My latest: Disconnect between political priorities and service delivery [focus on passports and immigration]

2022/07/18 Leave a comment

Article below as behind a paywall:

The disconnect between government commitments and its ability to deliver on targets and service levels has never been clearer as the immigration and passport backlogs attest.

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser indicated that the 2023-25 plan will likely include a target of 500,000 new permanent residents by the end of the plan. The number of temporary foreign workers will also increase significantly following relaxation of eligibility requirements (length of permits; increase in the cap allowed from 10 to 30 per cent; no longer refusing applications in low-wage occupations in regions with unemployment higher than six per cent), and the large number of Ukrainians arriving in Canada due to the war.

These current and planned increases are happening against the backdrop of large backlogs in permanent and temporary resident, citizenship and passport applications.

The resulting public and political outrage has prompted a mix of short-term measures, both symbolic such as the formation of a task force to improve government services as well as substantive, to alleviate applicant frustration (e.g., triage of passport applications, more online application tracking tools for immigration-related programs).

Why the disconnect?

Public service expert Ralph Heintzman focuses on the comparative neglect of service in relation to policy and program development (“poor cousin”) and how Service Canada never lived up to its promise to overturn that hierarchy in favour of citizen-centred service. As someone who has worked at Service Canada to implement that vision during the early days, we developed tools like score cards to maintain focus on service. Heintzman notes that departments do not focus on citizen and applicant satisfaction as current service failures illustrate.

Donald Savoie, a Canadian public administration expert, looks at the more fundamental issue of the relationship between the political and bureaucratic levels, and the need for the latter to have clear goals in order to implement effectively. The political level generally has conflicting goals, reflecting different stakeholder interests, and has a bias for the shiny and new, rather than program management, as any party platform will illustrate. Senior public servants are more akin to “courtiers,” rising through policy rather than service-delivery ranks, and have a “limited understanding of how best to help frontline managers deliver programs and public services.”

While his argument that government cannot be managed by using private-sector practices is valid at the policy level, I would argue that private-sector measurement and service practices are needed for the reasons outlined by Heintzman.

When service delivery is essential, as in the case of pandemic-related financial supports, the political and bureaucratic levels focus accordingly, and address the trade-off between speed of delivery and program integrity.

It is unclear the extent to which the public service advised the government that its focus on meeting its political objective of increased immigration would mean a surge in backlogs across programs, given reduced capacity during the pandemic.

The need for digitalization, modernization, and renewal of IT infrastructure was driven home during the pandemic. In the short-term, the IRCC has delivered online applications and updates for some programs. For the longer term, the challenges are greater, given the complexities of programs and government structures, the time involved and the need for effective management, as the Phoenix pay system debacle illustrates.

While the government is ultimately accountable, stakeholders, with some rare exceptions, bear some of the responsibility. Businesses complain about backlogs, but press for higher levels that exacerbate pressures, as do other levels of government, immigration lawyers, and consultants, settlement agencies, academics, and activists. While the general support for immigration across all these groups is laudable and exceptional compared to other countries, it also reveals an unhealthy group think that is unwilling to consider seriously trade-offs between addressing backlogs and increased levels.

Air Canada’s announcement that it is trimming capacity in order to ensure meeting their on-time performance service standards contrasts with the inability of the government to manage immigration and passport demand and related expectations. While I disagree with the government’s overall approach to increased immigration, a more responsible government would engage with stakeholders to explain the constraints and institute a partial and temporary reduction in immigration levels to reduce the backlog.

Politically, it is harder for governments to be open about service delivery issues than the private sector. However, being up front avoids the inevitable drip-drip of revelations of problems that result in greater public and media attention and prolonged controversies.

The challenge for the public service is to “provide stronger advice to the political level on the constraints and trade-offs inherent in public administration” on service delivery issues, always tricky to carry out in practice.

Canadians may not appreciate the abstraction of large numbers, but they do understand the many personal stories of those who are waiting for decisions, whether in passport lineups or applications in the system. As Heintzman, Savoie, and others have noted, government failure to deliver on services or communicate in advance of service delivery issues undermines overall trust in government.

Source: Disconnect between political priorities and service delivery

Filed under Government, Immigration, Passports Tagged with , , , ,

Feds aiming to clear passport backlog in next ‘4 to 6 weeks’: minister

2022/07/13 Leave a comment

Or after the summer travel season! But realistic:

Ottawa is acknowledging it underestimated the demand for passports amid relaxed COVID-19 restrictions, and is aiming to clear backlogs by the end of the summer.

Speaking in Vancouver Monday, Families, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould described the long waits and uncertainty Canadians seeking the travel documents have faced for months as “totally unacceptable.”

“Where we want to be is people getting their passports well ahead of time when they apply, and that’s what we’re working towards in the next four to six weeks,” she said.

Throughout the spring and early summer, Canadians seeking to renew their passports have faced long, sometimes multi-day lines at Service Canada offices. Many who have mailed in their documentation have reported poor communication and lack of clarity about when their documents will arrive.

In both cases, some applicants have faced processing times of months, sometimes threatening scheduled flights or planned travel.

On Monday, Gould said the federal government had anticipated an uptick in demand when restrictions were relaxed, but not the scale of applications or the way people chose to apply.

Prior to COVID-19, she said 80 per cent of people applied for passports in-person, with 20 per cent applying by mail. This year, that distribution flipped, she said.

“What we didn’t anticipate was the level of surge we were going to receive,” she said.

“Quite frankly the mail system was not sufficiently staffed to deal with that. That is something we are fixing right now.”

Between April and June this year, Canadians submitted more than 808,000 passport applications, 166,000 more than during the same period in 2019.

That’s pushed the volume of applications for this fiscal year to 4.3 million, up from 2.4 million last year, and left federal public servants clocking about 6,000 hours of overtime a week.

Ottawa has hired 600 additional passport workers, but only about 100 of them have completed training, which takes 12 to 15 weeks.

The remaining workers should be coming on the job within the next month, Gould said.

Despite the uncertainty and extreme delays for some, Gould said the majority of Canadians are getting their passports on time. She said those who are approaching their travel dates with not documentation should go to a Service Canada site, where people with urgent need are being prioritized.

Source: Feds aiming to clear passport backlog in next ‘4 to 6 weeks’: minister

Filed under Citizenship, Passports Tagged with , , ,

A summer of last-minute passports from a government that was too slow in spring

2022/07/08 Leave a comment

A number of articles on the passport and other delays.

Starting with Campbell Clark of the Globe:

A month ago, the strategy to beat down Canada’s passport backlog was to get people to apply in-person, rather than by mail. Now workers at big-city passport offices triage the people standing in the long lines outside, sending those travelling in the next 48 hours on, and giving others tickets to come back another time.

The minister responsible for the passport offices, Karina Gould, has started to tell Canadians that she is angry about it, too, or something like that: She calls the situation “totally unacceptable,” and insists more will be done.

But what Ms. Gould really needs is a time machine and a bullhorn, so she can go back four months to March to wake up the slumbering government machine.

That was when the uptick in passport applications was becoming visible. The alarm bells didn’t get sounded loudly enough, quickly enough. In April, the government announced it was hiring 600 staff, but it was too little. And now that more resources are being poured in, it’s too late – or at least too late to avert a summer logjam that has made travellers livid.

