bout de papier, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2021), pp. 10–11
THE TASK WAS HUGE, and like so much that has happened in the past 12 months, unprecedented. As Migration Offices around the world began evacuating staff early last year IRCC needed to figure out a way to keep processing urgent visa applications for entry to Canada. The solution was part innovation, part improvisation. A new Migration Office was set up, seemingly out of thin air, nominally based in Ottawa. Most of the staff would not be able to meet in person, many had never met at all and, days earlier, they had largely been working in various missions around the world. Now, however, they found themselves evacuated to Canada, thrown together in a virtual office but working apart, where their work stations were located in hotel rooms and other temporary rentals where they were forced to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival. In addition, these “offices” also doubled as bedroom, living room and even schoolroom for their children. And thus, the IRCC Rapid Response Operation Centre — -was born.
This was the response of IRCC’s International Network (the home branch of the department’s Foreign Service Migration Officers) as the impact of COVID-19 struck, first in China, and then almost everywhere else the department operates its 60 Migration Offices. Just over 150 officers and their families were evacuated to Canada representing close to half of all IRCC officers overseas. Many were assigned to the RROC which grew from a few early China evacuees to 117 staff members comprised largely of officers evacuated to Canada from abroad.
This included Liz Snow, veteran of numerous overseas postings with IRCC. Evacuated from Manila to Ottawa in March, she was appointed as Senior Director of the RROC upon arrival and found herself leading what effectively went from a place to park evacuees to one of IRCC’s largest visa processing offices.
“Nothing about it made sense on paper,” she reflected recently. “It was all so new. We never worked virtually liked this. We (IRCC’s International Network) can deal with compartmentalized issues where we knew the boundaries and timings.” She was referring to IRCC’s extensive experience with emergency operations. These include responding to natural disasters such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and 2011 Haitian earthquake, and several successful resettlement operations originating around the world: Hungary in 1956, Uganda in the early 1970s, Indochina later that decade and, most recently, in the Middle East, with Operation Syrian Refugees (OSR). All had relatively clear purposes and goals. OSR, for example, though highly complex, had a definitive target: resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by a specific date.
What made this crisis different, however, was the scale, according to Snow. She described it akin to building a plane while flying it. The rapidly changing operational environment during the pandemic made planning a chore. “The pace of change required senior tables to be in a constantly evolving policy and guidance state. We kept living on the threshold of borders opening, but then hitting another challenge.” Staff had to constantly adapt. “It wasn’t so much pivoting but pirouetting. This takes its toll. You can feel the fatigue in people.”
In spite of the upheaval, IRCC staff, including Migration Officers, adapted. “The professionalism of colleagues was beyond expectations,” Snow recounts admiringly. “People were in Air BnBs, hotel rooms, home schooling in different time zones, but embraced serving the public and delivering for the department. At their worst time, they were their best.” She pointed out that many Migration Officers thought their evacuation would be for a finite period of time and that they would be heading back to post quickly. They spent the summer “living in two worlds” as Snow describes. Snow herself was worrying about friends and colleagues in Manila, experiencing the same shock and stress as dozens of her colleagues.
Despite the uncertainty and logistical challenges, the RROC began to find its feet. The department saw it as a way to minimize service reduction caused by the scaling down of operations abroad. Evacuees were provided with laptops and network connections and assigned to remote processing roles. The RROC focused on critical, priority Temporary and Permanent Resident lines of business. Notably, this included gradually taking over responsibility for processing requests for exemptions from Canada’s strict travel restrictions which were imposed in March and largely remain in place at the time of writing. These were often complex cases involving time-sensitive requests to visit sick and dying family members, or individuals whose entry to Canada was deemed critical to the country’s economic interests such as temporary workers destined to the agricultural and agri-food sectors or involved in health care.
I processed some of these requests myself (before the RROC took over), from my home in southwest London where I was posted until returning to Canada last summer. I worked in my bedroom or living room, on a kitchen barstool or at the patio table if it was sunny outside — wherever I could find the most peace in my busy household, now locked down like tens of millions of others around the world. These were some of the most agonizing decisions that I have made in my career. They involved, for example, balancing the obvious compassionate grounds upon which an applicant applied to visit a relative taking their last breaths in a Montreal hospice, with the serious health risks of allowing them to do so during the height of a pandemic. Denying the request meant denying the applicant the opportunity to see a parent or sibling for the last time, to say goodbye, to comfort them in their final days and hours; granting them entry could put Canadians at risk of illness or death. I felt, to be honest, ill-equipped to make these tough decisions. The admissibility and eligibility requirements of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and Regulations and the “Program Delivery Instructions” issued by the department to offices offered minimal guidance in those early pandemic days of March and April. I consulted with my manager, headquarters, the Canada Border Service Agency and my conscience before making a decision. Some of the email exchanges and phone conversations with clients — occasional with frantic travellers at the airport departu gate — I still think about now.
Meanwhile, as spring turned to summe and the travel restrictions showed no sis of being lifted, pressure on the Internation Network was high to keep processi qualifying applicants. Migration Office responded to ensure that the trickle travellers who needed to get to Canada ke flowing across the border.
Innovation played a role and t RROC embraced digital work, alrea a growing reality at IRCC and now o that is accelerating as work-from-hor orders continue. The years of pre-panderr reticence to invest in change came back hurt IRCC as it struggled in the early da to respond to the new environment — a ¢ on paper applications in many lines of I obvious drawback. However, the depar other organizations, is seizing the opportunity to innovate. IRCC now has multiple digitization projects on the go, many on aggressive, decidedly non business-as-usual timelines. I’m involved in one of these, and have observed a welcome openness to rapid change, and a somewhat unfamiliar appetite for taking risks. IRCC is very seriously reexamining how it operates and interacts with clients in Canada and around the world.
This could be good news for clients and employees alike. At the other end of this rather challenging period for IRCC employees, including Migration Officers who have been uniquely impacted by the pandemic, may be a happier and more rewarding place to work: a department more responsive to applicants’ needs staffed by employees with the technological tools needed to communicate with these clients clearly and effectively while processing their files quickly, efficiently and in a transparent fashion.
“We have to stop being concerned about exploring innovations,” urges Snow. “Let it wash over us and push boundaries. We learned we can telework and get results. We need to be brave. We also have to listen to clients. We’ve been nimble and adaptive and they will have the same expectations. That won’t change — they will want us to keep innovating and we will have to deliver. And it can be done.”
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2021), pp. 10–11. Read the rest of this issue →
