Immigration Canada to set up new office to address staff racism complaints by this fall

2023/08/08 Leave a comment

Typical government response: set up a new office rather than fixing existing processes and offices, compounding the high growth rate of the public service and unlikely to dramatically improve or change the situation:

After multiple workforce surveys probing racism and discrimination toward employees, the federal Immigration Department says it is in the process of setting up an independent ombudsperson’s office, expected to be up and running by this fall.

“As with any effort toward real, lasting, and systemic change, we are not going to fix things overnight,” a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) wrote to CBC News in a statement.

The department said it would be creating an equity secretariat that will support “safe and independent channels for reporting racism and discrimination,” more accountability for senior managers, and also include an ombudsperson’s office available to all of its employees.

Source: Immigration Canada to set up new office to address staff racism complaints by this fall

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

Immigration Canada staff in postings abroad mocked, harassed by managers: employee survey

2023/08/04 Leave a comment

Of note. Wonder what the data says about separations by the various equity groups and disaggregated groups for IRCC (overall government data indicate lower for visible minorities, particularly for Black public servants How well is the government meeting its diversity targets? An intersectionality analysis):

Multiple employees at the federal government’s Immigration Department said they were subject to racist micro-aggressions, harassment and professional marginalization during postings in its offices abroad, according to a survey commissioned by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Staff cited management making fun of their accents, and group leaders expressing “overt disdain and even hatred for people from certain countries and for immigrants to Canada in general, using racial slurs and stating support for violence against people from other countries,” according to a summary of the survey’s findings published by the department.

“Being a black person here is an extreme sport. I kid you not. We are not protected,” one employee is quoted saying in the document.

Source: Immigration Canada staff in postings abroad mocked, harassed by managers: employee survey

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Canada’s immigration system is overwhelmed with information requests. Ottawa was warned – but did nothing

2023/06/17 Leave a comment

Well worth reading given depth of analysis and extent of problem:

A few months into his job, Michael Olsen realized he had a problem.

As director-general of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s access to information division from 2014 to 2018, he was in charge of the teams collecting public servants’ e-mails, reports, presentations, memos and other documents in response to access requests. It was delicate work. Mr. Olsen likes to joke he was the most hated man in the entire department.

A worrying trend had emerged: The number of access requests to IRCC was growing – and that growth was accelerating. “Volumes were always higher,” Mr. Olsen said. “They were never coming down.”

Under the federal Access to Information Act, people can force the government to disclose records that would otherwise be inaccessible. This legal mechanism is intended to promote transparency and act as a check on power. In practice, using it means filling out an online form, paying a $5 fee, then waiting for documents to arrive. (In other jurisdictions, these are often called freedom of information requests.)

Roughly a decade ago, lawyers, consultants and individuals realized they could better navigate the immigration system by using access legislation. IRCC ordinarily provides immigration applicants with minimal information during the process; if their cases run into problems, they often have no easy way of finding out why. But the department is required to respond to access requests, and its answers can reveal why cases have been rejected or become stuck in abeyance.

This meant Mr. Olsen’s office was gradually being turned into an immigration case file retrieval-and-delivery operation.

He began warning his superiors. Each year, he gave presentations to senior management – the deputy minister, as well as their associates and assistants, who together make up the top public servants overseeing Canada’s immigration system – showing the blistering pace at which access requests were being filed.

“It looks like we’re going to hit a wall in three years,” he cautioned them in 2015. (That year, IRCC received 34,066 access requests.) A year later: “It looks like we’re going to hit a wall in two years.” (41,660 requests.) Twelve months later: “We’re going to hit a wall next year.” (50,728.) “I didn’t beat my shoe on the table or anything like that,” Mr. Olsen recalled. “I did say, ‘You can see the projections as well as I can.’” But changes that might have addressed the torrent of requests never came.

Eventually, IRCC hit that wall.

Over a decade, IRCC has seen a 763-per-cent increase in access requests, from roughly 20,000 in the fiscal year ending March, 2012, to about 177,000 in the 2022 fiscal year. The influx of filings has become so overwhelming that IRCC now accounts for 80 per cent of all access requests made to the federal government.

That onslaught will only worsen. Last year, the government announced it was aiming to admit a record 500,000 new permanent residents a year by 2025. (To put that number in perspective, in 2019 Canada admitted 341,000 permanent residents.) This would be in addition to the millions of permits, visas and authorizations issued each year to workers, students and visitors.

As IRCC strives to meet its aggressive new targets, critics and insiders say the department first needs to tame how it interacts with the access to information system, a relationship that has morphed into something beyond its control – bogging down its internal processes, costing taxpayers money and giving rise to a cottage industry of experts who flood the system with requests.

The volume of requests the department receives has also begun affecting areas outside immigration. IRCC’s ever-increasing appetite for access staff is straining an already limited pool of experts within the government, and a majority of federal access disputes handled by the Office of the Information Commissioner are now related to immigration requests. Other departments involved in immigration matters, such as the federal border agency, are also now facing higher request volumes.

In effect, the federal access to information system, which is supposed to hold the entire government to account, has been hijacked by the immigration system. Faced with an unending stream of requests, IRCC’s leadership – including several successive immigration ministers – have been slow to address the root causes of the deluge now threatening Canada’s immigration and access systems, according to internal government records obtained through access requests and interviews with more than 20 experts.

This is made all the more puzzling by the fact that IRCC has known of a potential solution for years, one that has been championed by many current and former public servants: Give applicants as much of their case files as possible without requiring access requests.

“I think you could say that there was a problem,” said Mr. Olsen, who retired in late 2018. “It was identified. Sadly, not enough has been done yet to address that problem.”

In a statement, IRCC spokesperson Rémi Larivière said the department “is striving to implement initiatives that will address the root causes of the increase in access requests and corresponding complaints.”

During any immigration process, applicants submit forms and supporting documentation, which are then reviewed by case officers. Often, those officers will need additional information, such as a security assessment from a different government department or additional banking information, before a case can proceed. This can put an application on hold for months – or years. In other instances, officers may not be satisfied by an applicant’s submission, and may issue a formal refusal letter.

IRCC’s communications with applicants are brief. If a file is on hold, there could be no correspondence whatsoever; if a file is rejected, the refusal letter may only include a sentence or two about why the application did not succeed.

In nearly every access request made to the department, the same database is searched: the Global Case Management System, IRCC’s bespoke immigration software. GCMS is the beating heart of Canadian immigration. The system stores submitted documents, tracks correspondence between IRCC and applicants and logs case officers’ comments.