“We anticipated a surge, but we didn’t anticipate just how large it would be,” Ms. Gould, the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

She said she accepts that people think the government should have seen the problem sooner, but it wasn’t easy to predict. “It doesn’t justify it by any means, because we need to do better and we’re going to do better.”

Perhaps hindsight is 20/20. But the government wasn’t just slow to see the tsunami coming, but slow to react. One problem, as the backlog mounted, was that federal public-health rules kept COVID-19 capacity limits in place at passport offices, with 40 per cent of wickets closed, till May, two months after restrictions were lifted for stores in Ontario, for example.

And more broadly, the federal government was slow to get a grip on reopening. The bureaucracy that delivered CERB cheques in a few weeks in 2020 didn’t spring into action to meet travel-surge challenges in 2022. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government didn’t put the government on alert for reopening. The passport debacle is one embarrassing result.

The government notes that people are getting their passports. But it is often at the last minute, the day before they fly. The government is leasing space next to passport offices for waiting, or sometimes putting up tents, Ms. Gould said. “This is not the solution. This is just in the interim,” she added.

How did this happen?

In the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, demand for passports pretty much halted. Passport offices were closed. The number of employees shrank. When people started applying again, the numbers rose gradually. Then there was a surge. The immigration department’s forecasts of passport demand for 2022 were low, but revised dramatically upward in January, and again in the spring.

When applications started to pour in March, and pile up in April, there was another problem. In the pandemic, most people hard started mailing applications. But a quarter of them arrived with errors such as missing documents or blank boxes, so they took longer to process. The backlog mounted.

So officials encouraged people to apply in-person instead. And then the lines at offices grew. It wasn’t just new applicants showing up in person, but folks who had mailed in applications, and were getting nervous that their mailed application hadn’t been processed.

“The Easter long weekend was a worrying long weekend for me, because there was a big rush for people who wanted to travel,” Ms. Gould said. “And I would say that in mid-May we really realized we needed to ramp up in a much bigger way than we had been because the number of applications that kept coming in were much greater than the processing capacity.”

There was hiring – 600 in the spring, 600 being hired now and 600 to be seconded from other government jobs. Some get only part of the 12- to 15-week training so they can quickly do one part of the job. Workers were reorganized.

But the backlog of roughly half a million applications isn’t shrinking yet, and it’s a scramble. The government was slow to hit the panic button months ago. And now Ms. Gould forecasts that things will be back to a “steady state” by the end of summer, when most Canadians’ vacations are over.

Source: A summer of last-minute passports from a government that was too slow in spring

Heather Scofield in the Star:

Here’s a number the federal government would like you to know.

Between February and June of this year, the amount of Canadians travelling by air shot up 280 per cent. In the United States, the increase was just 25 per cent.

The number comes from Transport Canada, and the reason federal Liberals want us all to know about it is because they argue it’s why families are camped out at Canadian airports and why police have had to intervene in unruly passport lineups that stretch around the block.

For sure, a 280 per cent spike in demand for travel is enormous, and very difficult for normal-times bureaucracy and travel industry to digest. But it didn’t materialize out of nowhere.

The lineups that have thrown the delivery of government services into disarray are egregious, but they’re also a symptom of the post-pandemic disruption that has afflicted much of the private sector too. And the sooner we address that disruption with the full force of our ingenuity and resources, the better.

“Whatever it takes” defined economic policy on our way down into pandemic recession. The recovery requires an equally concerted effort, because this is more than congestion in airports and on the sidewalks outside Passport Canada.

The erratic flow of people is running amok in our travel industry, for sure, but also our immigration system, our labour markets and our housing markets, showing up in the form of massive lineups, backlogs, erratic prices and inflation. The disruption is not going away on its own, and there are serious implications for both our political landscape and our economy.

Let’s start with the 280-per-cent spike in Canadian travellers this spring, compared to just a 25-per-cent climb in Americans. It’s huge, but not a surprise.

After a couple of years of being mainly housebound here in Canada, we were then sent back home by the sudden restrictions imposed at the end of 2021 because of Omicron. Canadians finally burst out of their homes when Omicron settled down, and they haven’t stopped moving since.

The United States, on the other hand, responded with a lighter touch both to Omicron this winter and even before then, explaining why their wanderlust is not nearly as intense as ours.

Was that kind of surge foreseeable? Probably not to the exact extent we see before us. But one thing we have learned about how the economy and the public respond to the pandemic is that it’s in fits and starts. We have lurched from open to closed with dramatic and volatile effects on how things work.

Strange consumer demands have led to runs on toilet paper and used cars, and — more seriously — a perplexing and persistent shortage of computer chips and shipping containers. Supply chains have seized up, caught between the unpredictable demands coming their way and the unpredictable disruptions in the infrastructure they use.

And the job market is going haywire. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is fond of saying it has completely recovered from the pandemic recession because more Canadians are employed now than before the pandemic. But in fact, Stage Two of the pandemic recovery is upon us, where one million jobs sit empty and too-high inflation has dug itself in for the long haul.

We have to expect, and prepare for, a certain amount of chaos.

It’s too soon to abandon the crisis footing that Ottawa and the private sector shifted to in the early days of the coronavirus, when decision-makers quickly learned that projections based on how the world worked in pre-pandemic days were not worth much.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen some attempts to regain that footing. Transport Canada is meeting with increasing frequency with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, border officials, union officials and air navigators to detect every single inefficiency in the airport system, and shave off time and effort wherever possible.

Vaccine requirements have been scaled back and streamlined, airlines have cut flights, and now their attention has turned into the nightmare which is baggage.

It’s hard to know if there is progress, and there’s a recognition that no one was quite ready for the traffic patterns gumming up trips everywhere right now.

As for immigration, the lineups for processing have ballooned over the course of COVID-19. A parliamentary committee was told this spring that the backlog stands at two million people — almost double the pre-pandemic list — and that was considered already way too long. 

Canada’s economic growth and recovery strategy is heavily based on increasing immigration, but with backlogs like that, it’s a bumpy road.

Over in the world of passports, there’s a similar all-hands-on-deck approach that has taken on added urgency as the intractable lineups made a mockery of internal projections and erupted into a backlash on the sidewalks and in the offices of MPs.

Extra workers have been hired, senior managers are now involved in triage, new offices opened, hours extended.

But the pivot takes time, and success is hard to see.

Over on Facebook Marketplace, one enterprising Montrealer was offering to stand in line at 4 a.m. for passport-seekers for $250 just over a week ago. He has since dropped his price to $200. Is that a sign the lineups are easing?

The Liberals had better hope so, because the public patience for queuing and dysfunction in the machinery of government has worn thin.

Source: On passports and airports, public patience with Liberals is running out

And lastly, Minister Gould on the reasons:

The minister responsible for Service Canada admits the government did not fully anticipate the overwhelming surge in passport applications that came with the lifting of travel restrictions and is hopeful waiting times will return to normal by the end of summer.

Families, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould said the federal government hired 600 new staff ahead of the anticipated increase in passport applications and renewals, but said “clearly it was not sufficient.” The surge has forced some Canadians to camp overnight outside of government offices in an attempt to obtain their passports.

