That Citizenship and Immigration Canada and Human Resources and Skills Development Canada provide a status report to the Public Accounts Committee by 31 January 2011 on their progress in addressing the recommendations made by the Office of the Auditor General in Chapter 2 of the Fall 2009 report.
RECOMMENDATION 2
That Citizenship and Immigration Canada identify specific objectives by 30 September 2010 for the next ministerial instructions issued under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
RECOMMENDATION 3
That Citizenship and Immigration Canada articulate a clear strategy and timeline for eliminating the inventory of applications received prior to 27 February 2008 under the Federal Skilled Worker program.
RECOMMENDATION 4
That Citizenship and Immigration Canada provide to the Public Accounts Committee by 31 January 2011 its roadmap on the future of the immigration program.
RECOMMENDATION 5
That Citizenship and Immigration Canada evaluate the effectiveness of the Global Case Management System in identifying fraudulent applications and in increasing the efficiency of application processing by 30 June 2012.
RECOMMENDATION 6
That Human Resources and Skills Development Canada provide in its status report a statistical breakdown of review findings for programs that comprise the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, such as the Live-in Caregiver Program.
RECOMMENDATION 7
That Citizenship and Immigration Canada and Human Resources and Skills Development Canada report in their status reports on the progress made in negotiations with the provinces and territories to sign information-sharing agreements.
RECOMMENDATION 8
That Citizenship and Immigration Canada examine ways to coordinate their work more effectively with the constituency offices of Members of Parliament, including providing more up-to-date statistics, guidelines, and tools on its website.
CONCLUSION
Immigration has played a fundamental role in the economic, social, and cultural development of Canada. Given our aging population and labour market demands, Canada must seek out and attract permanent and temporary foreign workers with the skills required to meet the needs of Canadian employers. It is thus very important for the health of Canada’s economy that CIC, in conjunction with HRSDC, effectively design and implement programs for accepting foreign workers into Canada.
In order to help it manage the flow of new applications under the Federal Skilled Worker program, CIC has issued ministerial instructions to limit applications to selected occupations. However, CIC has received more applications than expected and risks creating a second backlog of applications under the new criteria. The Committee is concerned that CIC does not appear to have a strategy for eliminating its backlog of older applications. In consultation with the provinces and territories, CIC is undertaking a visioning exercise on the future of the immigration program, but it is not clear how the Federal Skilled Worker program and the Provincial Nominee Program work together. CIC has developed a new IT system to improve its efficiency in processing applications and has worked with HRSDC to improve oversight of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. These initiatives need to be monitored to ensure they have their desired effects. The Committee hopes CIC and