QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship
Call Centre Performance
June 14, 2022
Minister Fraser, an Auditor General’s report in 2019 found that 1.2 million calls to your department’s call centre were prevented from reaching an agent. Regrettably, the situation has only become worse.
An answer to a written question on the Senate Order Paper shows that between April and December of last year, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada call centre received over 2.6 million calls and 1.45 million of them were prevented from reaching the wait queue.
Minister, let me repeat that for you. In less than a year, almost 1.5 million calls were dropped, including calls from Canadian citizens, permanent residents and foreign nationals, some of whom are in desperate situations around the world and need your government’s help.
Minister, is that acceptable to you? Service has gone from bad to worse. Can you share with us what you are doing to fix it?
Thank you very much. Once again, if we’re going to identify the solution, I think we have to understand where the problem comes from. There are a couple of things going on that have created record demand in Canada’s immigration system at a time when our ability to supply services has been reduced primarily by the pandemic, but also by competing priorities, including the responses to both Afghanistan and Ukraine.
The numbers that we’re seeing now actually far exceed some of the numbers in your question, and when you seek to add thousands of staff over the last couple of years, it is still not enough to keep up with this short-term spike as a result of challenges related to the factors that I have just laid out.
Now, it’s not all negative news because, of course, we’re doing things to address these problems. I laid out some of the investments we have made that I won’t repeat. The big secret here is going to be to transform Canada’s immigration system into a digital one. We have a heavily paper-based system today. You can imagine somebody who has reached out to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and made a phone call will figure out that their paper is on the other side of the world. They call their MP, who reaches out to my office, who reaches out to a local office where somebody might actually have to pull out a physical piece of paper and then call everyone back in that chain to have the client receive an update on their case.
That’s unacceptable to me. I’m changing it. We have an $827‑million digital renovation of Canada’s immigration system under way. I mentioned the permanent residence case tracker available to family reunification previously. That’s going to give real-time information about a person’s case to them, so they not only will get good information, they won’t call Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which will free up the resources so we can deal with other challenging situations where a person is seeking something more than just an update.
We will have 17 lines of business with the ability to take digital applications as soon as this summer. We are already seeing some of the results of the investments in citizenship pay dividends with increased processing and results.