“If I put myself where we were as Canadians back in February, we weren’t talking about this kind of a surge. We knew it was going to increase and that’s why we took the measures that we did. But I will concede for sure that they were insufficient for what ended up happening,” Ms. Gould said in an interview.

Service Canada issued 363,000 passports during the first year of the pandemic, from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021 – and that number jumped to more than 1.27 million the following fiscal year. The government has received 757,207 passport applications since April 1, nearly 60 per cent of the past year’s total.

Service Canada is hiring an additional 600 staff to help with the delays. Ms. Gould said training for some of the new hires is being shortened from the typical 15 weeks to one to two weeks, so that fully trained passport officers can focus on more complex applications, such as children with custody issues, while new hires will work on simpler files.

Ottawa is asking Canadians travelling within the next 45 business days to go to one of the country’s 35 dedicated passport offices for service. Waiting times topped more than six hours at some locations Monday, according to the government’s website. The government is asking those who are not travelling within the next 45 business days to apply at a Service Canada centre or by mail.

Ms. Gould said the return to normal waiting times will depend on the number of applications the government receives in the coming weeks.

“If volumes on a weekly basis continue where they are now and don’t substantially increase, we feel quite confident that we’re going to be in a much better position over the next four to six weeks and definitely by the end of summer,” she said.

The department has a service standard time of 10 business days for passport applications submitted at a passport office. Ms. Gould said 96 per cent of those passports are being issued within the standard, but the government’s website says they could still take up to two weeks.

Ms. Gould said the mail option is about “40 per cent less efficient” than in-person service. The government groups processing times for mail with the in-person option at Service Canada centres; the service standard is 20 business days, but processing can take up to nine weeks.

Raphael Girard, a retired assistant deputy minister who was responsible for Passport Canada in 1993, said the government needs to consider more creative solutions to the problem, such as extending passports for a year so officials can catch up on the backlog. He said this could be done by having Canadians bring their expired passports to a government office, where an agent could extend the document with a stamp.

However, a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said simply extending expiration dates is not possible. Aidan Strickland said amending an expiry date that is not aligned with the electronic expiry date recorded in the Canadian ePassport could create further travel disruptions for the passport holder, and that the individual could also be refused boarding on a plane and denied entry to some countries.

More generally speaking, Mr. Girard argued the government has “lost the sense of operations designed to improve client service.”

“They’re layering on … controls and slowing things down, whereas 90 per cent of the workload is always routine,” he said.

Last month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau established a new task force of cabinet ministers to improve government services, such as passports, and monitor the delays causing chaos at Canada’s airports.

Conservative social development critic Laila Goodridge said Ms. Gould and Mr. Fraser, along with the task force, “continue to fumble managing the delivery and processing of passports. This is indicative of what we’ve seen with the Trudeau government that is unprepared for a predictable increase in demand for travel.” She pointed to a recent government tender for 800 chairs for people to sit on as they wait outside of passport offices.

NDP transport critic Taylor Bachrach said the continued delays for Canadians to get new or renewed passports are unacceptable, and that many people are going to their MPs for help to get their documents.

“Ultimately, the increased demand for passports was entirely predictable. But the Liberals failed to act even though they had months to prepare for travel to return. Now they need to urgently address this problem before more Canadians see their travel plans ruined, including speeding up the hiring process to clear the backlog.”

Source: Ottawa acknowledges it underestimated surge in demand for passports

Filed under Citizenship, Passports Tagged with , , ,

Mason: The gong show at our passport offices is inexcusable

2022/05/28 Leave a comment

Yet another backlog at IRCC, the department responsible for Passport Canada.

When multiculturalism moved from Canadian Heritage to IRCC in 2008, the then hope within the Citizenship Branch was that the addition of Multiculturalism would rebalance to some extent the IRCC focus on immigration.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen, and citizenship remained the “poor cousin” compared to other IRCC programs and then of course the program moved back to Canadian Heritage and the Liberal government increased its funding.

It appears that the move of passport to IRCC more than 10 years ago has similarly resulted in relative program neglect, an even “poorer cousin.” Telling, as I have noted before, that IRCC does not include current passport statistics on open data:

As COVID-19 vaccines began to do their work last year, more Canadians began to venture out and allow themselves to imagine vacations to exotic locales – or even just to the United States.

Surely, the federal government was aware of this. It must have known that the demand for travel after two years of being cooped up at home would be unprecedented. Airlines began preparing for this eventuality months ago, when it was evident COVID-related travel restrictions were being lifted around the world. You would assume the federal government would have brainstormed as well: What should we be prepared for, when the travel surge occurs?

If anyone in government had been thinking, they would have foreseen the mad march to Service Canada’s passport offices we have recently witnessed – of Canadians seeking to apply for and renew their passports – and come up with a strategy to respond to it. After all, these applications were way down during the pandemic – in no small part because many Service Canada offices were temporarily closed at points during the pandemic – and many of these documents have expired in the interim. It should have been plainly evident there would be overwhelming demand.

The numbers now bear it out: Service Canada issued 363,000 passports from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021, a number that jumped to more than 1.27 million in the following fiscal year. (It’s also been reported that the number of passports processed is up 350 per cent over last year). Before the pandemic, Service Canada was getting about 5,000 calls a day related to passport renewals; today, that number has shot up to more than 200,000.

But it’s clear now that whatever plan there was to deal with an inevitable avalanche of applicants was wholly inadequate. Maybe “inept” is a better word. Perhaps “complete disaster” more aptly fits the bill.

Of course, we have seen government incompetence before. But if there was a government-incompetence Hall of Fame, Service Canada’s response to this surge of passport demand would have to rank right up there.

The stories: wow.

Citizens have been lining up for days outside some passport offices. To no one’s surprise, this has led to tensions at some locations. When some of those who had been camped out for days outside an office in Surrey, B.C., noticed little to no movement in the line, they attempted to go inside to see what the issue was. They were met by security, and things escalated to the point police were called – surprise, surprise.

Women with babies in strollers have had to stand in line for hours, with no place to sit down. Pleasant, elderly commissionaires haven’t really been able to give people reliable information about how long if might be before they get processed, or even if they will. There have even been reports of people paying homeless people to hold their place in line.

The government agency has reported that it has hired more than 600 additional staff to handle the extra volume, and yet it does not seem to have alleviated the lineups at many of the most popular centres. People report going inside and seeing only a fraction of the kiosks open, because COVID-19 protocols and social distancing guidelines have kept many stations closed. Strangely, everyone in those same passport centres, including staff, can meet at a bar or restaurant afterward, maskless, and raise a toast to the incompetence and irrationality of all those involved in this utter shemozzle.

The government says you can still get a passport in five days if you apply in person at one of the centres. What it doesn’t say is that you might need to take a week off work so you can sit outside in the rain waiting for your chance to get inside one.

For many, new passports can take up to 12 weeks to get, according to the Travel Industry Council of Ontario.

I realize that having to wait in line to renew a passport seems like the mother of all first-world problems. There may not be a lot of sympathy for people who might not be able to go on their Caribbean cruise because they didn’t anticipate a three-month delay in getting their passports renewed.