These “GCMS notes,” as experts call them, are all drearily similar. They’re a lengthy list of application details, as if all the fields on a government form were unceremoniously dumped, line after line, into a document dozens of pages long. The most important information usually lies in the cryptic write-ups from case officers, which note status updates and issues with applications, such as missing documents.

GCMS, painstakingly built over many years to streamline operations, wasn’t designed to give people direct access to their case files. Applicants, lawyers and consultants, hungry for any information that would tell them what they needed to know to get a file moving again – or explain in detail why an application was rejected – realized these files were subject to federal access law. The requests poured in.

In 2021, 99 per cent of all the requests IRCC received were for immigration case files, according to an internal memo to Immigration Minister Sean Fraser. (The other 1 per cent of requests were for what the department refers to as “corporate records,” such as internal correspondence, communications, presentations – policy-oriented documents often requested by researchers, businesses and the media.)

To Robert Orr, assistant deputy minister of operations at IRCC from 2012 to 2017 and the person ultimately responsible for immigration processing, the department’s hands appeared to be tied as the number of immigration applications grew.

“Once we got into big volumes of applications, we had a choice: We either communicate with applicants about what’s happening, or we get on and process applications,” he said. “And so we were choosing the latter.”

“It had taken so long to develop GCMS that I was a bit reluctant from an operations point of view to start over, doing something that was new,” Mr. Orr continued. “We recognized the importance of giving as much information to people as we could, but we were struggling with the best way to do it.”

As director-general of access to information at IRCC, Mr. Olsen did not have the power to do anything about how much information was pre-emptively shared with prospective immigrants. Instead, he focused on wringing as much efficiency out of IRCC’s access process as he could. But those measures only went so far.

Access work at IRCC can be gruelling. In 2022, when the department received about 177,000 access requests, it had the equivalent of 122 full-time access employees, according to data from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. That’s roughly 1,460 files per person.

Ultimately, the issues that plague IRCC’s access unit come from outside – from a community of immigration professionals and applicants who have been unintentionally incentivized by IRCC to file access requests. Another issue is GCMS, an intricate and stubborn piece of software that is difficult to modify and more than a decade old.

There’s also a problem of political will.

“There’s immigration, and then there’s [access requests] about immigration,” Mr. Olsen said. “If a politician has to choose what to get right, what are they going to choose?”

“I think it’s fair to say that people had recognized the limitations of GCMS long before I left the department,” he continued. “But that’s a really big, really expensive item to throw at the government.”

Through his spokesperson, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser declined The Globe and Mail’s requests for an interview.

Manmeet Rai’s access to information empire began on an online forum.

In 2016, Mr. Rai, who had recently graduated from law school in the United States, was attempting to immigrate to Canada. He prepared and submitted the paperwork himself – given his legal background, he didn’t see the need to hire a lawyer or consultant. Months passed without an answer from IRCC.

Frustrated, he learned from an online immigration forum that an access request for his GCMS notes might tell him what he needed to know to get his file moving again. But there was a snag: Only citizens, permanent residents and other individuals or corporations currently in Canada are eligible to file federal access requests. Mr. Rai was none of these.

He found an online service that could serve as his proxy. It filed the request on his behalf and sent him the documents once they were available. He recalls it costing US$25, or $34, much more than the $5 fee charged by the government.

Mr. Rai, who had taken to helping others on that same forum, saw the growing demand for GCMS notes, so he created his own request-proxying service, GetGCMS.com. The site could process credit cards that weren’t enabled for international charges, which are common in India.

“This was not my full-time job,” Mr. Rai told The Globe. “I was just doing it initially as a hobby. And then it just blew up big time.”

Business was good. Within a few years, he was handling anywhere from 5,000 to 9,000 access requests annually. During one “blockbuster” year, he said, GetGCMS took in more than $150,000 in revenue, before expenses. (Mr. Rai, now a Crown prosecutor in Saskatchewan, has since stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the business. GetGCMS is run by his partner.)

GetGCMS charges $20 to obtain the basic notes stored in GCMS about an applicant. More detailed access requests cost as much as $75. In other words, at a minimum, the site is charging people four times more than what they would pay if they filed these requests themselves. And it has recently become possible for anyone – including non-citizens and non-permanent residents outside Canada – to file these requests for free, under a separate federal law called the Privacy Act.

“If you ethically ask me, should I be charging them $20 for something that they can do for free? Well, yes, they can do it for free,” Mr. Rai admitted. “But the thing is, you can file your immigration application or your visa application yourself and just pay $100, right? You don’t have to go down to a lawyer, or you don’t have to go down to a consultant and engage their services.”

In Mr. Rai’s experience, most people using the service don’t want to bother learning how to use the access system. To them, the premium charged by GetGCMS is worth it – and a pittance compared with what a lawyer or immigration consultant might charge for an access request, to say nothing of IRCC’s own filing fees. (A permanent resident application usually costs more than $1,000.)

Over the years, other businesses offering request-proxying services for immigration applicants have popped up, and these services have become a thorn in IRCC’s side. Immigration lawyers and consultants have also taken to automatically filing access requests on their clients’ behalf. (The Globe filed an access request to IRCC in September for data that could quantify the volume of filings coming from organizations like GetGCMS. The department’s reply to that request is now about eight months overdue.)

Mr. Rai said his e-mails to IRCC’s access unit would go unanswered, forcing him to file formal complaints to the Office of the Information Commissioner, the federal organization responsible for handling access disputes. “[IRCC] thought that I was just there to mint money,” he said. “I initially felt bad. I don’t feel bad now.”

Around 2018, Mr. Rai noticed requests were taking longer to be completed, and that the government was more often missing its legal deadlines. He and otherscomplained about these delays, too. A year later, he realized IRCC was claiming 90-day extensions on all new requests coming from GetGCMS. Internal IRCC e-mails Mr. Rai obtained through access requests show the department singled out him and four other so-called “bulk requesters” for these automatic extensions. The dispute was resolved only after the Office of the Information Commissioner stepped in and told the government the pre-emptive extensions were “inconsistent” with the law.

Because of all these new complaints, the commissioner’s office has found itself facing a surge of new work. In the 2022-23 fiscal year, 63 per cent of all federal access complaints were regarding IRCC.

In an ideal world, Mr. Rai said, he would be put out of business by the government. Prospective immigrants looking for information on their applications shouldn’t have to file requests, he argued. “It is a waste of time, resources, money. The government’s spending so much money on hiring people, processing these access requests,” he said. “I have maintained this position for many years.”

