As part of a new strategy to enhance operations, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) made major changes last week. An earlier study on the department’s opportunity for improvement was written by Neil Yeates, a former deputy minister for the IRCC. To determine whether the department’s existing structure best enables it to carry out its mandate, IRCC commissioned Yeates to write a report. The most senior employee in a government department is the Deputy Minister. They perform a non-political function in which they supervise the administration of their division, including the application of plans and strategies as well as personnel and financial management. IRCC’s deputy minister at the moment, Christiane Fox, communicates with immigration minister Marc Miller, who also serves as the department’s minister. The mandate of the elected government is to be carried out by the Minister of Immigration.
IRCC changed its structure to a business-line model.
The department was reorganized over the following sectors last week, among other adjustments:-
Strategic Policy Settlement Integration and Francophone Affairs Asylum and Refugees Resettlement Citizenship and Passport Service Delivery Migration Integrity Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer International Affairs and Crisis Response Economic, Family, and Social Migration Communications Corporate Services Client Service, Innovation, and Chief Digital Officer
According to it, the department is now set up across areas of business, as Yeates suggested. This means that IRCC staff members will be split among the numerous clients the department serves as well as among themselves in a fashion that will enable them to respond quickly to global changes. For instance, Fox told Wells that the department’s new International Affairs and Crisis Response sector has been created to help the IRCC in better planning for humanitarian disasters and developing a strategy. The IRCC regularly handles them, for instance, since last year with Ukraine and more recently with projects to resettle Afghan and Syrian refugees, to name a few.
Yeates: The IRCC’s organizational structure is weak:
Yeates writes in his review, a copy of which CIC News has obtained, that “the current organizational model at IRCC is broken but is being held together by the hard work and dedication of staff.” He indicates that “a series of steps need to be taken to realign the organizational structure (including a major shift to a business line-based structure), reform the governance system, implement stronger management systems (especially planning and reporting) and facilitate the development of a culture to better support the department’s goals and objectives (including consideration of an overall review of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and measures to better leverage the experience and expertise of diverse staff groups).”
Yeates explains that there are many reasons why IRCC’s current organizational structure has weaknesses, but he focuses on two in particular: first, a challenging operating environment in Canada and around the world; and second, IRCC’s explosive growth since the organization’s current structure was introduced more than 20 years ago. Yeates emphasizes this issue by pointing out that as of January 2023, there were 12,949 employees working for the IRCC, up from 5,352 in March 2013.