That’s not the point.

The point is there are all sorts of legitimate reasons for wanting and needing a passport beyond luxury travel. And people who need those passports shouldn’t have to compete in a real-life version of Survivor to get them from our own government.

Ottawa was completely drunk at the wheel here. And it still hasn’t been able to figure out how to design a system that can eliminate these unconscionable wait times and delays.

The country deserves better.

Source: The gong show at our passport offices is inexcusable

Filed under Passports Tagged with , ,

Canada is leaving some would-be immigrants waiting just to hear whether their application has been received

2022/05/11 Leave a comment

More accounts on backlogs, processing delays and lack of communication:

When Manmeet Kaur applied to sponsor her newlywed husband to come from India to join her in Canada, it seemed like a no-brainer to submit the application online rather than to send the paperwork by courier.

Electronic application through new government portals was supposed to be faster and keep important documents — such as wedding photos and personal identification — from getting lost in the process or mixed up with others’ files.

And so, Kaur applied last September.

As she watched applicants she had met through social media groups, and who had applied around the same time, start to get their acknowledgment of receipt, better known as their “AOR,” the Brampton woman says, she expected that immigration officials would soon open her e-application and that her day would come.

She says she got nervous when others who had applied months after her were getting their AOR, which is only issued once a thorough check by officials ensures an application is complete — with no missing forms, documents and signatures. That’s when an applicant receives a file number and the actual processing starts.

“Many of the September applicants have gotten their passport requests and decisions made in January and February. While we’re still waiting for our AORs, some already have their spouses with them. Now January and February applicants are getting their AORs, too,” said Kaur, 27, a medical lab technician, who last saw her husband in India in July.

“The people who applied first should get processed first. I completely understand each file is different and some take longer than others. But we are talking about just checking if an application is complete or not. It should make no difference. Now, we’re lagging further and further behind.”

Few other federal services have seen so much disruption as the immigration system during the pandemic, with the operation grinding to a halt; staff working remotely with antiquated infrastructure; and travel restricted for newcomers abroad due to border closures.

Inconsistency in immigration processing times has always baffled — and annoyed — applicants anticipating that each application would be processed on a “first-in, first-out” basis.

However, with immigration backlogs skyrocketing — more than 1.8 million across programs — and older applications piling up amid the operational disruptions, the frustration among applicants has reached a boiling point, as Canada scrambles to digitalize the application process.

The digitalization of applications for some immigration programs— up to a total of 17 out of more than 60 by this summer — and proliferation of social media groups has made it easier for people to keep track of files and compare notes to keep an eye on the system for transparency and accountability.

In the past, officials always stated immigration processing times varied depending on complexity of the case and completeness of the file. The Star reached out to the immigration department to ask how AOR is processed and why applicants are seemingly not being dealt with in a chronological order, but didn’t receive a response before press time.

“The immigration department is ignoring files that are old and is processing files that are new,” opined Maninder Aulakh of Abbotsford, B.C., who applied on Feb. 8, 2021 to sponsor his wife to Canada from India.

“It breaks my heart to see this kind of treatment.”

A former colleague and a relative — both submitted the same paper applications from India after his — have already had their spouses in Canada as permanent residents.

“I can give you more examples,” sighed the 31-year-old engineer from Punjab, whose application was finally approved and finalized in May, after 15 months.

“These officials just play by their own rules.”

Ottawa immigration lawyer Tamara Mosher-Kuczer said the department’s processing times are spotty across programs. In March, she and other colleagues with the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association launched their own tracker to trace citizenship and permanent residence processing times.

For instance, she said, spousal sponsors who submitted paper applications have been receiving AORs two months ahead of those who applied online around the same time.

(Due to COVID-19, the immigration department has had to scan paper applications into the system so staff can process files from home. Hence, officials have warned that paper applications are expected to take longer to get into the hand of an officer.)

“It also appears that they’re processing new applications much faster than they’re addressing the inventory,” said Mosher-Kuczer. “The inventory is paper (applications). So they are saying it’s difficult because we have digitized, but that doesn’t make sense because they’re processing new paper applications first.”

She said the same thing also happens to other applications, such as the issuance of initial permanent resident cards for freshly minted immigrants, which is supposed to be an automatic process without the involvement of a decision-maker. Yet, these applications are not processed in the order they come in. As a result, wait time varies.

“So why are these applications not being processed on a first-in basis? What is the rationale for that?” asked Mosher-Kuczer, who has tried to get answers from immigration officials with no success.

“People who are applying to immigration have an understanding that Canada is a fair country, a democracy where everybody is treated equally. They have an understanding that there would be no reason that their application would fall behind somebody else’s application.”

Burlington software engineer Tejas Ghutukade has been involved in multiple immigration groups on Facebook and WhatsApp that include spousal sponsorship applicants left behind in the process — some online and others who mailed in applications the old way. They came from Brazil, Egypt, France, Germany, India, the Middle East and Pakistan.

A former international student from Mumbai, Ghutukade said he never had problems with his own immigration applications before and was convinced those complaining about delays must have other complicating issues and were at fault.

“I have gone through multiple stages of immigration. I got my study permit on my own. I got my work permit and permanent residence on my own. I did have a certain level of trust in the system,” said the 31-year-old, who submitted his spousal sponsorship application in January and this week received an AOR after the Star inquired about his case.

“But this time, I can see that it doesn’t always work. If you’re stuck in the system, it’s a really bad situation. There has to be a time limit they take to issue an AOR and process an application.”

Marco Antonio Marques Valim, an immigrant from Brazil, said he still has no idea if the immigration department has received the spousal application he submitted in early December. His worst fear is the file would be returned and has to go back to the end of the queue if screening officials find any missing signature or document.

“We don’t know if they got it and if everything is correct. We’re going to wait to find out, and then wait again. In the meantime, I am not sure if I will be able to live with my wife at some point during my life in Canada,” said the 33-year-old Toronto bartender, whose spouse has been refused a visitor visa to see him.

“Having a first-in, first-out system would provide us some comfort that we may get there by certain time and plan our lives a lot better. At this point, it is just all frustration and uncertainty. It is not a good mental health state to be in.”

Source: Canada is leaving some would-be immigrants waiting just to hear whether their application has been received

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Automatic for the people [immigration focus]

2022/05/06 Leave a comment

Of note. Given volumes and resources, no realistic alternative but care need to eliminate biases (either pro or con):

If there was ever any doubt the federal government would use automation to help it make its administrative decisions, Budget 2022 has put that to rest. In it, Ottawa pledges to change the Citizenship Act to allow for the automated and machine-assisted processing of a growing number of immigration-related applications.

In truth, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has been looking at analytics systems to automate its activities and help it assess immigrant applications for close to a decade. The government also telegraphed its intention back in 2019, when it issued a Directive on Automated Decision-Making (DADM), which aims to build safeguards and transparency around its use.

“[T]he reference to enable automated and machine-assisted processing for citizenship applications is mentioned in the budget to ensure that in the future, IRCC will have the authority to proceed with our ambition to create a more integrated, modernized and centralized working environment.” said Aidan Stickland, spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship minister Sean Fraser, in an emailed reply.

