupations that were identified, and it is true that the uptake for that took a little while to build up, but then it started coming in a flood. The nature of our business is that as soon as you define requirements, everybody races around to try to make their qualifications fit the new requirements we have developed. There was a bit of a lag, but then it started to build very quickly.
That then led us into “Ministerial instructions 2” at the end of June this year. We took another look at the occupation groups with provinces and territories and employers and narrowed it a little bit, but there were some changes up and down. Also, the decision was made to implement a cap on the number of applications at 20,000 a year and 1,000 for any one occupational group. So far we have hit one of those for the year, for people in business management. It's quite a broad occupational group. We find that the broader the group, the more quickly it gets filled.
We'll see how that goes. We'll continue to monitor it, but we still have a large cadre of that, if you like, open-ended group, the 340,000, to draw from. We have been encouraging provinces and others to draw from that group because there are lots of good candidates in that group.
:
Biometrics, which is essentially the collection of fingerprint data and digital photographs, often using facial recognition software, is a very powerful identifier of identity, and it's very difficult to fool a biometric system.
You may have seen some of the cases in the media from time to time, the most recent example being the fellow from China who used a silicone mask--very creative on his part. But it's very difficult to fool a biometric system because it's your fingerprints that are going to be registered. It's a very powerful technology. It's being used by a number of other countries. It's already been implemented by the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.
We are working on rolling out, in a phased approach, over the next several years, a regime of biometric collection. We already do it for refugees. We do share information on a pilot basis with our partners, particularly the U.S. We are finding a fairly significant match rate with the U.S. It's about 43% on claimants, so it's quite high. Where people are claiming different identities and so on, biometrics is able to sort them out. So it's a very powerful tool.