Private Sector Raising Canadians’ Expectation of Faster Government Service, Report Finds

The Canada flag flies atop the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on May 5, 2023. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

The private sector has raised Canadians’ expectations of faster, better service in the federal government, according to a Department of Employment report.

Managers said that while the private sector has “evolved rapidly,” Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) struggles with months-long backlogs for handing out benefits like Canada Pension Plan (CPP) payments.

“The Government of Canada continues to work towards improving how it delivers services to the public. Service delivery in the private sector has evolved rapidly through ever-advancing technologies,” reads the ESDC report, “Evaluation of the Canada Pension Plan Service Improvement Strategy,“ first obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter.

“As a result clients increasingly expect the delivery of government services to keep pace,” the report says. “This means making services digital, easy to access, available at any time and accompanied by timely assistance. Modernizing services for Canadians has become a Government of Canada priority over the past 2 decades.”

The report reviewed the effectiveness of the strategy launched in 2016 to speed up the processing of CPP claims, as previously the department had a “service standard” of up to four months to process some claims. According to the report, the project’s planned budget was $75.25 million, but the actual cost was $67 million.

The ESDC report says there was “insufficient data to determine if processes to decrease manual work were affecting turnaround times for making decisions and/or issuing payments to clients.”

“There was insufficient data to determine if the implementation of workload management improvements affected the backlog, inventory age and key performance indicators for high-priority tasks within Service Canada,” it adds.

New applications for benefits like Old Age Security (OAS) number more than 60,000 a week, according to official estimates. The department, in a separate Sept. 29 briefing, said processing was so slow it accumulated a backlog of 1.2 million pension claims last year.

Service Canada is the agency within ESDC that processes OAS, CPP, and employment insurance claims. It was established in 2005 to provide Canadians with a single point of access to a range of government services and benefits. It has since grown from the 416 points of service it had at fiscal 2005–06 year-end to some 600 in-person offices and outreach locations across Canada.

Repeated initiatives “pertaining to the improvement of client service, performance and results” were uneven, the report said. The auditors cited challenges that included staff turnover and “significant pressure” with growing volumes of CPP claims due to Canada’s aging population.

Delivery of CPP payments to 6.6 million beneficiaries alone cost more than $244 million in the 2020–21 fiscal year, according to the report. It noted that the online application volume for CPP Disability (CPPD) benefits exceeded the expected volume by 50 percent that year.

The report also said that since 2017–18, “an increasing share” of respondents to CPP and CPPD client experience surveys “agreed that the ability to complete steps online made the process easier.”