“We can shut down and be happy.”

The deluge of access requests at IRCC will almost certainly get worse over the next few years, in part because of a quiet policy change that threatens IRCC’s access system with collapse.

Since July, 2022, a new federal regulation has allowed anyone in the world to file a personal information request under the Privacy Act to the federal government. These requests work almost identically to access requests, but apply only to information a government body holds about the requester. Crucially, these requests carry no fees, meaning that since 2022 all immigration applicants have been able to request their own files for free. (Most aren’t aware of this, or prefer to offload the work to lawyers, consultants or businesses like GetGCMS.)

An internal IRCC memo from 2021 attempted to game out the consequences of different rates of growth in the numbers of requests under this new regime, and the increases in work for access officers that might result. The projections were alarming: The memo said that if one out of every 20 immigration applicants were to file requests, the department would receive around 332,000 filings in the fiscal year ending March, 2023. If one in five people exercised these new rights, that number would be roughly 706,000. The memo did not say whether the department considered either of these scenarios likely to occur, and IRCC has not yet disclosed its 2023 request volumes. In 2022, the department received more than 26,000 privacy requests, in addition to the roughly 177,000 requests it received under access legislation.

In the one-in-five scenario, accounting for current request growth rates, IRCC would be facing 926,000 requests a year by March, 2024. The rest of the federal government combined saw about 113,000 access and privacy requests in the 2022 fiscal year.

That amount of requests to IRCC would grind the federal access system to a halt.

The most valuable resources in any access system are the staff members who process requests. At the federal level, access units have struggled to hire and retain people, and it has become common for departments to poach each others’ workers.

During an appearance before the House of Commons access to information committee earlier this year, Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard warned that IRCC’s ravenous demand for staff would constrain the labour market for access experts. “If you’re going to give more information through access requests, you clearly need to have more people working in access units,” she said.

A sharp increase in requests would also carry more direct costs to taxpayers. According to statistics from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, IRCC spent a total of $10.9-million in 2022 to handle a combined 204,000 access and privacy requests, more than double what it spent in 2012. It also spent $475,000 on two contracts to LRO Staffing, an employment agency, between 2019 and 2022. The company handled more than 2,300 requests, according to a document tabled in the House of Commons. If IRCC’s access volumes were to swell further, itsbudget would also need to grow considerably.

While the department receives the bulk of federal requests, some of those require consultation with other government institutions, such as the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which are now also facing surges.

Many of those requests also trigger complaints to the Office of the Information Commissioner (which adjudicates requests made under the Access to Information Act) or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (which handles requests under the Privacy Act). If volumes increased, both offices would have to direct more staff and funds to immigration-related complaints, reducing the resources available to other requesters, including academics, activists, journalists and the general public. (The Information Commissioner is currently investigating the Canada Border Services Agency as a result of increasing immigration-related access complaints.)

IRCC has announced plans to update GCMS, part of what it calls its “Digital Platform Modernization” project. This would give applicants a greater understanding of their place in the application queue, and more detailed refusal reasons. But those changes are years away, according to Andrew Koltun, an Ontario-based immigration lawyer at LJD Law who researches IRCC’s access to information processes.

While the department has built some public-facing services that share information about the status of an applicant’s file, Mr. Koltun said these tools aren’t very detailed. “I would say that Domino’s Pizza Tracker, when you make a delivery order, is far more detailed in tracking status than IRCC’s trackers are,” he said.

There are other ways of tracking a file’s status. If an applicant is in Canada, they can call an IRCC call centre, where agents are able to look up a GCMS file and read it over the phone. But those calls were answered only 19 per cent of the time in 2021, according to an internal memo. The department’s service standards say the answer rate should be at least 50 per cent.

Mr. Koltun believes applicants should have nearly full access to their GCMS files. “I love the idea that you should have access to your default GCMS notes,” he said. “I think there would be a lot of institutional pressure that would make sure that never happened.”

In part, this comes down to IRCC’s own risk policy, which “is very protective in saying an applicant should never learn anything about the system, because the more someone learns about how the system works, the more likely it is that someone will be able to manipulate this to gain an immigration benefit,” Mr. Koltun said.

The fact that IRCC is now receiving as many requests as it does “speaks to a lack of transparency that immigration applicants face throughout the system,” he said, “and speaks to a paternalism from IRCC that you’re not owed anything as an applicant.”

With updates to GCMS trickling in over the next several years, the department has no choice but to try to curb the demand for access requests, either by improving applicants’ access to documents, thus eliminating the need for requests, or by restricting who can file them in the first place.

In 2020, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, which is responsible for overseeing the administration of federal access law, solicited submissions from various departments as part of a review of government access policies. IRCC’s submission, disclosed by the Treasury Board in response to an access request, asked for limits on who is able to file requests, and the ability to put requests on hold indefinitely during “exceptional circumstances” (the submission noted the pandemic as an example). It also asked that the access filing fee (currently $5 across the government) be set at the discretion of institution heads, and that deadlines be calculated using business days instead of calendar days, which would give IRCC more time to respond.

In part, the submission was a direct response to the internet services filing access requests on behalf of applicants, like GetGCMS. “We would like to see the ATIA reform address the issue of representatives using the Access to Information system for their own personal benefit,” the submission said.

To Mr. Koltun, IRCC’s submission was a cry for help, but the changes it proposed would ultimately mean constraining people’s rights.

“I don’t think anyone sat back and said, ‘Okay, if this is what the system is, what does this mean from a requester perspective?,” Mr. Koltun said. “What does this do to the democratic notion of a right to access?”

In April, 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Treasury Board held a “business resumption” conference call, hoping to get stalled access units back to processing requests in a new era of remote work.

During the meeting, managers shared their approaches, according to meeting minutes released through an access request. Some organizations had begun sending documents via e-mail. Others, including IRCC, were putting requests on hold indefinitely. Audrey White, then the head of IRCC’s access unit, spoke bluntly: The department’s mandate was to process immigration files – not access requests.

Today, it is clear that access to information is as much a part of the immigration system as border agents and background checks. When the federal access to information system was established 40 years ago, legislators did not intend for this to happen – and yet it has.

In 2021, Ms. Maynard, the Information Commissioner, published a detailed investigation into IRCC’s access woes, which laid out a series of recommendations. Chief among them was the idea that applicants’ files should be available without access requests. “Imagine if you had to ask, through an access request, for information about your taxes,” Ms. Maynard told the House access committee earlier this year. “You don’t have to, because you have a portal where you can go and see your information.”

