Service Canada 2006-2007 Annual Report Highlights

The following information is out of date.

Service Canada is pleased to present to all Canadians a summary of its second annual report for fiscal year 2006-2007. This summary highlights the progress we made between April 2006 and March 2007. It describes how we are working to become the place where Canadians go-whether by phone, online, in person, or by mail-to access many of the programs, services, and benefits they need from the Government of Canada and its many partners. The complete annual report is available at www.servicecanada.gc.ca.

Who we are

At Service Canada, we are the Government of Canada's one-stop service delivery network for Canadians. Working with other federal departments and agencies, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, and many community organizations across Canada, we provide Canadians with easy access to a range of government programs and services.

Canadians have told us that they want a single place to go for the information they need and for the programs and benefits to which they are entitled. They want to be able to access government information, programs, and services in ways that make sense to them-either by phone, on the Internet, in person, or by mail. This is what Service Canada is delivering.

Service Canada is just a call, click, or visit away. We have a national telephone information service at 1 800 O‑Canada, online services at www.servicecanada.gc.ca, and 587 points of service across Canada where Canadians can visit us in person. In fact, by March 2007, we had 327 full-service Service Canada Centres and 260 scheduled outreach locations and Service Canada community offices.

95% of Canadians are living within 50 kilometres of a point of service

During 2006-2007, Service Canada's 19,000 employees:

• served more than 32 million Canadians from all walks of life-including youth, working adults, seniors, Aboriginal people, Canadians with disabilities, veterans, and newcomers to Canada;
• performed an average of 1 million transactions every working day;
• paid more than $70 billion ($190 million a day) in benefits, which represents 93 percent of all Government of Canada payments to Canadians;
• made 122.4 million individual payments to Canadians for such benefits as Employment Insurance, Canada Pension Plan, and Old Age Security;
• answered more than 53 million calls about the Government of Canada and its programs and services;
• hosted 22 million visits to the Service Canada Web site;
• handled more than 11 million secure online transactions with citizens;
• posted more than 1 million job openings from employers;
• welcomed 9.3 million visitors at our 587 points of service;
• received 1.56 million requests for Social Insurance Numbers;
• mailed more than 20 million letters;
• conducted about 500,000 client interviews;
• contacted about 250,000 Canadians directly through our outreach services;
• responded to 25,000 e-mails; and
• worked with more than 55,000 community organizations.

We are improving our services

In 2006-2007, building on work from our first year of operation, we took steps to further improve the way we deliver one-stop service. Specifically, we:

• expanded the number of programs and services we deliver to a total of 77;
• enhanced the way we deliver services on the phone and on the Internet;
• added 171 more locations across Canada where Canadians can access in-person services;
• introduced longer business hours at 53 locations;
• increased outreach services to better serve Canadians in more rural and remote communities;
• extended our services to meet the language needs of Canadians living in minority Francophone and Anglophone communities, as well as the language needs of Aboriginal Canadians and newcomers to Canada; and
• took steps to reach out to Canadians with common interests and needs, including Aboriginal people, seniors, and people with disabilities.

A world leader in serving citizens

We are meeting Canadians' expectations

Citizens expect us to make sure that benefits go to the right people in the right amounts for the right purposes. They also expect us to manage our services in ways that prevent fraud and deliver results efficiently. To fulfil these expectations, in 2006-2007, we:

• took action to make the Social Insurance Number system more reliable and secure;
• put measures in place to help ensure Canadians are able to deal online with the Government of Canada in ways that are secure and that respect their privacy;
• developed more agreements with provinces and territories to automatically share information on vital events, such as birth dates;
• automated many Service Canada forms to help catch typical errors, prevent others, and speed up service; and
• began moving toward a single system for collecting, using, and integrating the information that Canadians provide so that, in the future, they will no longer have to give the same data to different government departments to access different programs and services.

We are working with many partners

Partnerships have been and will continue to be a key ingredient of Service Canada's success. Our partners help us deliver better one-stop service to Canadians, while reducing overlap and duplication. Canadians can then get what they need without having to run from one place to the next.

In 2006-2007, we provided access to 77 different government programs and services on behalf of 13 Government of Canada organizations.

At Service Canada, we also forged stronger links with our provincial and territorial partners throughout 2006-2007, further improving the many ways we help Canadians. As well, we continued to co-operate closely with our community partners to learn more about what Canadians need and to ensure their well-being.

We are accountable

As well as strengthening partnerships and delivering access to services, we took steps throughout 2006-2007 to help further improve accountability and transparency in government. We continued to report on our progress, and to strengthen the way we track our performance.

At Service Canada, we also established the new position of Fairness Advisor to deal objectively with any concerns raised by the voluntary organizations that help us deliver services in the community.

Processing passport applications

We are listening to Canadians

Like any organization committed to service excellence, we want to hear what Canadians have to say about the quality of our service, as well as their ideas on how to improve it. That is why we created the Office for Client Satisfaction during our first year of operation.

In 2006-2007, we took additional steps to listen to Canadians by introducing a dedicated toll-free telephone number for the Office of Client Satisfaction. The new number makes it even easier for Canadians to give us their comments on all aspects of our service.

During the year, the Office for Client Satisfaction met its service commitments to Canadians. It returned 99.9 percent of calls within 24 hours, and it replied to 100 percent of inquiries within seven business days.

We value our people

Listening to Canadians is one important component of delivering excellent service. Another is recognizing that good service starts with our people. That is why, at Service Canada, we are committed to investing in their training and career development. We're committed to building a work force that is defined by its professionalism and competencies in service, and to recognizing and rewarding a service excellence culture within Service Canada, and right across government.

In our second year of operation, we made clear progress in helping our people develop the range of skills that enable them to deliver service well. We established a Service Canada College and Service Excellence Certification Program.

We also opened the first campus of the Service Canada College in Regina. The opening of this and other campuses will help us deliver on our promise to Canadians in many ways. As a place of learning, it will help us expand our understanding of how we can do an even better job of delivering programs and services.

It will help expose us to new ideas and new ways of doing things. It will also mean that employees have a place where they can learn about service excellence and how to become certified service delivery practitioners.

The end result will be service delivery that is second to none, and a workplace that can serve as a model for professionalism, career advancement, and learning.

Looking ahead

Transforming government service and creating a one-stop service experience for Canadians is a long-term process.

Every day, thousands of Canadians turn to Service Canada for a diverse range of programs, services, and information. Whether they call us, visit our Web site, or drop by one of our locations, we are the face of government to those people. We have a duty to show them that we provide results-and that we bring care, professionalism, and integrity to our work with Canadians.

We look forward to reporting once again on our achievements in next year's annual report.