Transformational Change and Serving People

04/24/2013

The past several years have seen the highest sustained level of immigration in Canada’s history. At the same time, there have been record numbers of people coming to Canada on a temporary basis to visit, study or work. CIC is fundamentally changing the way we work, and striving to improve service as we manage these high levels of temporary and permanent immigration. This includes making information easier to find and making applying to come to Canada easier.

Under our new model, the first point of contact for most applicants is our website, which has recently been redesigned, simplified and substantially improved. They are now able to complete applications for many immigration streams online, including making payments, downloading forms and using our Help Centre to find answers to over 500 commonly received queries.

An innovative addition to our online services is the Come to Canada Wizard, which allows users to self-assess their eligibility to work, study or immigrate to Canada, and then guides them through the application process, helping to ensure that it is completed correctly.

Our network of Visa Application Centres (VACs) around the world is also making it easier for people to submit their immigration applications, and ensure they are properly filled out. CIC will be significantly expanding its global VAC network in 2013.

CIC is committed to improving processing times and reducing backlogs. Processing for several business lines has been centralized to various locations in Canada, including some lines that were previously administered only at our offices abroad. We can do this because our improved case management computer systems, and the increased number of on-line applications, make it easy to move files around our global network. This allows us to be more efficient, and allows our staff overseas to focus on complex cases that require local expertise.

The opportunity to be more efficient by centralizing services has been a key factor in the decision to close a number of CIC offices. While this caused concern for some of the people we serve, our better use of technology is allowing us to generally maintain our levels of service, and in some cases improve them. Our Buffalo office, for example, which we closed last summer, had a significant visa processing workload. But applications submitted to our centralized office today, in most immigration streams, are processed more quickly than they were previously processed in Buffalo.

Another initiative to better serve applicants is Question@cic.gc.ca. This email address allows people to make inquiries specific to their case files, if they applied from within Canada and the normal processing time for their application has passed. It can also be used to report changes such as births, deaths, marriages, divorces, adoptions, changes in address or job status.

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