Despite a commitment to change from Marco Mendicino, who was immigration minister until 2021, the department “has yet to offer applicants any alternative methods to access the information they are seeking on their immigration files,” according to Ms. Maynard’s latest annual report, published earlier this week.

In response, Mr. Larivière, the IRCC spokesperson, said the department believes it is on track to resolve these issues, but did not provide further detail.

Even Alec Attfield, a public servant who was until recently in charge of IRCC’s citizenship program, said it is time to take pressure off the system by making case files accessible without formal access requests – and he said the federal government’s ambitious immigration targets are in jeopardy if the status quo persists.

Mr. Attfield, who was the director-general of citizenship at IRCC from 2016 to the end of 2021, said that while information is already obtainable through access to information requests, that access is slow and burdening the department.

“Clients should have access to their case files, their written notes,” he said, with exceptions for information that might affect national security. “Until you have the proper information systems in place, growing immigration volumes are going to put further pressure on access to information and our ability to respond to people’s requests for status on their files. It’s just a fundamental thing.”

It’s still unclear when – or if – IRCC will get to a point where it gives applicants all the information they need, without them having to resort to access requests. Until then, immigration will be restrained by the access to information system.

“Canada is keen to grow its immigration levels,” Mr. Attfield said. “Without a proper system, we won’t be able to achieve those targets.”

In the meantime, the current system is having real-world consequences.

Sunkar Shagambayev, a 32-year-old immigrant from Kazakhstan, came to Canada in 2019 with his wife, Sitora, and their son, Alan. They’re a strikingly handsome family, with photos proudly displayed on the walls of their home in Tillsonburg, Ont. Those pictures depict a fourth person: Sabika, their adopted daughter, whose immigration file has been stuck in bureaucratic limbo since 2020. Each time the Shagambayevs have filed for a permit that would allow Sabika, 14, to enter the country, they have been rejected.

Mr. Shagambayev is unable to get a straight answer as to why the federal government has repeatedly denied the teenager’s study permit. “They’re very vague,” he said. “They never tell you what the real reason is.” The rest of the family have had similar troubles: Their permanent residence applications, first submitted in early 2020, have yet to be approved or rejected. Deeply frustrated by the lack of information from IRCC, Mr. Shagambayev has taken to filing access requests – he’s up to nine so far.

Last week, after prodding IRCC through his lawyer, Mr. Shagambayev received a call from a case officer, who said his file had begun moving again.

The process has taken a mental toll. “I had problems with sleep,” he said. “For maybe two years, I was waking up at night and I was thinking about it, like, ‘What can I do? What can be done in order to speed up the process?’”

“We came to Canada because we thought that the Canadian immigration system was transparent, tolerant and equal,” Mr. Shagambayev said. “This really made us feel like we’re not needed in Canada, not welcomed, like nobody wants us here, even though there are all these shiny slogans about how we need immigration to fuel our work force and economy.”

“But I love this country anyway, because every time I leave Canada and come back, I feel like I’m home.”

Source: Canada’s immigration system is overwhelmed with information requests. Ottawa was warned – but did nothing

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Express immigration programs overstaffed: budget watchdog

2023/03/09 Leave a comment

Backlogs yet…:

Three programs designed to get skilled immigrants settled in Canada faster have more staff than needed to meet the government’s goals, according to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer released Tuesday.

The report looked at three “express entry” programs — the Federal Skilled Worker Program, the Canadian Experience Class and the Federal Skilled Trades Program — and the government’s target of processing 80 per cent of applications to the programs within six months. Quebec does not participate in the three programs.

“Based on our analysis, current staffing levels at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) are expected to be more than sufficient to meet the processing time goal for the next five years,” Yves Giroux, the parliamentary budget officer, said in a news release.

Source: Express immigration programs overstaffed: budget watchdog

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Clarkson: If Canada loses its citizenship ceremonies, we risk losing ourselves

2023/03/06 Leave a comment

Calls out the efforts by the government and IRCC to diminish the value and meaningfulness of citizenship and highlights their lack of understanding of the fundamental meaning and belonging of ceremonies (disclosure I am providing citizenship and related data to the ICC).

To date, op-eds from the left (Toronto Star), centre (Globe) and right (National Post). Tenor of reader comments is against the proposed change but how many will submit written comments through the Gazette process and will the government listen.

And will either the NDP or CPC deem it important enough issue to raise given the understandable fixation on the government’s handling (or mishandling) of Chinese government foreign interference allegations:

One of the most wonderful things about becoming a Canadian is the citizenship ceremony.

There, new citizens are surrounded by a little crowd of other people who want to become Canadian too. It might be held in a federal citizenship office or in some other location that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has found that can accommodate people, though at the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, we try to hold our citizenship ceremonies in public spaces: libraries, city halls, university campuses, places we hope these new citizens will return to. Always, there is incredible joy – the kind that comes with recognizing that something special is happening. Wearing a head scarf or a beard, or an embroidered vest in brilliant colours, these about-to-become citizens know that they are doing something meaningful.

When I became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1992, I was told that I would be able to preside over these ceremonies in the way a citizenship judge does. I was delighted by the idea: For my family and me, who arrived as stateless refugees during the Second World War, the precious gift of Canadian citizenship that we received in 1949 was something we cherished and celebrated.

The first ceremony over which I presided was overwhelming: there was such excitement and warmth among people of different backgrounds – even though the whole thing was taking place at the Metropolitan Toronto Police headquarters!

When my husband John Ralston Saul and I founded the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, one of the first things we wanted to do was to have special ceremonies to acknowledge how important this moment is in people’s lives. For six years, as Governor-General, I presided over citizenship ceremonies, and invited people who already had Canadian citizenship to come specifically to meet the new citizens, to sit at roundtables with them and have discussions before the formal ceremony. Everyone shared coffee and doughnuts afterward. It wasn’t elaborate, but it was congenial and hospitable.

When I left Rideau Hall, I decided that this would be a feature of the institute, and for 16 years we carried this on with the wisdom and guidance of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. With their help, we have ceremonies in which we have Indigenous speakers and music, and roundtables where people can share their experiences of Canada up to that point.

It’s not a big deal. But it is important. And everyone who is sworn in across the country as citizens recognizes that the others around them are people who, like them, have taken the risk of leaving their own country with the courage to come and make a new life in Canada.