“This would enable us to streamline the application process for citizenship with the introduction of e-applications in order to help speed up application processing globally and reduce backlogs,” Stickland, added. “Details are currently being formalized.”

But to live a life of ambition requires taking risks. So the DADM comes with an algorithmic impact assessment tool. According to Teresa Scassa, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, it creates obligations for any government department or agency that plans to adopt automated decision-making, either in whole or as a system that makes recommendations. It is a risk-based framework to determine the obligation to be placed on the department or agency.

“The citizenship and immigration context is one where what they’re looking at is that external client,” Scassa says. “It does create this governance framework for those types of projects.”

Scassa says that the higher the risk of impact on a person’s rights, or the environment, the more obligations are placed on the department or agency using it, such as requirements for peer review, monitoring outputs to ensure the system remains consistent with the objectives or that it doesn’t demonstrate improper bias.

“It governs things like what kind of notice should be given,” Scassa says. “If it’s very low-risk, it might be a very general notice, like something on a web page. If it’s high risk, it will be a specific notice to the individual that automated decision-making is in use. Depending on where the project is in the risk framework, there is a sliding scale of obligations to ensure that individuals are protected from adverse impacts.”

Scassa suspects that IRCC may use automated decision-making to determine if someone qualifies for citizenship, which can mean different things.

It could be a triage system, for example, drawing information from applications before using AI to determine which applicants clearly qualify for citizenship. “Everything else [would fall] into a different basket where it needs to be reviewed by an officer,” Scassa says.

Such a system would be relatively low-risk as any decisions would be positive for the applicant, while all others go to a human for review, which would speed up overall processing times.

“That may be less problematic than a system that makes all of the decisions, and people have to figure out why they got rejected, and you have to ask how transparent is the algorithm, and what are your rights to have the decision reviewed,” Scassa adds. “There is the question of how it will be designed, and how impactful the AI tool will be on individuals. On the other hand, a triage system like this could have automation bias where files get flagged. Maybe the human reviewing them approaches them with a particular mindset because they haven’t been considered to be automatically accepted. The automation bias may make the human less likely to approve them.”

Scassa notes that the Open Government platform shows an algorithmic impact assessment for a tool developed for spousal analytics, a form of triage tool, which gives a sense of what kinds of tools the department is contemplating.

Scassa also notes that under the Citizenship Act, a provision allows for the delegation of the minister’s powers to any person authorized in writing. She suspects that the proposed legislative change could be to specifically allow some of the decisions to be made on a fully-automated basis.

When it comes to reviewing decisions, the DADM and its risk framework appears to apply administrative law principles, including procedural fairness protections.

Paul Daly, also a law professor at the University of Ottawa, adds that the administrative law principles apply regardless of whether this type of automated decision-making has been authorized in the statute.

“It’s a common concern for officials using sophisticated machine-learning technology to want legal authority,” Daly says. “Really, that’s only one part of the picture. There’s a whole body of legal principles from administrative law, the Charter, and the [DADM] that have to be complied with when you start to actually use the systems,” Daly says.

Lex Gill, a fellow at Citizen Lab, co-authored a report called “Bots at the Gate,” which looks at the human rights impacts of automated decision-making in Canada’s citizenship and immigration system. She acknowledges there are serious backlogs within the immigration system. But she cautions that faster isn’t always better, particularly when the error rates associated with AI disproportionately affect certain groups who are already treated unfairly.

“Sometimes we adopt technologies that will allow us to believe that we are doing something more scientific, methodical or fair, when really what we are doing is reproducing the status quo, but faster and with less transparency,” Gill says. “That is always my concern when we talk about automating these kinds of administrative processes.”

Gill notes there is a spectrum of technologies available for automated and machine-assisted processing, some of which are not problematic, while others are worrying and raise human rights issues. Still, it is hard to know what we may be dealing with without more information from the minister.

“When we talk about using automated or machine-assisted technology to do things like risk scoring, that’s an area where we know that it’s highly discretionary,” Gill says. “There is an entire universe of academic study that demonstrates that those technologies tend to replicate existing forms of bias and discrimination and profiling that already exists within administrative systems.”

Gill says that these systems tend to learn from existing practices. The result tends to exacerbate discriminatory outcomes and makes them more difficult to challenge because there is the additional layer of perceived scientific or technical neutrality layered on top of a system that demonstrated bias.

“When the government is imagining adopting these kinds of technologies, is it imagining doing that in a way that is enhancing transparency, accountability, and reviewability of decisions?” asks Gill. “Efficiency is clearly an important goal, but the rule of law, accountability and control of administrative discretion also require friction—they require a certain degree of scrutiny, the ability to slow things down, the ability to review things, and the ability to understand why and how a decision was made.”

Gill says that unless these new technologies come with oversight, review and transparency mechanisms, she worries that they will take a system that is already discretionary, opaque, and has the ability to change the direction of a person’s life, and render it even more so.

“If you’re going to start adopting these kinds of technologies, you need to do it in a way that maximally protects a person’s Charter rights, and which honours the seriousness of the decisions at stake,” Gill says. “Don’t start with decisions that engage the liberty interests of a person. Start with things like whether or not this student visa application is missing a supporting document.”

Source: Automatic for the people

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

Immigration Canada acts to end racism, cultural bias among employees

2022/04/04 Leave a comment

Of note:

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is conducting a study to explore potential cultural bias shown by its employees when it comes to processing visa applications at the country’s points of entry, according to a department spokesperson.

The study comes in response to a survey examining workplace racism at IRCC released last year that revealed multiple reports of racist “microagressions” by employees and supervisors.

Participants interviewed said that some of the overt and subtle racism they have witnessed by both employees and decision makers at IRCC “can and probably must impact case processing.”

The department has also made it mandatory for employees and executives to take unconscious bias training, and instituted a requirement for senior staff to take a specific course on inclusive hiring practices as a prerequisite for obtaining their delegated authority to sign financial and staffing decisions.

In addition, said spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald, IRCC is appointing anti-racism representatives in each sector of the department to support the work of a newly-established Anti-Racism Task Force and has created a Black Employee Network to ensure Black voices are heard in driving change.

“We must actively fight racism and continue to work tirelessly to foster a culture of inclusion, diversity, and respect…but actions speak louder than words,” MacDonald told New Canadian Media through email.

MacDonald said IRCC will be hiring an independent firm to do an Employment System Review (ESR). The ESR will identify new solutions in core areas such as people management practices and accountability.

IRCC also plans to release its Anti-Racism Strategy and action plan later this year.

IRCC’s steps to combat racism and cultural bias come in the wake of critics arguing that that’s precisely what is contributing to a growing backlog of visa applications while exacerbating issues of racial discrimination and harassment in the workplace.

Jasraj Singh Hallan, a Calgary-area MP who serves as the Conservative Party’s shadow minister on immigration, told NCM the IRCC isn’t only plagued with racism and cultural bias when dealing with visa applications, but it is also struggling to stamp out racist workplace behaviour.

“I have been asking IRCC for several months now to reveal the number of disciplinary actions and investigations it has taken against employees, but have been unable to get answers,” he told NCM.

