Chinook – Coles Notes by another name
In March 2018 Immigration Refugee and Citizenship Canada (“IRCC”) unveiled its shiny new in-house technological software innovation that would be the saviour of visa officers who, until then, were buckling under the enormous weight of the almost too numerous to count visa applications for which they had to make visa determinations. Enter Chinook.
In one of its online publications, “CIMM-Chinook Development and Implementation in Decision-Making – February 15, &17, 2022”, IRCC provided its readers with the following description of Chinook:
- Chinook is a Microsoft Excel-based tool developed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) for temporary resident application processing to increase efficiency and to improve client service by decreasing the impacts of system and broadband latency, thus improving processing times.
- Chinook displays information stored in the Global Case Management System (GCMS), IRCC’s processing system and system of record, in a more user-friendly way, allowing for increased GCMS user productivity.
- Chinook is a tool designed to simplify the visual representation of a client’s information. It does not utilize artificial intelligence (AI), nor advanced analytics for decision-making, and there are no built-in decision-making algorithms.
…
- IRCC officers may use the Chinook tool for assessing temporary resident visa, study permit and work permit applications. In part, Chinook extracts temporary resident application information from the client’s submitted application in GCMS and presents it in a user-friendly fashion. This streamlines administrative steps that would otherwise be required if applications were processed directly within the GCMS environment.
…
- Chinook is a tool designed to simplify the visual representation of a client’s information…
From this publication we learn, among other things, that Chinook “displays information …in a more user-friendly way”, “simplif[ies] the visual representation of a client’s information”, and “extracts…information from the client’s submitted application…and presents it in a use-friendly fashion”. And this is all done on one screen through “batch processes”. As I understand it, visa officers are looking at Chinook notes for multiple applications on one screen (Ibid, para.14).
Standing back and reflecting on this description, Chinook’s functionality seems strikingly familiar. And, indeed it is. Harkening all the way back to high school, the picture comes clearly into focus. Chinook, for all its advanced modern technological trappings, is simply Coles Notes by another name. In other words, it is an abridgment of written work. Compressed knowledge, as it was termed in the 20th century.
For those us who actually put pen to paper when working on high school homework assignments or even used electric typewriters to do so know about Coles Notes, whether we used them or not. For the uninitiated, LibraryThing.com describes Coles Notes as being a series of books that provide concise and comprehensive summaries and analyses of classic and contemporary works of literature.
Coles Notes were a huge success. With high school students. Not so much with their teachers. The article, “From Coles Notes to “Compressed Knowledge”: A Condensed History of the Summary” from ELearning Inside, sheds light on this high school dialectic. It reads in part as follows:
From the beginning, most educators were never particularly fond of Coles Notes or Cliff’s Notes. A 1965 letter published in the New York Times sums up the average teacher’s feelings about compressed knowledge. Writing about “Cliff’s Notes,” as they were known at the time, English teacher Anna Lou Ennis of Blackwood, New Jersey lamented:
I possess several ‘Cliff’s Notes’ and unfortunately so do many of my students. High school students pool their dollars to acquire enough of these literary desecrations to pass around among themselves and to last them for a year’s worth of book reports. The problem wouldn’t be so acute if students would also read the books. These books act as an aid, a begetter, of cheating. In time, what will become of reading, required or otherwise? [Emphasis added]
There’s the rub: visa officers are no longer burdened by having to read the book. That is, visa officers don’t even have to read a visa applicant’s submission package. The officer need only read the Chinook Notes, which are a simplified representation of the visa applicant’s information generated by Chinook.
Indeed, again, IRCC writes that Chinook’s purpose is “to increase efficiency and to improve client service by decreasing the impacts of system and broadband latency, thus improving processing times.” It stands to reason then that visa officers would not both review visa application submission packages in their entirety AND use Chinook: that would lengthen processing times, not improve them.
Somewhat surprisingly IRCC candidly admits in its aforementioned online publication that:
In December 2020, performance of Chinook was measured through a sample study for overseas migration offices. The results determined there was an 18-30% gain in efficiency, decreasing the impacts of system and broadband latency and allowing for shorter review time per application hence increasing productivity. [Emphasis added]
I read “shorter review time per application” as implicitly meaning that visa officers in the sample study only read the Coles Notes, not the book. That is, they only considered the Chinook notes, not the entire visa application package.
Recently, I litigated a visa application refusal in Federal Court where the reasons contained the now all too familiar phrase, “File processed with the assistance of Chinook 3+”.
It was readily apparent from even a cursory review of the reasons for refusal that the visa officer in my client’s case had based their decision solely on a review of the Chinook Notes of my client’s visa application package. This was a breach of procedural fairness: my client had not been heard.
So, I reduced my Coles Notes submissions to writing, put them before the court and served them on the Department of Justice Canada, the lawyers representing the visa officer.
My client’s matter ended up never making it to the hearing stage in the Federal Court, because the Department of Justice lawyers settled out of court at the application for leave stage. Perhaps my Coles Notes submissions struck a nerve with them. I will never know. But what I do know is that Chinook, though user friendly to visa officers, is not procedurally fairness friendly to applicants.