We can’t overstate the significance of being able to be around each other when we take our citizenship vows, or of new citizens receiving the formal and yet warm welcome they get from professional and excellent Immigration officials, who leave no misunderstanding as to what a citizen is and how a citizen can contribute to their country. The citizenship judges, whether they are federal appointees or members of the Order of Canada, always take the ceremonies to heart, and it is so moving to see people from so many different countries at each ceremony joining together and saying that they will become part of Canada.

Now, there are reports that in order to get rid of an administrative backlog, new citizens will be given the option to take their oath online, rather than in a physical ceremony. Frankly, I’m horrified by this. I believe that people want ceremonies to mark important passages in their lives. I think welcoming people in person is the least we can do as a country. I feel that the people who work at the ministry understand that, and that they do put a human face on it as much as they can.

The idea that Canada, which is perhaps the most successful immigrant nation in the world, would resort to a machine-oriented way of saying that you are now a citizen, is egregious. In 2001, on my state visit to Germany as Governor-General, then-president Johannes Rau told me how deeply impressed he was that we inducted people into citizenship personally. He lamented the fact that Germany generally sent out citizenships by some form of registered mail.

I can’t help feeling very emotional when I talk about this, because I do believe that ceremonies are important stages of every human being’s life. There is a reason why we have birthday parties, for instance, or why co-workers often share a cake when someone leaves for another job. There is a reason why people go to city hall or to a religious institution to bring meaning to their marriage. There is humanity in marking milestones in each other’s company; it is the mark of a civilized society. And Canada should always think of itself as a society which not only knows how to welcome people, but shows that a personal welcome is only the beginning of belonging.

Adrienne Clarkson was Canada’s 26th Governor-General and co-founder of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.

Source: If Canada loses its citizenship ceremonies, we risk losing ourselves

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , , ,

Yuan Yi Zhu: Canadian citizenship is embarrassingly cheap and online oath makes it cheaper

2023/03/06 Leave a comment

Apart from the unnecessary snark and playing to the gallery if the comments on Zhu’s article are any guide, he nails the substance of this misguided change. But hopefully he and others will take the time to file their objections to the proposal through the Canada Gazette process (I will share my input in a future post):
Newly published figures by Statistics Canada revealed that fewer than half of permanent residents now take Canadian citizenship within 10 years, a 40 per cent decline over two decades.
Cue soul-searching among the usual Ottawa think tankers, wondering why the world’s denizens no longer wanted to be on “Team Canada.” Why did so many recent immigrants, arriving in record numbers, refuse the citizenship we hand to them practically for free and after as little as three years’ residence, or 1,095 days spent within the country out of the last five years?

Source: Yuan Yi Zhu: Canadian citizenship is embarrassingly cheap and online oath makes it cheaper

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In Niagara Falls, Roxham Road asylum seekers find less space and more strife as tourist season nears

2023/03/06 Leave a comment

Not all that surprising:

It had been a long time since Marie Saintil had last been to church, when she found herself at the pulpit of the Faith Tabernacle in Welland, Ont., on a recent Sunday evening.

“Est-ce que tout le monde parle Créole?” she asked the small Haitian congregation, a half dozen or so of whom had been shuttled to the service in their Sunday best from the various hotels in nearby Niagara Falls where they are living. The congregation nods in unison – yes, they all speak Créole.

Ms. Saintil, a lawyer of Haitian background herself, was there that evening to deliver not a sermon, but a primer on the refugee claims process.

When she took a job with the Niagara Community Legal Clinic in January, she was looking for a change of pace after two decades of practising immigration law in Toronto. Instead, she has found herself in the throes of a migration crisis, with thousands of asylum seekers unexpectedly placed in a tourist town that is not equipped to absorb them, transferred by the federal government from Quebec after crossing at Roxham Road.

More than 2,841 asylum seekers have been transferred to Niagara Falls by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada since last June, spread across more than 1,400 hotel rooms in the city after being shuttled on from their arrival in Quebec.

Another 702 have been placed in Ottawa, 618 in Windsor, and 1,396 in Cornwall, according to the IRCC. They began transfers to Atlantic provinces at the end of last month, with 63 so far transferred to Halifax and 30 people transferred to Fredericton.

But nine months in – as understaffed settlement and social services scramble to support the newcomers, and with as many as one in 12 hotel rooms occupied as the city’s tourism season looms – tensions are starting to build.

“These people are taken from Roxham Road in Quebec, and they’re put into a bus, and they’re dumped. And the word is dumped – they’re dumped here,” Ms. Saintil said.

“And now they’re being told, you’re not really wanted because we have tourists coming … It was fine to have them here during the slow season, in the wintertime, but now that the tourists are coming, you’re not wanted.”

Ms. Saintil cannot represent them, she told the congregants at the church, as she handed out information packets and business cards. This has not been her clinic’s mandate, but she feels compelled to help given how few lawyers in the area do this work.

The migrants did not choose Niagara Falls. They ended up here after being repeatedly shuffled along by American and then Canadian authorities – perpetually treated as someone else’s problem. Regardless of where their journeys began, these migrants have often crossed several borders before arriving in Canadain an effort to flee violence, persecution and poverty – and have faced hostility along the way.

At the Mexico-U.S. border, thousands of people are crossing each day. And once in the United States, they have faced increasing hostility, including from political leaders in southern states such as Texas and Florida, whose Republican governors have transported thousands of asylum seekers to places such as New York, Washington and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

In New York, Democratic politicians have responded to an influx of migrants by offering one-way tickets to Plattsburgh, N.Y., a short distance from the Canadian border at Roxham Road.

Under the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the U.S., asylum seekers must file their claims in whichever country they arrive in first, which means they will be turned back if they attempt to get into Canada at official border crossings. Because that agreement covers only official border points, crossings at the unofficial Roxham Road entry have risen sharply.

Now in Canada, the migrants are finding themselves unwelcome in Quebec, too. With the numbers at Roxham Road continuing to rise – close to 40,000 migrants entered Canada there last year – Quebec’s Premier François Legault has protested the “strain” the influx has put on his province’s social services and urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to shut it down, or send them elsewhere.

“Everybody is sending the ball to somebody else,” Ms. Saintil said. “It’s a blame game.”

With a population of 95,000 people, Niagara Falls depends heavily on tourism and is known as much for the massive falls that straddle an international border as it is for the garishness of its main drag, lined with haunted houses and wax museums. The city has upwards of 16,000 hotel rooms, Mayor Jim Diodati said, and at first the IRCC contracts seemed like welcome news for hotels that have been struggling after three years in a pandemic.

