PACP - Deputy Minister’s Opening Statement - December 5, 2023

Thank you, Mr. Chair^{Footnote 1}, for the opportunity to appear before this committee alongside the Office of the Auditor General.

I want to start by acknowledging that we’re meeting today on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people.

Immigration is crucial to our country’s long-term success. To that end, Canada has already welcomed approximately 405,000 permanent residents as of October 31st, 2023, up from about 388,000 during the same period in 2022. That positions us well to reach our target of welcoming 465,000 new permanent residents by the end of this year, as we begin stabilizing our levels as part of our responsible path for immigration set out in the 2024-2026 Annual Immigration Levels Plan.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada recognizes that modernizing and strengthening elements of our immigration system is necessary to address the challenges associated with welcoming more people.

The Office of the Auditor General assessed our department’s efforts in 2022 to process permanent residence applications in support of the country’s economic, family reunification and humanitarian objectives.

The resulting report recommends areas where improvements are needed to boost the efficiency, fairness and transparency of our immigration processes.

We thank the Auditor General for her report, and take the concerns she raised seriously. Over the last few years, we have prioritized improving processing times as part of our commitment to client service and building a stronger immigration system.

Today, we are much farther ahead. Since the audit period, IRCC has made significant progress in reducing processing times and application backlogs, including for the eight permanent residence program areas assessed by the Auditor General.

We have hired new employees to assist with processing—more than 800 this year alone. And we continue our work towards digital applications and harnessing automation technologies to increase our processing capacity and efficiency.

In August 2022, the department began publishing data on a monthly basis to inform the public about our ongoing efforts to reduce backlogs.

I am pleased to report that a number of our economic immigration programs are now processing applications within our service standards.

We continue to work toward our goal of reducing overall backlogs and processing 80 percent of new applications within service standards, accounting for expected delays in complex cases.

However, with the high demand to come to Canada, it will not always be possible to achieve this goal, as the number of applications received annually exceeds Canada’s planned admissions targets set in the Immigration Levels Plan.

We’ll continue to address backlogs and improve the workload sharing in regions where backlogs exist by increasing the capacity of local processing offices.

Meanwhile, we’re pleased to have made great strides on recommendation number 6 in the Auditor General’s report. We recently opened the permanent residence online portal to private refugee sponsorship groups and it will be expanded further to some of our government-assisted refugee referral partners by the end of the year.

With this expansion, we’re improving convenience and efficiency for these groups to securely submit their applications and referrals.

The department has also been improving its policies and programs as a result of consultations with the public and stakeholders. We released our report, An Immigration System for Canada’s Future, earlier this fall. We are committed to continue building a more robust, effective and agile immigration system that is responsive to the most pressing challenges of our time, so that Canada remains a welcoming and inclusive destination for people seeking to build new lives here.

We’re grateful for the feedback from the Office of the Auditor General, and appreciate this committee’s role in upholding the principles of accountability and transparency.

I’m happy to take your questions.