CIMM – Question Period Note - Processing Costs – November 29, 2022
Date: November 25, 2022
Classification:
Department: IRCC
Issue:
Processing costs
Proposed Response:
- The Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is on track to welcome at least 432,000 permanent residents this year – the highest number in recent history – while continuing to process millions of temporary resident, passport and citizenship applications.
- Operating costs have increased as a result of pandemic-related backlogs and special humanitarian measures for managing the Afghanistan and Ukraine crises which entailed exceptionally high delivery costs.
- To this end, IRCC has required additional funding to ramp up processing capacity through hiring, and modernizing processes and technology, all of which require higher up-front costs. Additional costs are also associated with responses to international humanitarian crises, including considerations such as accommodations facilities and biometrics collection centres.
- We are already seeing results from the investments - overall inventory levels are decreasing in permanent resident, temporary resident and Citizenship lines of business. We expect that the investments made now will yield strong economic and social returns for Canada in the short-term and for years to come.
If pressed on overall efforts:
- To increase processing capacity and tackle the backlogs in the short term, I announced that IRCC would be hiring up to 1,250 staff by the end of this Fall. As of October 31st, the Department has hired over 1,000 new employees and is expected to add up to 400 more new employees by the end of March 31, 2023. Almost 850 of those employees have already been trained and are fully operational.
- A Task Force on Services to Canadians was launched in the summer 2022 where processing times and client service are being examined with a goal to develop an Action Plan for impacted Departments to implement.
- By implementing technology-based solutions and streamlining processes, improving policy, re-examining our risk tolerance and leveraging provincial/territorial and other partners, we will be able to respond quickly and effectively to client concerns.
Contact:
Marie-Josée Dorion
Director General, Operations Planning and Performance
Cell No.: 613-277-4134
Approved By:
Daniel Mills
Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Operations
Tel. No.: 613-437-6396
Background:
Current Status of Operations
- As at the end of October 2022, 4.3M final decisions were made across permanent resident, temporary resident (temporary workers, students, and visitors), and citizenship programs, compared to 2.3M over the same period last year.
- IRCC is on track to achieve its 2022 target of 432,000 permanent residents to Canada, and aims to welcome 465,000 in 2023.
- The multiplication of niche permanent resident lines of business in recent years have increased the complexity of the processing and requiring increased activities for program set up and tracking (e.g. training, delivery instructions, tracking reports, etc.) which can incur high costs.
- IRCC is currently on track for a new record of citizens with a projected range of 307,000 to 341,000 this fiscal year (2022/23). The previous confirmed record for new citizens was 252,000 in 2015/16.
- For passport, approximately 2.5 million applications were received and 2 million issued between January and October 2022. This is a significant increase over the same period of last year where approximately 1 million passport applications were received, and 817,000 issued.
Processing Improvements
- IRCC continues to work towards reducing inventories and improve processing times for all lines of business. Some categories of applications are seeing an improvement to the processing times, such as applications for Family class clients and Express Entry. For those categories, new applicants will be processed within services standards (12 and 6 months respectively).
- However, the effects of the pandemic are lingering and improvements will be seen incrementally as inventories of older cases are processed, all while respecting Cabinet set targets for immigration levels.
Key Accomplishments since July (Data as of November 3, 2022):
- Temporary Residents inventory has been reduced by over 150,000 applications, from 1,714,000 applications to 1,561,000 applications.
- Permanent Residents inventory has been reduced 107,100 applications from 714,700 to 607,600. 46% of the permanent resident inventory is within service standard compared to 40% in July.
- Citizenship inventory has been reduced by 53,000 applications from 382,000 to 329,00. Processing times have decreased to 24 months, from 26 months in July.
Increased Federal Funding
- To support the increases in processing and settlement of new permanent residents to Canada as part of Canada’s Immigration Levels Plan — including the government’s increased commitment to Afghan refugees — the government committed $2.1 billion over five years and $317.6 million ongoing in new funding.
- The fall 2021 Economic and Fiscal Update announced $85 million in funding for IRCC and federal partner organizations to reduce inventories and support return to service standards for some lines of business.
- In the fall 2022 Economic and Fiscal Update, an additional $50 million has been committed for IRCC in 2022-23 to continue to address application backlogs and speed up processing times.
Processing Costs
- It is important to recognize that direct processing costs vary across business lines. For example, economic immigration processing tends to be less costly than humanitarian and family immigration. Temporary residence visas require a lower level of effort in processing than study or work permits.
- While overall costs have increased through additional funding injections for processing higher immigration targets, special initiatives for Afghanistan and Ukraine, and additional funding for processing backlogs, on a per unit basis, processing costs have not increased across all business lines, indicating that investments are yielding potential processing efficiencies. At an aggregate level, the per unit processing cost for applications for most permanent economic classes is lower than it was in 2019-20 pre-pandemic.
- For example, while overall processing volumes across all business lines increased by 14% between 2018-19 and 2019-20, processing costs increased by only 5%. This reference is to pre-pandemic years to demonstrate that the perception of increased processing costs in past years is attributable to various factors and special initiatives such as Afghanistan, Ukraine, pandemic measures and funding injections.
Hiring
- IRCC employs an integrated, departmental-wide approach to staffing planning and hiring. IRCC has already hired more than 1,000 full time equivalents (FTEs) as at October 31, 2022. Of those hired, 841 FTEs or 83% have been fully on-boarded and trained to process applications.
- Hiring is continuing with up to 400 additional full time equivalents to be hired by the end of March 2023.
Investment in Technology
- The Department is working towards developing a modern digital platform that can sustain the intended growth through IT infrastructure stabilization, cloud computing, and scalable system design.
- The Digital Platform Modernization project is an $800 million investment, which included approximately 100 FTEs who were devoted to this project in 2021-22.
- As IRCC moves towards this new platform, other digital tools to facilitate application processing and improve client experience have been introduced. Examples include: a new Permanent Resident online intake portal; a case application status tool; and, digitization of paper files to facilitate electronic processing.
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