“We’ve got lots of rooms, we’ll do our part and help out as much as we can – that’s kind of the attitude as it started,” he said. But as the numbers began to grow, he said the mood has shifted. “They went from 87 to 300, to 687, to 1,500 … And then we were told 1,700 and 2,000 were the next steps,” he said. “And, you know, we weren’t really sure how much we can handle, and at what point it would become disruptive, because we’ve never been through anything like this before.”

After a video call with Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, and his staff last month, the mayor said he still doesn’t know how long the hotel rooms are booked for. He said he’s concerned about the impact on the coming tourism season, which he describes as the “the goose that lays the golden eggs here.”

“A tourist is going to spend money in restaurants, the attractions, the casinos, the wineries … whereas these folks are just staying in the rooms,” he said. “A lot of people are counting on it to feed their families and pay their mortgages and pay their rents. So we’re asking, ‘What’s the plan?’ ”

IRCC spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald wouldn’t provide a timeline on how long the hotel rooms have been leased, citing confidentiality. In an e-mail, he said the department takes into account availability, cost, transportation and access to support services.

Mr. Diodati said he was told numbers were likely to peak in the coming weeks, as they began to transfer people to other areas, including the Atlantic provinces. But in the meantime, he warns the mood of the town has begun to shift. “Most conversations that people have with me start off with ‘I don’t want to be insensitive, and I’m not complaining … but where are we going with this?’ ” he said. “And we’re trying to get answers.” The mayor said he has asked the federal government for more money to help the city and local organizations keep up with demand. IRCC said in a statement that it was working with the local government to ensure they are prepared and to respond any concerns.

On a Friday evening almost one week after the mayor’s meeting with the immigration minister, the lobby of the Ramada hotel on Lundy’s Lane was crammed with 100 or so people lined up for dinner.

This type of scene, Ms. Saintil believes, is the real unspoken concern. “It just doesn’t look good to see all these refugee claimants in the hotels. That’s what it is,” she said. “It doesn’t look good in pictures with American tourists.”

On a frigid Sunday afternoon, Henry Carmona and a group of fellow Venezuelan migrants headed down from their hotel to take in the icy view of the falls.

The economic collapse and rise of political violence in Venezuela have led to one of the largest displacement crises in the world. It is a mass exodus that has sent a quarter of the country’s population – more than seven million people – fleeing to neighbouring Colombia and then onward.

It took these men years to get here. They each show off photos of the families they had to leave behind because of the dangerous nature of their journeys.

Truck drivers by trade, the men are eager to get their work permits, learn English and begin to find work. But they landed in Niagara only a few days earlier, bused in from Quebec after their arrival at Roxham Road.

They have appreciated their treatment in Canada so far, they said. They laughed as they took in the various gimmicky attractions on Clifton Hill. Next door to the Museum of the Stars, a stiff-moving dinosaur head called out to them from the Looney Tunes-esque Bone Blaster Shootin’ Gallery.

And though they’d expected to be in Quebec, they are content in Niagara for now; whenever their work permits are ready, they plan to go where the work is. Other asylum seekers who spoke with The Globe and Mail, some from Colombia and others from Haiti, said the same.

At the YMCA of Niagara, Deanna D’Elia, manager of employment and immigrant services, has scrambled to move some part-time workers to full-time in an effort to address the spiralling need.

Of their 65-member team, 25 or so are focused specifically on settlement. Others work on helping them find employment, though a major part of that process depends on work permits – which, given the backlog, can take many months or even years to be issued.

“Individuals and families have come to Canada to seek a better life and they are eager to work,” Ms. D’Elia said. In the meantime, many must rely on social assistance, which in today’s rental market can barely cover a room in the city. It’s a situation that she says has “amplified” discussions about the housing crisis, both regionally and across the province and country.

It’s a pressure that is being felt in social services across the region, which were under pressure even before the asylum seekers arrived.

On a recent Friday morning, Pam Sharp and her team at Project SHARE were preparing for a busy day at the largest food bank in Niagara Falls. They’d had to close the day before for an ice storm, and knew it was likely to be busier as a result.

Demand in the community was already very high. In addition to the food bank, they also provide homelessness prevention supports and other services, and served the equivalent of one in 10 residents last year, she said.

They see, on average, 100 families a day, and the infusion of 3,000 new vulnerable people is stretching them to their limits. Both the regional and city council have declared a state of emergency on homelessness, mental health and opioid addiction.

Ms. Sharp has noticed more and more asylum seekers coming in – for example, of the 157 families they served one day this week, 60 identified as asylum seekers –and the team has on occasion done outreach at the hotels directly.

“We want to make sure that anyone coming into our city is able to meet their basic needs,” she says.

Janet Medume, executive director of the Welland Heritage Council and Multicultural Centre, which is leading the local settlement efforts. said they weren’t told in advance about the asylum seekers’ arrivals but began to hear word through community networks last summer. Since then, more than 20 community organizations have banded together to develop a strategy, but she said they need both funding and staffing boosts from all levels of government to keep up.

“Let’s inject more resources so we can focus on ensuring individuals get the help they need, and hopefully get employment quick enough, so we can get them out of there as soon as possible,” she said. “Give us those resources and we’ll be okay.”

At the church Sunday evening, Ms. Saintil lingered after the service, passing out information pamphlets and business cards. She wore a sad smile as she watched a trio of siblings – ages 8, 7 and 1 – playing in the foyer. The older two, sisters, showed off cartwheels and boasted about their favourite school subjects.

She urged their father to get them scarves for the cold weather, and he nodded enthusiastically. They’ve been here eight months in a hotel, Ms. Saintil said, after they waved goodbye. The parents were only recently able to meet with a lawyer for the first time.

“Everybody’s doing their best,” she said. “But if they’re hoping this is not going to be a crisis in a month or two, they have to start acting now.”

Source: In Niagara Falls, Roxham Road asylum seekers find less space and more strife as tourist season nears

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@IRCC Consultations: Shaping the future of immigration in Canada

2023/02/25 Leave a comment

Somewhat cynical about the consultations exercise.

On the surface, may be a response to the increased public commentary questioning the impact that current and planned high immigration levels have on housing, healthcare adnn infrastructure but without the political will for a fundamental review of immigration programs and policies, which appear largely based on a “more the merrier” approach. The “learn more” section suggests that no fundamental review is planned.

