:
Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.
My name is Les Linklater. I am the Assistant Deputy Minister for Strategic and Program Policy at Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Joining me today is Claudette Deschênes, Assistant Deputy Minister for Operations at CIC.
You have undertaken a study regarding application backlogs and the wait times applicants face. We are pleased to be here today to speak to you about these issues.
[English]
As you know, Canada's immigration program is guided by a balanced plan, tabled in Parliament each fall, which establishes the total number of permanent resident admissions Canada expects to welcome in the upcoming calendar year. The levels plan also sets out the planned ranges for admissions in each category of permanent resident. In other words, the levels plan limits how many people we can welcome to Canada each year.
Most years we receive many more applications than can be processed. But again, it's the levels plan that establishes how many people can come in, not processing capacity. This results in the accumulation of backlogs in some categories, which in turn has led to long wait times for some applicants, particularly in the family class.
Canada's family class is one of the most generous definitions of family in the world for immigrant-receiving countries. The fact that we even allow parents and grandparents to be sponsored is proof of this, and sets us apart from virtually every other country in the world. Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom all have more restrictive policies in place than Canada for parents, and grandparents are only allowed to immigrate under exceptional circumstances.
In Australia, where no provisions exist for grandparents, applicants can pay for faster processing. Those who don't pay can expect to wait approximately ten years. Even for those who do pay, inventories are growing and wait times are getting longer.
In the U.K., only fully dependent parents over the age of 65 can be sponsored, and only about 1,000 are admitted each year. New Zealand allows grandparents to be sponsored, but only if the sponsor's parents are deceased. Wait times there range between 24 and 30 months.
In the United States, only citizens can sponsor, but the minimum income to do so is 125% of the poverty line. Grandparents cannot be sponsored.
[Translation]
Canada, by contrast, admits between 15,000 and 18,000 parents and grandparents every year—more than Australia, New Zealand and the UK combined.
[English]
Ours is a generous system, but this generosity comes at a cost, because in the parents and grandparents category there are currently about 165,000 people with applications in process. In fact, we have enough parent and grandparent applicants for seven years, and this problem is getting worse.
Altogether, as of June 30 there were slightly fewer than one million people awaiting a decision across all categories, and more continue to join the queue daily. Significant resources are required to manage the backlog, and implementing reasonable service standards is difficult, as long wait times in many categories continue to grow.
In light of this imbalance between the number of applications we receive and the number of people we can accept, CIC has begun to take steps to limit the intake of applications. You will recall that until 2008 there was no mechanism in place to manage the inflow of applications. Everyone who applied joined the queue, and the Government of Canada had an obligation to provide a decision, yes or no, to each one of those applicants on whether to issue a permanent resident visa.
Budget 2008 changed that. It introduced amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that became law in April 2008. Those amendments provided the minister with the authority to issue ministerial Instructions that allow the minister to limit intake to align with CIC's capacity to process applications in a reasonable timeframe.
[Translation]
Simply put, new applications that do not meet the criteria of the instructions do not have to be processed to a decision and fees are refunded to applicants.
It should be noted that the legislation specifies that the instructions cannot be applied to the refugees category or to humanitarian and compassionate requests made from within Canada.
[English]
Thus far, this authority has been used three times, and only in the economic class. The first set of ministerial instructions was issued in November 2008 under the action plan for faster immigration. These instructions applied only to federal skilled workers who had to have experience in one of 38 in-demand occupations to be eligible to apply, have an arranged employment offer, or had been legally resident in Canada for at least a year as a temporary foreign worker or international student.
The second set of instructions was issued in June 2010. It refined the occupation list and introduced a limit of 20,000 on the number of new applications without employment offers that will be considered in the federal skilled worker category each year. That was followed this past June by a lower limit of 10,000 in the third set of instructions, which also limited intake of applications to the federal immigrant investor program and introduced a temporary moratorium on federal entrepreneur program applications.
Combined, they have allowed the department to focus on the applications already in process, and we have indeed made significant progress towards our action plan for faster immigration goals.
At the end of the second quarter of 2011, the backlog of federal skilled worker applicants who applied before February 2008 stood at slightly fewer than 314,000 people. This is a reduction of more than 50% from the peak of almost 641,000 in February 2008.
It's true that because of the unexpected high volume of new federal skilled worker applications we received under the first set of ministerial instructions before intake limits introduced numerical caps, CIC still has a sizable inventory in that group of some 140,000 individuals. Combined with the pre-2008 backlog, this will take some time to eliminate. But the good news is that people who apply now are being processed within six to twelve months.
[Translation]
So, since 2008, there is a mechanism that allows us to control the number of new applications. As that is reduced, backlogs and wait times improve because normal processing gradually reduces the total number in the queue. This works whether admissions stay the same or increase. If admissions increase, it happens faster.
It will still take some time to process the remaining applications. How long exactly will depend on a number of factors, such as: the number that are processed through referrals to provinces and territories, and the number of immigrants we admit every year according to the annual immigration levels plan.
[English]
I would point out that the federal government works closely with the provinces and territories to develop the levels plan. Many factors are taken into consideration, including the impact on health care costs and the capacity to help newcomers settle and integrate into their communities.
Looking to the future, Mr. Chair, our experience shows that the number of new applicants coming into the system every year needs to be more actively managed. Simply hiring more officers won't solve the problem, because in the absence of controls, applications accumulate, wait times lengthen, and service standards deteriorate.
The key lesson learned is that effective management of the number of new applications we receive is critical to reducing backlogs and improving wait times.
In closing, Mr. Chair, let me say that CIC strives to process applications in a timely manner. We would like to make our way through the backlog as quickly as possible, and we are concerned about the time that people are spending waiting.