“The impact of racism and cultural bias in IRCC is contributing to massive backlogs in visa applications, refugee processing times and increased cost to the taxpayer.” The latest IRCC numbers show there are 1.84 million people waiting on decisions in its inventory as of mid-March.

Even as Canada struggles to address the processing delays, the country’s 2022–2024 Immigration Levels Plan aims to continue welcoming immigrants at a rate of about one per cent of Canada’s population. This includes 431,645 permanent residents in 2022 (an increase of about 21,000 people from its original plan), 447,055 in 2023, and 451,000 in 2024.

Respondents to the survey released last year pointed to the differences in visa refusal rates by country as an indicator that some form of bias must be at play.

The study also showed there’s growing concern that increased automation of visa processing will embed racially discriminatory practices in a way that will be harder to see over time.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) has filed a policy grievance against IRCC on behalf of the Canada Employment and Immigration Union (CEIU) based on the disproportionate and adverse treatment of racialized members.

The grievance was filed on March 15, ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

“In this case, IRCC has shown they are incapable or unwilling to proactively address issues of racial discrimination and harassment when they arise, such as excluding racialized employees from hiring and promotional opportunities,” said the PSAC.

PSAC and CEIU are seeking several corrective and concrete measures to eliminate discrimination in the workplace and prevent discriminatory practices in the future. The unions are also calling for all affected members to receive compensation for damages.

PSAC is also supporting a Black Class Action Lawsuit brought by 12 federal public service workers, who identify as Black, Caribbean or of African descent.

The lawsuit reaches back 50 years, arguing the federal government perpetuated Black employee exclusion: the systemic practice of limiting skilled Black workers from career advancement opportunities.

The lawsuit has now grown to represent 1,300 plaintiffs, including past and present IRCC employees, who are seeking over $2.5 billion in damages.

Meanwhile, an internal IRCC memo, obtained by Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, shows that taxpayers are doling out between $9,915 and $33,738 depending on the determination of the eligibility of an asylum claim.

“The lower cost is incurred in cases where the asylum claim is accepted at the first hearing, while the higher cost relates to claims which are initially denied, and the claimant exhausts all appeal options and is ultimately removed from Canada,” the memo stated.

“You can expect the processing costs to go up given the increasing backlog,” Kurland told NCM.

“When the government doesn’t put in the necessary resources to process applications properly and in a timely fashion, Canadians end up paying for it anyway,” Kwan told NCM.

Kwan noted that in 2021, 23 per cent of appeals of Refugee Protection Division (RPD) decisions were overturned by the Refugee Appeals Division (RAD), with an additional 8.5 per cent sent back to the RPD to reassess their decision.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​The Refugee Appeal Division decides appeals of decisions of the Refugee Protection Division to allow or reject claims for refugee protection. A person whose claim is rejected by the RPD can ask the RAD to review this decision to assess whether the RPD was wrong.

“That’s a very high error rate and this doesn’t include federal reviews which will uncover even more judgement errors,” said Kwan.

Source: Immigration Canada acts to end racism, cultural bias among employees

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

‘Racism plays a role in immigration decisions,’ House Immigration Committee hears

2022/03/29 Leave a comment

While always important to recognize that bias and discrimination can influence decisions, different acceptance rates can also reflect other factors, and that misrepresentation may be more prevalent in some regions than others.

Training guides and materials need to provide illustrations and examples. Meurrens is one of the few lawyers who regularly looks at the data but his challenge of the training guide “Kids in India are not back-packers as they are in Canada.” is odd given that the data likely confirms that statement.

Moreover, the call for more transparency, welcome and needed, may provide opportunities for the more unscrupulous to “game the system.”

“Kids in India are not back-packers as they are in Canada” reads a note appended to a slide in a presentation used to train Canadian immigration officials in mid-2019.

In a recent access to information request, Immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens said he received a copy of the presentation which was used in a training session by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) officials, dated April 2019 and titled “India [Temporary Resident Visa]s: A quick introduction.” He shared the full results of the request with The Hill Times.

The slides, which detail the reasons why Indians may apply for a Temporary Resident Visa (TRV) and what officials should look for in applications—have notes appended to them, as if they were speaking notes for the person giving the presentation. On one slide detailing potential reasons for travel to Canada, the notes read: “Kids in India are not back-packers as they are in Canada.”

In an interview, Meurrens spoke to an apparent double standard for Indian people looking to travel to Canada.

“It drives me nuts, because I’ve often thought that, as a Canadian, a broke university student, I could hop on a plane, go anywhere, apply for visas, and no one would be like, ‘That’s not what Canadians do,’” Meurrens said, adding that he’s representing people from India who did in fact intend to come to Canada to backpack through the country.

A screenshot of the page wherein an IRCC presentation notes that ‘Kids in India are not back-packers as they are in Canada.’ Image courtesy of IRCC

“To learn that people are trained specifically that Indian people don’t backpack” was “over the top,” he said. It reminded him of another instance of generalizations made within IRCC about different nationalities of people, when in 2015, an ATIP he received showed that training materials within the department stated that when a Chinese person marrying a non-Chinese person was a likely indicator of marriage fraud.

At the time, the department said that document was more than five years old, and no longer in use.

“[I’d like us] to get to a state where someone’s country of origin doesn’t dictate the level of procedural fairness that they’ll get and how they’re assessed,” he said.

The fact of systemic racism within Canada’s Department of Citizenship, Immigration, and Refugees Canada (IRCC) is not new; evidence of such racism was uncovered through what is colloquially known as the Pollara report. This report, conducted by Pollara Strategic Insights and released in 2021, was the result of focus groups conducted with IRCC employees to better understand “current experiences of racism within the department.”

The report found that within the department, the use of the phrase “the dirty 30” was widely used to refer to certain African nations and that Nigerians in particular were stereotyped as “particularly corrupt or untrustworthy.”

As the House Immigration Committee heard last week, there remains much work to be done to combat systemic racism within IRCC.

On March 22, the House Committee on Immigration and Citizenship began its study on differential outcomes in immigration decisions at IRCC, and Immigration Minister Sean Fraser (Central Nova, N.S.) appeared at the committee on March 24. Other issues brought up by witnesses included a lack of transparency from the department as well as concerns of systemic racism and bias being embedded in any automated intelligence (AI) the department uses to assess applications.

From students in Nigeria being subjected to English-language proficiency tests when they hail from an English-speaking country, to the differential treatment of some groups of refugees versus others, to which groups are eligible for resettlement support and which are not, the committee heard several examples of differential treatment of potential immigrants to Canada due to systemic racism and bias within IRCC.

“I know it’s very uncomfortable raising the issue of racism,” said Dr. Gideon Christian, president of the African Scholars Initiative and an assistant professor of AI and law at the University of Calgary.

“But the fact is that we need to call racism for what it is—as uncomfortable as it might be. … Yes, this is a clear case of racism. And we should call it that. We should actually be having conversations around this problem with a clear framework as to how to address it,” he said.

According to Christian, Nigerian students looking to come to Canada to study through the Nigerian Study Express program are subjected to an English-language proficiency test, despite the fact that the official language in Nigeria is English, that English is the language used in all official academic institutions there, and that academic institutions in Canada do not require a language test from Nigerian students for their admission.