Will be interesting to see if those consulted include critics of the current approach, not from the various advocacy groups but more broadly:

Immigration is critical to Canada’s long-term success. To fully harness the potential of immigration and create the best experience for newcomers,

Canada needs an immigration system that is strong, easy to navigate and adaptive to change.

The Honourable Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, today announced the start of a broad-based engagement initiative—An Immigration System for Canada’s Future—aimed at exploring how immigration policies and programs can support a shared vision for Canada’s future. The engagement, which will continue throughout the spring, will include in-person dialogue sessions across the country, thematic workshops and a survey for the public and our clients. The input gathered will inform Canada’s future immigration policies and programs, and will help shape a system that will benefit communities across the country for decades to come.

The next generation of Canada’s immigration system will involve continued, whole-of-society collaboration. That is why this engagement initiative is intended to capture a diversity of perspectives from a broad range of partners and stakeholders, including all levels of government, businesses, academia, post-secondary institutions, settlement organizations, implicated sectors in Canada and our clients.

To kick off the engagement initiative, Minister Fraser chaired the first dialogue session in Halifax. The session provided an opportunity for the Minister and participants to exchange ideas and discuss how Canada’s immigration policies and programs can better support the needs of communities from coast to coast.

If you would like to contribute to the future of Canada’s immigration system, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) will also be launching a survey, which will be available to the public later in March in addition to the dialogue sessions and thematic workshops with stakeholders. We encourage you to visit our website to learn more about how to get involved.

Source:

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IRCC’s reliance on McKinsey explains a ‘disconnect’ between money spent and value added, immigration lawyers say

2023/01/31 Leave a comment

More on McKinsey and IRCC. Hearing some concerns from within IRCC as well:

The decision by Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada to hire McKinsey and Company to mobilize its digital transformation explains what immigration lawyers are calling a ‘disconnect’ between the resources being put into IRCC and the results it’s produced.

Barbara Jo (BJ) Caruso, an immigration lawyer speaking on behalf of the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association (CILA), said when she heard about contracts IRCC had with McKinsey, “a light bulb went on.

“We were then able to sort of connect the dots and say, ‘Okay, now maybe this makes sense why everything’s been sort of haphazard, and pieced together,’ ” she said. 

At the beginning of January, a Radio-Canada report revealedthat the Canada branch of global consulting firm McKinsey and Company had seen a marked increase in the number of contracts it had been awarded by the federal government since 2015. In fact, the government later confirmed it had awarded McKinsey a total of 23 contracts at a cost of $101.4-million since 2015. By comparison, Stephen Harper’s government had spent $2.2-million on the firm throughout its nine year tenure. 

There’s been a disconnect, Caruso said, between the amount of money going into the department and the results it’s been able to produce, adding there’s been a lot of changes made, but “essentially no consultation from our vantage point.” 

“We’ve been perplexed by the amount of money that has been designated to the department and yet, we’re not really reaping the benefits of those financial contributions. We’ve got bigger backlogs than we’ve ever had, and probably the lowest client service standards, ever. And a diminishing trust from the public in the whole immigration system,” she said. 

The House Government Operations and Estimates Committee (OGGO), headed by Conservative MP Kelly McCauley, agreed over the break to undertake a study of the government’s contracts with McKinsey, particularly given this government’s relationship with Dominic Barton, who was Canada’s ambassador to China from 2019 to 2021, head of the Trudeau government’s advisory panel on economic growth, and prior to both those appointments, global managing director at McKinsey and Company between 2009 and 2018. It’s expected to call a total of seven ministers to testify before the committee, as well as top McKinsey executives, and Barton. 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) said he welcomes the committee’s probe to determine whether there was “value for money” in the work McKinsey did. 

McKinsey spokesperson Alley Adams said the firm “welcomes the [committee] review of the services we deliver to the federal government.” 

“We look forward to working with the committee to resolve its questions and clarify relevant issues. We are proud of the contributions our firm has had across the public sector and are focused on working with the committee to discuss our impact in detail,” Adams said in an emailed statement. 

McKinsey and Company was a key player in the department’s “transformation agenda” since 2018, when it was awarded a $2.9-million contract to assess the department’s operations and “recommend a way forward for its transformation agenda,” according to IRCC.

Based on McKinsey’s assessment, “and IRCC’s own analysis of its operating context,” IRCC launched its transformation program in 2019, with the overarching goals of improving its operations. 

In 2019, McKinsey and Company was hired for a second contract to set “the service transformation agenda in motion.” According to IRCC, the contract focused on “reviewing, developing, and implementing digital tools, processes, and services.” It was initially valued at $16.37-million, but was later amended to add $8.47-million, bringing the total to $24.8-million. 

“Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, IRCC was faced with an immediate need to further accelerate the development and implementation of digital products and services. That is why the contract was amended in 2021 to help IRCC respond to these pandemic-driven pressures, manage increased volumes, and sustain core client services,” the department added. 

For its part, McKinsey has stressed that it was only involved in non-partisan, government operations, and did not influence policy.

“We work on independent research, economic and sector-based insights, in addition to core management topics such as the reduction of document processing backlogs, digitization of processes, technology strategy, operational improvements, and change management. This work does not include policy development and/or political advice. We support the service delivery objectives pursued by
the professional public servants who lead the departments and agencies we serve,” McKinsey said in a statement issued to media. 

However, Toronto-based immigration lawyer Maureen Silcoff—a former decision-maker at IRCC herself—said she doesn’t think the distinction between the two is so obvious. 

“I’m not sure that there’s really a bright line that can be drawn between the immigration policies and the immigration systems,” said Silcoff, who also sits on the executive of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers. “In the immigration context, [systems] necessarily impact the way laws and policies are implemented, or operationalized.” 

“Efficiency is crucial, but whatever measures are put in place, and have been put in place, have to be alert to the sensitivities of the population affected, which we know involves, very often, racialized people and vulnerable people,” she added.

The move towards digitizing and automating processes at IRCC has already proven to be a sticky process. 

The department has already been the subject of systemic racism allegations, and as the House Citizenship and Immigration Committee heard last March, artificial intelligence, and immigration expert witnesses expressed concern that systemic racism and bias would be embedded in any automated processes the department employs. 

“There’s advantages to algorithms, to artificial intelligence, to web-based portals, but they do come with a cost, and if attention is not paid to the frailties, there could be serious human rights implications,” Silcoff said. 

“A digitized refugee portal, for example. Is that accessible to vulnerable people, people arriving in Canada who have been subjected to torture or remain traumatized, who are new to the country and the systems?” 

An element that further exacerbates this challenge is who can access the portals on behalf of the applicant. 

