"Does Everything Seem Broken?"
A Tale of Dealing with the Federal Government
A few years ago, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre posed the question: “Does everything seem broken?”
I think “everything” is a bit sweeping and “broken” is a bit harsh. But it does seem as if many governmental operations are operating at less-than-optimal performance.
But how can this be?
Let’s cast our minds back a decade. The new Liberal government led by the Hon. Justin Trudeau was making a bit deal about deliverology. A British veteran of the Blair governments was brought in (three times) to speak to Trudeau’s cabinet on the importance of getting things done.
Have the Liberals delivered on deliverology? Or is Pierre Poilievre’s question pointing to an essential truth about federal government operations?
What follows is a detailed and over-lengthy description of one citizen/government interaction. It’s the story of my application to get the Old Age Security pension. (Yes, I’m of that age). The rest of the article is a reproduction of a letter I sent to two federal cabinet ministers a month ago.
Read and weep.
The Honourable Patty Hadju
Minister of Jobs and Families
The Honourable Stephanie McLean
Secretary of State for Seniors
Dear Ministers Hadju and McLean:
I turned 65 three years ago but continued working. As a result, I postponed applying for my Old Age Security (OAS) pension. This spring, concerns about health caused me to quit working and apply for my OAS. My experience has raised issues and questions in my mind that I am respectfully requesting that you address.
This request has three sections. First, I will outline my experience. Second, I will report what I’ve been able to discern about the administration of OAS from the Departmental Results Reports of Employment and Social Development Canada. These sections are intended to provide context for the questions I will pose in the third section.
Personal Experience
I submitted my application for OAS in May 2025. I was surprised to find that applications had to be submitted, via Canada Post, in the form of a paper application. I contacted the Service Canada office in Regina to see if it could be submitted in person to ensure receipt (especially in light of ongoing uncertainty about the status of mail service as a result of the seemingly eternal labour dispute at Canada Post) but was told this was not possible.
Then I waited. As time passed without any word or confirmation, I became concerned that my application had been lost in the mail. This concern intensified when the automated telephone information service operated by Service Canada informed me that no application from me was in progress.
On September 29, after being on hold for several hours, I managed to speak to an employee at Service Canada’s call center. I was assured that my application had been received 139 days earlier. I was also informed that the system showed no application in process until actually reached the front of the queue. I also told that the target for processing applications was 150 days – and that my application was still within this period.
Reassured that my application had been received, I waited.
And waited.
On December 4, the automated phone line at Service Canada still informed me that my application was not being processed. Since my application had now been in the hands of your department for 205 days (i.e. 55 days longer than what I’d been told was the targeted, expected time), I again talked to an employee at the Service Canada call center. On this occasion, the wait time was a much more reasonable ten minutes or so.
I was told that no definitive estimate of processing time was possible, but that I should expect a further wait of at least two to three months.
I politely expressed incredulity.
The employee (who was extremely polite and professional) attributed the delays to unprecedented numbers of applications. We discussed the pattern of births in Canada in the post-war period and agreed that the “post-war baby boom” had begun in 1946 which mean that the beginning of a high-intake period for OAS had begun in 2011. I expressed the opinion that 14 years was long enough for a government department to adjust to a high demand period that could be predicted to last two decades. The employee politely refrained from commenting on this observation.
In any event, the Service Canada employee asked about my personal financial situation. When informed that I had no private pension – and that we were well past the 150-day processing-time target – he indicated that he would request that my application be given “urgent” status. He indicated that I could expect to receive back-payment of benefits in three days and that a written assessment letter would arrive in a few weeks.
I thanked him for his assistance. I want to stress that he was very polite and professional in his interaction. He fully met the core job description of a civil servant. He was civil and he served.
Then I waited.
After five days, my application was processed and back-pay deposited into my bank account. If you are keeping score, that means it took 210 days to process my application. To put this in context, let’s compare this processing time with the average gestation periods of various mammals. Processing my application took:
22 days longer than the gestation period for a pale-throated sloth,
Four days longer than the gestation period of a mule deer,
Only five days shorter than the time needed to produce a grizzly bear, and
Only 27 days shorter than the gestation period for a hippopotamus.
But processing was only as fast as it was because my application was placed on “urgent” status. Had it not been for that, given the estimates provided by the Service Canada call center employee, in all likelihood we’d have been into the Hereford Cow or Bactrian Camel gestation period range. In fact, it would have taken Employment and Social Development Canada longer to process my OAS application than it took for my mother to produce me.
This seems wrong.
As a result, I went to the Departmental Results Reports of Employment and Social Development Canada to get a more wholistic view.
OAS Processing by the official statistics
According to your department’s Results Reports, in 2021/22 87.2 percent of OAS applications were processed within a target time of 120 days. Then things began to go south. The percentage of applications processed within this target time is reported to be:
78.7 percent in 2022/23,
53.2 percent in 2023/24, and
49.3 percent in 2024/25.
This is not a good trendline. In four years, the percentage of applications processed “on-time” (a very generous 120 days) declined by 43.46 percent.
Is it a question of resourcing?
Again, let’s turn to your department’s Results Reports. We are told that the average headcount of people processing pensions was 6,821 in 2021/2022. More staff were added. The average headcount for subsequent years is reported to be:
7,276 in 2022/23,
7,608 in 2022/24, and
8,446 in 2024/25.
This means that average headcount INCREASED by 23.82 percent while achievement in meeting processing goals DECREASED by 43.46 percent.
Is it a question of increased volume?