Ultimately, it is in everyone's best interest to get people out of the lineup and into the labour market, reunited with their families, or enjoying the protections and freedoms that Canada offers as quickly as possible.
[Translation]
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We are now ready to take any questions that you may have.
:
I will begin by telling you that I do not know the name of the system in French. The Global Case Management System, or GCMS, is the system that is presently in place abroad and that we are trying to put in place in Canada. The system will allow us to examine cases differently. At the present time, we examine them from beginning to end in one and the same place. For example, if a case is being dealt within a given post, then it is that post that will deal with it from beginning to end.
This new system will allow us to decide what must be done in-house by the post and what could be done in a centralized location. It will also allow us to have at our disposal, at the very outset, much more information about the applicant. For example, in the case of an individual who enters as a student and later becomes an immigrant and then a citizen, we will be able to shorten the processing time and reduce the work to be done by an officer.
Secondly, we are working on electronic application systems. At present, we have 2D bar code applications thanks to which public servants do not have to fill in all of the data fields. It is the applicant who does this and the data is then automatically entered into our system. We are moving towards e-applications and e-storage, which will allow us to have in our system the information contained in the documents provided by the applicant. We will then be in a position to follow up.
For example, if I am here in Ottawa, I would be able to see the file of an applicant just as easily as someone in Beijing might be able to do so. As things now stand, visitor requests from China are created in Ottawa in order to facilitate the work. However, this worldwide system will soon allow us to work virtually 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in order to accelerate processing and provide better service to clients. But we are not quite there yet. There remain several things to be done, but we already have the platform that will allow us to do this.
Let me give you a very concrete example. Let us say that there is an individual wishing to apply for a visitor visa. But because of this individual’s occupation, he or she must travel to another country. In the first country, let us say Iran, we can process the application and approve it. That person can then go to our consulate in Washington to retrieve the visa.
This technology will therefore allow us to do much more than what we are able to do now.
:
I would say that with the human capital model that's been in place since 2002, we have seen considerable increases and improvements in the outcomes for federal skilled workers, whose performance had been declining prior to that.
We've actually completed an evaluation, which is on our website, of the federal skilled worker program. Actually, our backlogs were helpful in terms of the methodology for the evaluation. We were bringing in people at the same time into the same labour market conditions, people who had been selected both under the previous occupations-based grid and the human capital model.
The evaluation has proven that those who are selected for their higher levels of official language ability and higher levels of education, and especially those who are coming to a job lined up with an employer, tend to do exceedingly well. In fact, they exceed average earnings of their Canadian-born counterparts within three years.
So we would see that things have changed fairly dramatically. With the action plan and some of the changes that have been put in place more recently, such as mandatory third party language testing, we've seen improvements in terms of our ability to process more efficiently. Applicants no longer have the opportunity to provide us with a written submission, which does not really tell the visa officer how well the individual comprehends or is able to express themselves in English or French. With third-party language testing, we now get results around the four dimensions of reading, writing, comprehension, and expression.
This is done in a secure way. It allows us to have more confidence in the language ability of the individuals we're selecting. They're doing that before they actually apply as skilled workers, so the completed application is coming to us much more readily than was the case in the past.
My colleague alluded to the fact that this has helped improve the efficiency of processing. Ultimately it will improve their outcomes further as we have a better measure of their official language ability.
:
I broke down the numbers, because the most recent numbers that you provided are for the first three months of 2011, January to March 31. For the time before February 27, 2008, you've processed 3,139 applications. I'm just working with the reduction in your working inventory numbers. Those are the differences I'm quoting you.
If I pro-rate it for the 2009-2010 year, you processed 11,000 and change. The previous year was 4,000 and change. These are all just three-month pro-rated numbers that I'm quoting to you.
For post-February 28, 2008, there were 4,000 in three months, 11,000 in three months, and then 3,000 in three months. At the same time, for processing before 2008, there were 28,000 and change, 16,000 and change, and then 12,000 and change. So I'm seeing an influx of those from post-2008 in the 2009 processing year, but after that there is a drastic decline. Even with the pre-2008 numbers, fewer and fewer are being processed.
How do you decide how you're going to actually get rid of the backlog when the number being processed is declining by over 10,000 each year?
:
I'll do my best in terms of trying to unpack what I know of our comparator countries.
In the United States most of their economic immigration is driven primarily by temporary entry initially, and then people transition to permanent status once they've been in the United States. The allocation for various types of visas is set by Congress year over year. So for the H-1B visa, which would be a skilled worker, the number is set by Congress, and, relative to the size of the American labour market, is fairly small.
In terms of family reunification, there's a stratification of priority in the American system in terms of spouses and children of citizens, as opposed to their parents or brothers and sisters, whether married or unmarried. In some countries like the Philippines, the waiting times can be longer than 10 or 12 years in some categories.
New Zealand has in the past had a backlog, which they worked to eliminate through legislation. The specifics I'm not up to date on, but essentially they did use legislative authority to eliminate their previous backlog.
Australia has tended to use a comparable system to Canada's in terms of a levels plan that the immigration minister would table yearly and that reflects priorities year over year for the Government of Australia. We've seen in the last number of years their focus on skilled migration increase rather significantly, along with their overall levels, although during the recession they did dial back their overall levels plan.
The U.K. has been, with the current government, looking at options to reduce immigration from outside of the EU to the United Kingdom and are working to ensure program integrity at the same time, particularly as foreign students look to remain permanently in the United Kingdom.
I think it's fair to say that of most immigrant-receiving countries, Canada's approach is fairly transparent and open in terms of the criteria around skilled worker applications, in terms of the accommodation that's made to ensure provincially selected economic immigrants are part of the mix, and, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, by virtue of the fact that our definition of “family” is much broader than that of most other countries, allowing parents and grandparents to be sponsored to come forward.