One complaint Caruso and CILA have with IRCC currently is that lawyers cannot access certain online portals on behalf of their clients. 

According to IRCC, as part of its work on the department’s “digital transformation,” McKinsey helped design, develop, and launch an online citizenship application, which “enabled clients to apply digitally and IRCC to continue business throughout the pandemic.” 

However, Caruso said lawyers have not been able to access this portal on behalf of their clients, which she said is an impediment not only to their work, but to the efficiency of the department as well. 

“In our dialogue with the department, they absolutely recognize the role that counsel plays, that we can add value to the process, eliminate applications that have missing documents, because typically with good counsel, it’s a more complete application. There’s less back and forth and it means they can get to a decision sooner,” she said. 

It struck her and CILA as strange, then, when the department decided to roll out a portal that didn’t allow lawyers to access it. 

“For us, there has been this disconnect with the rollout of the technology and our role in the process. And now it sort of makes sense that it wasn’t the department, but an external player that maybe doesn’t appreciate the role that legal counsel can have in simplifying and ensuring efficiency,” she said. 

NDP MP Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.), her party’s immigration critic, said she’s eager to hear more about exactly what work McKinsey was contracted to do for IRCC, but added that overall, departmental work should be done in-house. 

Kwan said the fact that IRCC, along with the Canada Border Services Agency, spent the most money on McKinsey contracts of any department tells her “there’s very little transparency within IRCC.” 

“It’s just so concerning that there’s this discovery of these contracts and the government is anything but transparent about it,” she said, after describing a lack of transparency at IRCC as a “black hole.” 

“It just really speaks to the black hole that exists within IRCC. And it is deeply concerning,” she said.

Source: IRCC’s reliance on McKinsey explains a ‘disconnect’ between money spent and value added, immigration lawyers say

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Crise des passeports: Jusqu’à deux fois moins d’employés en 2022

2023/01/16 Leave a comment

Of note. See my earlier op-ed Passport delays risk undermining our trust in government on the complexity of linkages between IRCC, responsible for passport policy, and Service Canada, responsible for delivery, and the failure of both to anticipate demand even if official planning documents expected a surge once travel restrictions lifted:

Ottawa a réduit considérablement les effectifs affectés au traitement des demandes de passeport entre 2018 et 2021. Résultat : ils étaient presque deux fois moins au début de 2022 pour répondre aux nombreuses demandes des Canadiens désireux de voyager après la levée des principales mesures de restriction pour les déplacements à l’étranger.

Selon des données obtenues par La Presse en vertu de la Loi sur l’accès à l’information auprès d’Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada, 1512 fonctionnaires étaient chargés de répondre aux demandes de passeport au début de l’année 2018. On n’en comptait plus que 893 en 2021, un nombre qui est passé à 1161 au cours de l’année suivante.

Cette baisse substantielle des effectifs a nui considérablement à la capacité de Passeport Canada de traiter le flot de demandes au cours de l’été 2022, signale Yvon Barrière, vice-président exécutif régional Québec à l’Alliance de la fonction publique du Canada (AFPC). « On avait entre 40 et 50 % de personnel en moins », précise-t-il.

Où sont allés tous ces employés ? Un très grand nombre ont été affectés à d’autres services au plus fort de la pandémie, alors que des mesures de restriction limitaient de façon importante les voyages à l’étranger. De nombreux fonctionnaires de Passeport Canada ont notamment travaillé au traitement des demandes de prestation canadienne d’urgence (PCU) au moment où la COVID-19 forçait l’arrêt de nombreux secteurs d’activité économique.

« Chaque fois qu’il y avait un nouveau programme d’aide aux citoyens, le gouvernement avait tendance à aller chercher du personnel à l’Agence du revenu, à l’Immigration et aux passeports. »

– Yvon Barrière, vice-président exécutif régional Québec à l’Alliance de la fonction publique du Canada

UN AN ET DEMI DE RETARD

Mais selon M. Barrière, la diminution des effectifs n’est pas la seule cause de la crise des passeports qui a fait les manchettes au cours de l’été 2022. Un retard important dans le traitement des demandes au plus fort de la pandémie a aussi aggravé la situation.

« Les demandes de passeport, alors que les gens ne peuvent pas voyager, ils peuvent patienter. Laissez-les de côté, disaient les gestionnaires », indique M. Barrière, qui estime qu’on a ainsi cumulé jusqu’à un an et demi de retard dans le traitement des demandes.

« Tous les ingrédients étaient là pour ce qu’on a connu [à l’été 2022] », soutient-il. Au moment où il n’y avait plus de restrictions pour voyager à l’étranger, les employés se sont donc retrouvés à traiter une hausse considérable de demandes de nouveaux passeports ou de renouvellement. Tout cela avec un retard important cumulé dans les deux années précédentes.

« Ils n’ont pas vu venir la crise », plaide Yvon Barrière. Il estime pourtant que celle-ci était parfaitement prévisible. « Si les gestionnaires avaient prévu le coup, on n’aurait pas eu les files d’attente qu’on a connues », soutient-il.

Quand Ottawa a entrepris d’embaucher du personnel face au flot de demandes, la situation ne s’est pas nécessairement améliorée, du moins pas à court terme. « Il fallait former les employés et souvent, on prenait les meilleurs pour les former. Ils n’avaient pas le temps de traiter les demandes. »

Le représentant syndical rejette par ailleurs l’argument voulant que le grand nombre d’employés en télétravail au cours des trois dernières années ait pu ralentir le traitement des demandes de passeport.

Selon les données obtenues par La Presse, au moins 80 % du personnel traitant les demandes de passeport a travaillé à distance en 2020, 2021 et 2022. « Les gens ont des quotas, ils doivent traiter un certain nombre de demandes chaque jour, qu’ils soient à la maison ou au bureau », explique Yvon Barrière.

« ILS ONT EU LEUR LEÇON »

La majorité des employés prêtés à d’autres services ont été rapatriés, estime-t-il, jugeant que le retard dans le traitement des demandes a été comblé.

« Ils ont eu leur leçon. Ils sont en train de reprendre le contrôle. On ne devrait pas vivre de nouvelle crise », conclut-il.

Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada n’a pas donné suite aux questions de La Presse, nous invitant à écrire à Emploi et Développement social Canada (EDSC). En réponse à notre courriel, EDSC a précisé ne pas être en mesure de répondre à nos questions vendredi.

Source: Crise des passeports: Jusqu’à deux fois moins d’employés en 2022

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