OTTAWA—Operators are not standing by.

That's the conclusion reached by the Auditor General's office after an audit of call centres found that millions of calls from Canadians seeking information about government services weren’t being answered.

Half of the 16 million Canadians who tried to reach call centres operated by Employment and Social Development Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and Veterans Affairs Canada could not get through, according to a report released Tuesday.

Calling into overloaded systems, frustrated callers got messages sending them back to automated menus, referred to a website and simply told to call back. More than a million callers who did get into a queue to wait for an agent eventually hung up.

“We found that callers who wanted to speak with an agent were often prevented from doing so. Instead of being given the choice of waiting in a queue to reach an agent, they were rerouted to the automated system or asked to check the website or call back later,” the report said.

Those that did get through to an agent were often answered in under 10 minutes, although wait times for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada averaged 32 minutes.

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That’s unacceptable service, the report said: “People contact federal government call centres to get the information they need to make time-sensitive, important decisions about benefits and services.”

The report found that connecting with government operators by phone was especially important for Canadians who are visually impaired, have intellectual or physical disabilities, don’t have access to a computer or the internet, and those living in rural regions.

It’s not the first time the Auditor General’s office has criticized government’s inability to field inquiries from Canadians. In 2017, it revealed that the Canada Revenue Agency’s inability to handle high call volumes means that some two-thirds of all calls — numbering in the millions—were going unanswered.

This latest report serves up another failing grade even though the federal government has a program underway to modernize its call centres. After five years of work, Shared Services Canada had only succeeded in updating eight of 221 federal government call centres. Plans for the other 213 call centres had not been finalized.

The auditor general’s office urged Employment and Social Development Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to consider changes, such as allowing callers to decide if they prefer to wait or opting to have call centre call them back.

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In other findings released Tuesday, the audit office revealed that:

Canada’s refugee determination system is not able to process claims in a timely fashion. Despite reforms introduced in 2012 to speed up decision-making, there is again a significant backlog of unresolved claims. There were 50,400 claims in 2017 — more than double than in the previous year — causing a backlog and increased wait times for refugee protection decisions. Another 55,000 claims were made in 2018. The backlog now stands at more than 70,000 claimants awaiting determination of their asylum applications.

Carol McCalla, director of the audit, said while the federal budget in 2019 announced more resources for the refugee determination system, “it was not clear how exactly it’s going to deal with the backlogs or the wait-times.” More money won’t fix the problems unless efficiencies are found, she said. The audit recommended a faster move away from a paper-based claims system to electronic claims, and more efficient processing of those electronic claims — such as the parole board recently undertook.

She said reforms in 2012 intended to set two-month deadlines for refugee claims to be heard, but those wait-times have grown to two years, and could balloon even longer in the next five years if nothing is done. She said the system “needs to be a lot more flexible in order to be scale-able” to the rising number of claims.

Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen blamed the previous government of Stephen Harper for inadequately funding the 2012 reforms, which he said made matters worse. Hussen said the Liberals have managed to clear 32,000 “legacy claims” inherited from the previous government, and put more money into the system in the 2018 and 2019 federal budgets, money that went to filling vacancies at the Immigration Refugee Board and its appeal division, and “will accelerate the processing of claims and permit the Immigration Refugee Board to actually process 50,000 claims annually.”

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Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel said it is “just patently ridiculous” nearly four years into the Liberal government to blame Harper for the current issues. The report recognized the Conservative party’s concerns that the refugee system cannot handle the influx of refugees that entered Canada under Justin Trudeau, she said, adding that the Liberal government has only recently acknowledged the problem with recent budget changes aimed at stemming the number of asylum claimants, and reducing requirements for in-person hearings.

The federal government has failed to collect $169 million in sales tax on foreign digital products and services sold in Canada in 2017. Revenue Minister Dianne Lebouthillier said Canada is working with the OECD and other allies to work out a way to better tax digital commercial giants, saying she wants to catch the “big fish,” not smaller vendors.

Oversight of advertising was not sufficiently robust to ensure that public funds were not to be spent on partisan advertising. Advertising campaigns with a budget topping $500,000 undergo external review to ensure they are non-partisan. The Auditor General says the government should consider a risk-based approach to identify which advertising campaigns have a higher risk for partisanship. Treasury Board President Joyce Murray said the Liberal government has spent no public funds on partisan advertising — a claim she said was justified by the fact there have been no public complaints to the contrary.