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Kelowna-Lake MP Tracy Gray
Getting the basics right for serving people is the first step in customer service that small businesses deal with every day.
It is unfortunate that this is not the rule for the current federal government. The basic services that Canadians deserve and pay for with their taxes are not being delivered through blatant mismanagement and lack of leadership by our federal government, and it’s a mess.
I have countless constituents contacting me every day regarding backlogs and unanswered questions from every federal department, including the CRA, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (IRCC), Service Canada (including passports) and veterans’ disability claims.
While many Canadians were hoping to go camping this summer, they probably didn’t expect it to happen in the parking lot of a Service Canada office.
We’ve already seen widespread reports of unmanageable backlogs, dawn-to-dusk queues and growing frustration for people seeking a basic service like applying for a passport. It’s not that federal employees don’t work hard, it’s mismanagement from the top. Our election office deals with heartbreaking situations every day.
The government can say it is deeply concerned about the backlog, but it can’t say it wasn’t warned of potential problems months ago. (Oh, if only the government had a way to know when passports expire. Of course it does).
The government even allowed many senior officials to receive bonuses even though many of their departments were failing.
Another fact is that the number of passport applications is lower than pre-pandemic levels. Andrew Griffith, IRCC’s former director general and former senior Service Canada official, said the IRCC department’s own plan for 2022-23 tells the government there will almost certainly be a surge in passport applications as restrictions on COVID be eliminated.
Common sense would dictate that with the opening of borders abroad, Canadians would seek the opportunity to travel. Common sense would also dictate that the answer should have been to ensure proper processes and staffing at airports and for passports.
Once again, the government waited until we were deeply dysfunctional before hiring more workers, only a fraction of whom will be able to issue new passports due to a lack of full training, according to Kevin King, president of the National Employees Union, which represents Service workers Canada.
This was despite the government’s claims that it was doing its best to cope with “unprecedented” volumes.
The truth is that government statistics for 2022 show an average of 54,200 passport applications per week, with peaks of up to 75,000 per week. That falls well below the 90,000 to 98,000 a week issued by Service Canada before the pandemic, discrediting the government’s claims of “unprecedented volumes.”
This dysfunction also jeopardized my office’s ability to serve Kelowna-Lake country constituents and assist with IRCC applications. The backlog now exceeds more than two million applications across all categories. As a result, the number of cases an MP service can be contacted to help is limited to just five at a time.
Immigration cases in our office range from temporary foreign worker visas to refugee status. After questioning this at the Industry Committee I sit on, IRCC officials said it would take until the end of this year to meet even standard processing times for normal services.
Writing off a year of immigration work will have far-reaching and adverse effects on the Okanagan economy, including our agricultural sector and others suffering from labor shortages. Limiting my office’s ability to serve local families and small businesses is not acceptable.
Now we’re hearing that Canada topped the global list of flight delays last weekend.
The government’s response to all this? A ministerial taskforce to “listen better to concerns”, according to its co-chair. Canadians have made their case very clear about where (the feeling) the problems lie, and it’s time for the government to do its job to ensure that the basic services your tax dollars pay for are available in a way that doesn’t include sleeping bags in parking spaces.
If you need help with programs or have any thoughts to share, don’t hesitate to contact us at 250-470-5075 or at [email protected].
This article was written by or on behalf of an outside columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
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