Let me start by saying that we have serious challenges with access to information and privacy in this department in terms of volumes. We are a department that is committed to upholding our obligations under the act, and we are working closely with the Office of the Information Commissioner on this.

We receive more access to information requests than the rest of the Government of Canada combined. Those numbers have grown significantly over the last few years, so we are prepared to try just about anything to make sure that we're able to stay on top of our service standards. In that regard, one of the things that will be most important to do is to have clients access, in a real way, their own information, and to expand the work in the My Account portal.

I'm happy to report that one of the biggest successes we've had is with the recent announcement of a better tracker on My Application. We have started with citizenship applications. We are watching closely how this is working and how it's going. Our intention is to absolutely move this to other lines of business. We would be only too happy to come to give the committee a bit of a demonstration on how this works and what we've done with it.

Second, there is our own action plan on this. It's also to look at technology and where we can use technology as our friend in automating some of the processes to improve our processing times. We have worked closely with the private sector on this in using bots inside our own system to retrieve information and bring it forward.

What is really important for us to do, as other members have indicated previously at this committee, is simplifying IRCC's online request form through the use of drop-down menus, and enhancing our website to improve the transparency of how processing times are communicated.

We've gotten better in our capacity to push and notify clients' targeted information, but there's still room for improvement and to really move forward on this.

The final thing is that we do a dance with legal considerations and providing more information to clients. When we have rejected applications, we should be clear with clients on our reasons for doing so. We continue to look at that and how we craft those letters, so that they are in plain language.

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