With summer deadline approaching, tribunal backlog still looms large

OTTAWA – A federal quick-response team set up to tackle the massive backlog of cases plaguing the social security tribunal doesn’t appear to be moving all that quickly.

Between December and March 20, the federal government’s so-called “spike unit” reviewed fewer than 3,000 appeals from Canadians seeking social security disability payments, the employment minister’s office said last week in a reply to a written question from the NDP.

That is troubling considering that a backlog of roughly 11,000 cases had been slated for review since last fall, said New Democrat MP Jinny Sims.

“It’s very, very clear that they have not allocated enough resources because they have managed to get through so few from the backlog,” Sims said in an interview.

Former employment minister Jason Kenney, now the defence minister, established the 50-member spike unit in December and said at the time he expected the backlog to be eliminated by the end of the summer.

Of the 2,948 appeal files reviewed so far, 946 settlements have been offered to sick or injured Canadians who were previously denied CPP disability benefits. Some 428 people accepted the settlement offers, the government said.

The backlog began accumulating after the federal government launched the social security tribunal in April 2013 with a goal of streamlining the appeals process and saving Canadian taxpayers $25 million a year.

Kenney had said the backlog got out of hand largely because the new tribunal inherited more than 7,000 “unexpected” cases from the old social security review system.

He also blamed a 12-month “rigorous pre-screening process” for appointees to the new tribunal for creating additional delays.

Pierre Poilievre, who took over the employment portfolio from Kenney, said earlier this year he expected the government’s plan for eliminating the backlog would work.

“We do have a plan that my predecessor has already implemented which is intended to encourage the officials to review each case under appeal and to try and solve them before they even get to the tribunal,” Poilievre told the Commons on Feb 19.

“That will allow us to reduce and eliminate the waiting list in the long-term, before the end of the summer.”

On Friday, department officials said they still expected the backlog to disappear within that time frame. But Sims was skeptical, saying it’s clear that more must be done to speed up the reviews.

“The fact is we still have a huge number waiting, and I don’t see how they’re going to be able to go through everything,” she said.

“What we’re talking about here is people who are claiming disability pensions. And these are people who, many times, don’t have anywhere else to go and they need income right now.”

Some have been forced to wait years to have their appeals heard, and they include terminal cancer patients, organ-transplant recipients and suicidal Canadians.

Of the 50 people dedicated to the special review unit, 16 hold medical degrees and about 30 are CPP disability medical adjudicators, the department said in answers signed off by Poilievre’s parliamentary secretary, Scott Armstrong.

The tribunal itself, which operates separately from the spike unit, consists of 74 full-time members and 22 part-timers.

Under the old system, there were about 1,000 part-time referees on four separate social security panels.

Kenney also announced in February that new service standards would be put in place to improve the tribunal and to prevent the accumulation of a backlog in the future.