The second Service Canada employee I talked to indicated that your department is facing record a record volume of applications. The Results Reports do not provide application volume, so I’m forced to make some estimates here.
I turned to the age profile tables from the 2021 census. From this, I learned that the employee was probably right. In 2021, there were 475,600 people living in Canada aged 65. We’ll treat this as a proxy for the number of applications. It will be an over-estimate since not all will qualify for OAS (most will, but not all). However, it gives us a good baseline for volume comparative purposes. From the census, we can also predict the number of people scheduled to turn 65 each year. Based on people’s ages as of census day in 2021, we see that:
492,175 people could schedule their 65th birthday parties in 2022,
506,135 people could expect to turn 65 in 2023, and
585,400 people were due to turn 65 in 2024.
Most of those celebrating their 65th birthday in 2021 could be expected to apply for OAS in 2021/22 and so on. Again, the estimates are not precise. Some people would not apply because of a known lack of qualification. Some will have died before they reached their 65th birthday. Some – like me – delayed application until after turning 65. However, these people should balance each other in every government fiscal year.
If we divide the number of people scheduled to turn 65 in a year by the number of pension processing employees, we can arrive at a pretty good estimate of volume per employee. If anything, these estimates will be a bit on the low side for the reasons outlined above. However, this means that in 2021/22 a total of 69.7 applications were processed for each employee on an annual basis. Productivity subsequently dropped for two years before rebounding a bit:
67.4 applications per employee in 2022/23,
66.5 applications per employee in 2023/24, and
69.3 applications per employee in 24/25.
The bottom line is that volume us up in the past four years, but headcount has gone up in roughly the same proportion.
However, this level of productivity – while stable – seems extraordinarily low. Given that each employee will work between 200 and 220 days per year, this means that it takes about three person-days per year to process a single OAS application. Approximately 35 years ago I was involved in the administration of income security programs for the Saskatchewan Department of Social Services. Applications for assistance for the Saskatchewan Assistance Plan were considerably more complex than those for the OAS. The level of computer technology was much lower. Despite this, it was expected that intake workers would handle four applications per day. Quite frankly, I’m puzzled as to why productive standards for employees in Employment and Social Development in 2025 appear to be one twelfth what they were for employees of the Saskatchewan Department of Social Services in 1991.
Questions arising
My first question is a definitional one.
Both the Service Canada employees I talked to indicated that the target processing time is 150 days. However, your department’s Results Reports through to 2024/25 indicate that the target time was 120 days. Which is it? Have your service standard targets for 2025/26 been changed from 120 days to 150 days?
My second question is more substantive.
How is possible that the productivity standards for processing an OAS application seems to be in the range of three person-days of work? My calculation of the three-day standard arising from your department’s head count and Statistics Canada’s census data seems supported by the expectation of the Service Canada employee that I talked to. He estimated that – once placed on urgent status (presumably to the top of the pile) – the actual processing time would be three days. That, of course, was not met but the aspirational goal lines up with my estimate of productivity. In this day of computers and linked governmental data, how is it possible to take an average of three person-days of labour to determine eligibility for the OAS?
Question 3: What is the actual process of processing applications and determining eligibility? What is actually being done?
Question 4: Do you have a plan to improve the performance of this branch of government – both in term of productivity and in speeding up the processing of applications?
Thank you for your attention to this somewhat lengthy inquiry.
A final note
I’ve sent this to your Parliamentary email address. It’s been addressed to you as a Member of Parliament rather than you in your capacity as a Member of the Privy Council because the Government of Canada does not appear to provide contact information for you or any other Cabinet Minister. This lack of transparent accessibility is not something I’ve seen from the Government of Canada in the past or currently see on provincial government websites. I understand that this is not something that you as an individual Minister would have decided but I would be grateful if you could inquire about this and let me know why you and other Ministers are being shielded from receiving questions and comments from Canadian citizens.
Thanks again for your attention to this inquiry.
The response to this inquiry
Going back to the question posed by Pierre Poilievre: “Does everything seem broken?”
One thing that does seem broken is federal government responsiveness to citizen inquiries. As noted at the end of the e-mail to the Ministers, I was forced to send this inquiry to their MP Constituency Office because I could not find any ministerial contact information on the Government of Canada website. (And I’m pretty good at finding information on these sorts of sites.)
I promptly got automated acknowledgement of receipt emails from the constituency offices. They were sternly worded missives indicating that those offices only dealt with inquiries from constituents. People living outside of these constituencies writing about ministerial responsibilities were instructed - in no uncertain terms - to send their correspondence to their boss’s “ministerial team”. This communication helpfully provided email addresses for such ministerial orientated inquiries.
Fair enough.
I added a short explanation of this to my email and resent them to the address provided for the “ministerial team.”
After a month, I’ve received no response.
Nothing.
Not even an automated acknowledgement of receipt.
I think back to my time in the Saskatchewan government led by Premier Roy Romanow. Ministers had a strict “respond to correspondence within three weeks” rule. This was adhered to and enforced. If nothing else, reasonably prompt response responses to citizen inquiries were delivered - and without the government spending big bucks to bring in experts on “deliverology.”
And one other observation.
In the automated responses from both Minister’s constituency offices, reference was made to “the high volume of emails received.”
Could it be that this high volume (and the long wait times at Service Canada call centers) is a by-product of basic government operations being - if not broken - extremely creaky?
If the government was capable of processing a routine application for a legislatively mandated and universal program, maybe - just maybe - there would be less need to spend a lot of time responding to inquiries from anxious people.
Just a thought.