A spokesperson for IRCC said the department does not single out Nigeria in its requirement for a language test.

“IRCC is committed to a fair and non-discriminatory application process,” reads the written statement.

“While language testing is not a requirement to be eligible for a study permit, individual visa offices may require them as part of their review of whether the applicant is a bona fide student. This includes many applicants from English-speaking countries, including a large number from India and Pakistan, two nations where English is widely taught and top countries for international students in Canada.”

“Nigeria is not singled out by the requirement of language tests for the Nigeria Student Express initiative,” the spokesperson said.

Systemic racism embedded in AI

Christian, who is also an assistant professor of AI and law at the University of Calgary and has spent the last three years researching algorithmic racism, expressed concern that the “advanced analytics” IRCC uses to triage its immigration applications—including the Microsoft Excel-based software system called Chinook—has systemic racism and bias embedded within it.

“IRCC has in its possession a great deal of historical data that can enable it to train AI and automate its visa application processes,” Christian told the committee. As revealed by the Pollara report, systemic bias, racism and discrimination does account for differential treatment of immigration applications, particularly when it comes to study visa refusals for those applying from Sub-Saharan Africa, he said.

“External story of IRCC—especially the Pollara report—have revealed systemic bias, racism and discrimination in IRCC processing of immigration applications. Inevitably, this historical data imposition of IRCC is tainted by the same systemic bias, racism and discrimination. Now the problem is that the use of these tainted data to train any AI algorithm will inevitably result in algorithmic racism. Racist AI, making immigration decisions,” he said.

The Pollara report echoed these concerns in a section that laid out a few ways processes and procedures adopted for expediency’s sake “have taken on discriminatory undertones.” This included “concern that increased automation of processing will embed racially discriminatory practices in a way that will be harder to see over time.”

Meurrens, who also appeared at committee on March 22, said a lack of transparency from the government impedes the public’s ability to assess whether it is indeed making progress on the issue of addressing systemic racism or not.

He said he’d like to see the department publish Access to Information results pertaining to internal manuals, visa office specific training guides, and other similar documents as downloadable PDFs on its website, pointing out this is how the provincial government of B.C. releases its ATIP responses. He also said he thinks IRCC should publish “detailed explanations and reports of how its artificial intelligence triaging and new processing tools work in practice.”

“Almost everything public today [about the AI programs] has been obtained through access to information results that are heavily redacted and which I don’t believe present the whole picture,” he said.

Whether the concerns were actually reflected in the AI itself, Meurrens said, could not be known without more transparency from the department.

“In the absence of increased transparency, concerns like this are only growing,” he said.

Fraser: racism is a ‘sickness’

On Thursday, Fraser told the committee that he agrees that racism is a problem within the department, calling it a “sickness in our society.”

“There are examples of racism not just in one department but across different levels of government. It’s a sickness in our society that limits the productivity of human beings who want to fully participate in our communities. IRCC is not immune from that social phenomenon that hampers our success as a nation, and we have to do everything we can to eradicate racism, not just from our department,” he said.

Fraser said there is “zero tolerance for racism, discrimination, or harassment of any kind,” but acknowledged those problems do exist within the department.

The minister pointed towards the anti-racism task force which was created in 2020 and “guides the department’s strategy to eliminate racism and applies an anti-racism lens” to the department’s work. He also said IRCC has been “actively reviewing its human resource systems so that Indigenous, Black, racialized peoples and persons with disabilities are better represented across IRCC at every level.”

Fraser also referenced a three-year anti-racism strategy for the department, which includes plans to implement mandatory bias training, anti-racist work and training objectives, and trauma coaching sessions for Black employees and managers to recognize the impacts of racism on mental health, among other things.

“It’s not lost on me that there have been certain very serious issues that have pertained to IRCC,” he said.

These measures are different from the ones witnesses and opposition MPs are calling for, however.

NDP MP Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.) her top priority on this topic is to convince the government to put an independent ombudsperson in place whose job it would be to assess IRCC policies and the application of said policies as they relate to differential treatment, systemic racism, and gender biases.

“Let’s dig deep. Have an officer of the House do this work completely independent from the government,” she said in an interview with The Hill Times.

At the March 22 meeting, Kwan asked all six witnesses to state for the record if they agreed that the government should put such an ombudsperson in place. All six witnesses agreed.

Kwan questioned the ability of the department to conduct its own internal reviews.

“As the minister said [at committee], he’s undertaking a variety of measures to address these issues and to see how they can rectify it. … But how deeply is it embedded? And if it’s done internally, then how independent is it?” she wondered.

Fraser said the implementation of an ombudsperson was something he would consider after reading the committee’s report.

Conservative MP Jasraj Singh Hallan (Calgary Forest Lawn, Alta.), his party’s immigration critic and the vice-chair of the committee, agreed with Meurrens’ calls for increased transparency. “We need more evidence that the government is serious about this,” he said in an interview.

Hallan also said he wants to see consequences for those within the department who participated in the racism documented by the Pollara report.

“[Fraser] should start by approaching those employees of IRCC that made these complaints from that Pollara report and find out who is making these remarks. Reprimand them, fire them if they need to be,” he said.

Source: ‘Racism plays a role in immigration decisions,’ House Immigration Committee hears

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , ,

Immigration Canada probing claims of systemic racism at two offices, union says

2022/03/11 Leave a comment

Notable that these complaints are related to the Montreal call centre, and the pressures described are likely common to most call centres. On the stereotyping mentioned by one staffer regarding “liars,” completely inappropriate but one has to recognize that fraud and misrepresentation occur, and that this may be more prevalent from certain source countries or areas:

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is investigating claims of systemic racism at two of its offices, says the union representing its employees.

Meanwhile, the department has hired an outside company, Charron Human Resources, to conduct a workplace audit at IRCC’s call centre in Montreal — the department’s only Canadian call centre — where employees have been working to fulfil the federal government’s commitment to bring in 40,000 refugees from Afghanistan.

The Canada Employment and Immigration Union (CEIU) — which represents employees at IRCC, Service Canada, Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), and the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) — says the IRCC’s internal racism probes stem from complaints filed by employees.

The news comes after the IRCC released a damning report late last year. That report cited employees complaining of repeated instances of staff and supervisors using offensive terms with racialized colleagues, and of limited opportunities for advancement for racialized minorities.

“We are going to be proving that there is a national problem at the IRCC across the workplace,” said Crystal Warner, the CEIU’s national executive vice-president.

“IRCC is committed and believes in creating a workplace free from racism, harassment, discrimination and marginalization of any kind,” the department said in a statement, adding it could not comment on the probes due to confidentiality issues.

The union said workplace issues at the Montreal call centre — the subject of Charron Human Resources’ workplace audit — go back years but have been aggravated by Canada’s daunting commitment to bring in 40,000 Afghans after the Taliban took over Afghanistan.

“[Staff] are telling us that all the new employees that are getting hired are leaving within a few months because of the pressure to produce, to stay on the call and take the next call,” Warner said.

“You could be on the phone and you could hear someone telling you about a sibling being beheaded or a relative that had been raped and all these horrible situations,” she said, adding employees aren’t permitted to take a moment to decompress before taking the next call.

