Dealing with clear failures in federal departments

Why is Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada so badly run?

That’s the galling question raised by last week’s auditor general’s report of the International Student Program. It found over 153,000 students in potential non-compliance with their study permits between 2023 and 2024. It found fraudulent documentation was used by students to enter Canada in at least 800 cases over a five-year period. And it found that the department was simply unable to properly forecast the impact on provinces and learning institutions from reductions in student permit applications it put in place in early 2024.

Surprised? Don’t be. This is the same department that presided over the single largest unrestrained jump in immigration levels to Canada after the pandemic ended.

Immigration entries to Canada rose from 226,000 in 2020-21 to 493,000 a year later — a 118 per cent increase. The number of temporary foreign workers rose from 313,000 in 2021 to 765,000 two years later — a 144 per cent jump. And international student permits climbed from 446,000 in 2021 to 683,000 in 2023 — a 53 per cent hike.

IRCC actually welcomed this stating in its 2023 annual report to Parliament that record admissions to Canada in 2022 were because “IRCC sought to recover from the loss of admissions in 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The Carney government figured out pretty quickly these dramatic and deliberate increases were not sustainable. It dialed back immigration targets dramatically for the next two year to get the system under control. Better late than never. But the nagging question posed above remains. Why is this department so badly run?

Here’s one explanation: five deputy ministers at IRCC over the past 10 years. An average of just two years in the job before someone else is put in charge. Out the revolving door, consistency and accountability alongside. Here’s another: from 2016 to 2019, IRCC averaged five internal program audits per year to assess and improve the effectiveness of its risk management, control, and governance processes. Since then, it has never conducted more than one per year.

Is this a serious way to run a $4.4-billion organization with over 13,000 staff? Fair question when the auditor general writes this about a flagship program that impacts provinces, learning institutions, and municipalities: “We found that the department did not know why its approval rates were lower than projected.”

It was “slow to act on integrity concerns.” It “did not effectively monitor and adjust to the unintended impacts of study permit reductions.” Either senior management was unaware and could do nothing or was aware and still did nothing.

Was this just a one-off issue for the Immigration department? Unlikely. Two years before, the auditor general examined processing times for permanent residents to Canada, post-pandemic, that had generated big backlogs. It “found that the department continued to assign application workloads to offices without assessing whether they had enough resources to process them.”

Customer service excellence this is not.

For too long and too much of the federal government it has sadly had a performance problem.

Two other incidents last week make this plain. The procurement ombudsman found that the billion-dollar procurement strategy for Indigenous business was awarding contracts without checking whether some businesses even qualified as a registered Indigenous business.

The lack of oversight was “quite stunning,” the ombudsman said. Meanwhile, Veterans Affairs Canada announced it is launching an independent review of its half-billion rehabilitation program for veterans after public reports that too many veterans had experienced repeated service care failings from the department’s contracted provider.

But these examples are symptomatic of a larger governance failing that requires urgent attention and remedy. Especially so if Ottawa is to achieve the Build Canada Strong goals set out by the Carney government.

A better-performing government abets a better-performing economy. It engenders trust in our governing institutions, not scorn.

Prime Minister Mark Carney signalled early on his impatience with the bureaucracy he inherited by going around it.

He created three new agencies, each with new outside leadership, to advance his priorities for new housing construction, major project approvals, and Canadian defence investment. He is reducing the size of the public service by some 40,000 positions, reversing the high-growth years of the Justin Trudeau government.

But the underlying barriers to better-run government that delivers more efficiently and effectively for Canadians are still in place. They are layered in from top to bottom, front to back, side to side. A web of rules and procedures that ensnares innovation and accountability, propagating a risk-averse culture that worries more about things going wrong than getting things done.

They’ve been built up over time and won’t disappear without a deliberate, dedicated effort unleashed by the prime minister.

Canada’s immigration system has lost the confidence of Canadians, according to the minister herself. The government wants to “restore Canadians’ confidence in our immigration system,” federal Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab writes in her department’s latest annual report.

Last week’s auditor general’s report shows she and her government have a long way to go yet.

David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government.