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Why is CIC so slow and what are their employees doing all day?
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11 ANSWERS
Martin Levine, former Canadian Foreign Service Officer at Government of Canada (1978-2009)
Updated Sep 12, 2017
As I have said in other answers, I am a retired visa officer (Canadian overseas immigration officer). I worked for CIC and its predecessors for many years.
Concerning “slow”, are you speaking of applications for visitor visas or applications to immigrate to Canada? Processing procedures and processing times are very different depending on what sort of visa you are applying for.
Visa applicants so often seem to imagine that CIC and its programming must be the most important activity conducted by the Government of Canada. It’s not even close. Historically immigration and visas have been much lower priorities than other Government of Canada activity, such as Employment Insurance, National Defence, international trade relations, income tax collection, implementing bilingualism legislation, regulating and ensuring the safety of the transportation industry, the pharmaceutical industry etc. After all, immigration applicants don’t vote.
The Government of Canada has a central budgetary agency called the Treasury Board. Each fiscal year every Government of Canada department must apply to the Treasury Board for its funding. The Treasury Board is responsible for advising the Prime Minister and the federal Cabinet about priorities for disbursing Government of Canada funds. The Government of Canada never has anything near the funds to resource every department to the hilt. There is no real reason to identify CIC as a special priority to receive large amounts of funding and resources.
The funds paid by visa applicants do not go into a special CIC account. Those fees are paid to the Receiver General for Canada. The Receiver General ‘s accounts are a central repository for all sorts of fees paid to the Government of Canada. It is mostly there where the Treasury Board finds the funds it will disburse.
I would almost suggest that the revenue producing parts of CIC ( principally the skilled worker program) be spun off into what in Canada we call a “Crown Corporation”.
Wikipedia describes what a Crown Corporation is:
Crown corporations of Canada - Wikipedia
Essentially a crown corporation acts in some ways like a private company but is owned by the Canadian federal or a provincial government. They operate “at arms length” from the federal or provincial bureaucracy and make most of their own business judgements. Unlike federal departments they collect and allocate their own revenues. Were a crown corporation operating the federal skilled worker selection program you might see much more efficient and timely operations.
The visa application program operated by CIC happens in the context of a rather rigid, hierarchical bureaucracy. Also, since the 1960’s a strong objective of Canada’s immigration selection legislation has been to limit the discretion of visa officers in order to reduce subjectivity and restrict the ability of visa officers to make such subjective and racist decisions. Even in the case of visitor visa applications visa officers are expected to note up the reasons for their decisions in the GCMS electronic visa processing system. This takes time, sometimes a lot of it.
I should note that, due to technical and infrastructural limitations GCMS sometimes stops and does not work. (Perhaps it could work better if more resources were devoted to operating it but there aren’t such resources.) In a situation like that the visa officer has no alternative but to stop work and look helplessly at their computer screen.
When I became a visa officer in 1978 the immigration program was to a large extent beyond the Canadian public eye. There was little attention in the Canadian media to visa matters. The immigration bar (those lawyers who specialize in immigration matters) was small and not always very professional. Now things are very different. In particular litigation is now very common. A visa officer’s notes have to be adequate enough to withstand review by the Federal Court. A visa officer would want to think very carefully and take extra time with their notes, and never have them become a source of derision by the Canadian media. This type of publicity can easily destroy your career.
I have mentioned in another Answer that, in my opinion, there has been intense pressure to reduce the cost of Canada’s visa operations. One of the results is to take as much as the processing as possible and “dumb it down” so it can be done by lower-paid clerical staff in Canadian processing centres, not more experienced and better paid visa officers. One of the unintended results is a substantial number of processing errors. This increases processing time.
So many applicants do not understand that CIC does not have full control of the visa application process. CIC has to rely heavily on CSIS, the RCMP and CBSA for security and criminal clearances. These federal agencies have many other, more important priorities than visas.
Visa applicants do not always understand that immigration visas are subject to rationing by the annual immigration levels system. CIC has to allocate resources to each visa office according to the contribution that office is expected to make to the annual level. A given visa office is only expected, or allowed, to issue a certain number of immigration visas per year. They are not allowed to issue as many visas as they can. At times they must delay or stop processing certain categories of visas.
I have alluded in the Answer I mention above to problems in the working environment and career system for visa officers. Put yourself in a visa officer’s shoes. How productive would you be?
Martin Levine