The investigations came as little surprise to two federal civil servants who, fearing workplace reprisals, spoke to CBC News on the condition they not be named.

One staffer — who is Black — started her career at the IRCC call centre in Montreal in 2017 and now works in a different federal department.

Pressure to produce

She described an office of overworked staff constantly being monitored by management — where the pressure to field as many calls as possible affected everything, even bathroom breaks.

“If you took more than the allotted surplus time that you had in order to do your bodily functions, you would get an email saying, ‘You’re really off your stats today, what’s going on?'” she said.

“Am I supposed to ask like in a kindergarten? Raise my hand and say, ‘Ma’am, can I please go to the bathroom?'”

She reported racist attitudes toward immigration applicants from certain countries — particularly those from Cuba and Nigeria.

“That came from the top, how we were instructed to deal with people from certain countries,” she said. “There was a lot of stereotyping going on … ‘People from this country, people from that country, they’re all liars, you know?'”

The report the IRCC released last October spoke of employees referring to a group of 30 African countries as the “dirty 30.”

‘Plebeian tasks’ left to people of colour, staffer says

The unnamed staffer also said there were few career advancement opportunities at the call centre for people of colour.

“The plebeian tasks were left to the people of obvious ethnic background and the higher-ups were homogeneous in their colour and culture,” she said.

The second employee who spoke to CBC — who is also Black — started his career at the call centre in Montreal in 1998 and now works as an immigration officer.

He said he noticed a reluctance to promote employees of colour within the department over the years. He said he went through about a dozen applications before he got a promotion.

“They would find ways to tell me, ‘You’re not qualified, come and we’ll discuss about the failure and we’ll tell you exactly what to do next,'” he said.

Farahldine Boisclair, director of the IRCC’s anti-racism task force, admitted the department has a lot of work to do.

“Racism is a factor in Canadian life,” Boisclair said.

The department created her position and the task force after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020 triggered widespread protests against police violence targeting people of colour.

She said the department has been working hard to stamp out workplace racism through training for managers. She said IRCC has introduced programs to help emerging talent from racialized minority groups move up the ranks.

“The higher you move up, the less diverse it gets at the top,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is really empower employees to share their experiences with us, in whatever fashion.”

External audit expands scope

According to emails seen by CBC News, the scope of Charron’s audit expanded over the past two months.

A message sent to staff by Charron on Jan. 6 explaining the nature of the audit was limited to employees who had lodged workplace complaints, as identified by an IRCC director-general.

A second email, dated Feb. 7, went to everyone at the call centre. Like the first, it promised to keep all information confidential and suggested interview dates for later in the month.

Charron did not return requests for comment.

The CEIU said it has little faith in the department’s internal processes or its impartiality.

“It’s like you’re your own judge and jury,” Warner said, adding that as a result, many staff choose not to report individual complaints. “If your complaint is founded, you basically get an email saying, ‘We agree that you have been harassed.'”

The union says it intends to file a collective grievance about workplace discrimination and harassment.

It said it has more faith in the external audit performed by Charron since it’s a third party.

Source: Immigration Canada probing claims of systemic racism at two offices, union says

Filed under Immigration, Racism Tagged with ,

How Canada uses personal information collected at the border on immigration applications

2022/02/07 Leave a comment

Useful overview. Entry/Exit will improve data collection (e.g., visa overstays) and allow for simplification and better client service (e.g., automatic completion of citizenship application residency information):

Since February 2019, the Entry/Exit Program has allowed the Canadian border to collect basic traveller information and share it with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

IRCC uses the information to verify residency requirements for applications for permanent residence, work permits, study permits, and Canadian citizenshipapplications. Some programs require applicants to be in Canada for a certain number of days. For example, in order to apply for citizenship, permanent residents need to have been physically present in Canada for 1,095 days out of the five years prior to the date of their application.

With the Entry/Exit Program, IRCC can inquire about traveller information from the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) via the Global Case Management System (GCMS), which is the system IRCC uses to process immigration applications.

What information is available

For now, the Entry/Exit program is only open to travellers to come to Canada by land and air. It is not yet available for marine and rail travel to Canada. The information that IRCC can access through the Entry/Exit program includes:

  • given and family names
  • aliases
  • date of birth
  • gender
  • country of birth
  • country of citizenship
  • passport details
  • date of entry/exit

CBSA stores the information in the GCMS, which IRCC can use as needed to administer the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), the Citizenship Act, and the Canadian Passport Order.

How IRCC uses Entry/Exit data

According to the government website, IRCC can use Entry/Exit data to:

  • verify residency requirements in support of applications for grants of citizenship (CIT) or permanent resident cards;
  • verify if a temporary residence applicant may have previously overstayed their allowable period of admission in Canada;
  • assist in an investigation of an individual’s entitlement to a Canadian travel document;
  • verify that sponsors are residing in Canada;
  • verify the residency of spouses and partners under the spouse or common-law partner in Canada class;
  • verify whether or not a refugee claimant entered Canada using their travel documents; and
  • support investigations of possible fraud in relation to immigration, citizenship, and passport/travel document programs.

IRCC does not need client consent in order to query traveller entry and exit information. They are allowed to access the information if it is relevant to an IRCC officer’s decision in relation to a specific program. Only IRCC roles that make decisions on applications can access Entry/Exit information in the GCMA.

IRCC officers are not allowed to disclose entry and exit information unless it is necessary to administer the IRPA and is covered under an information-sharing agreement. Any disclosure not covered under a memorandum of understanding or other information-sharing agreement must be governed by CBSA.

As CBSA is the owner of the data, all authorized CBSA employees have access to it.

Travellers can request a copy of their personal travel history through an access to information request under the Privacy Act. To request a correction, travellers can contact the CBSA.

Temporary residence applications

IRCC can request Entry/Exit information for the following application types:

The Entry/Exit data can be used to check whether a foreign national has previously exceeded their authorized period of stay in Canada. The government calls this “overstay monitoring.” It begins when a traveller enters Canada and ends upon their exit. If the applicant has overstayed their visit, an “overstay indicator” will appear as a checked box in the GCMS once queried.

IRCC expects overstay indicators for temporary residents will begin appearing in Entry/Exit search results in November 2022, once a sufficient number of air carriers are on-boarded.

Permanent residence applications

Entry/Exit information is available to IRCC for the following permanent residence application types:

The data can be used to outline the periods of time spent in and outside Canada, and will allow IRCC to see if residence has been maintained. In addition to residency requirements, IRCC may make an Entry/Exit query to investigate misrepresentation, or revocation of Canadian documents.

For family sponsorship applications, Entry/Exit data can be used to determine if a sponsor is residing in Canada.

Citizenship applications

Exit/Exit data can be used in citizenship applications to:

  • verify compliance with physical presence requirements for grants of citizenship;

  • assist in the verification of other requirements, such as, flagging of potential loss of permanent resident status, the need for applicants to submit foreign police certificates, or misrepresentation;

  • verify compliance with physical presence requirements for resumption of citizenship; and

  • assist in cases of revocation of Canadian citizenship.

Source: How Canada uses personal information collected at the border on immigration applications

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