Parents of babies born in Ontario will be able to register births online, apply for a birth certificate and ask for a Social Insurance number all at once, come fall - thanks to a new electronic service delivery project.
Service Canada is working with Ontario's Ministry of Consumer and Business Services to update the birth and death registration process, in a model the federal government hopes other jurisdictions will also adopt.
Registering births, deaths and marriages is one of a government's oldest functions, as Richard Steele, the director of registration modernization for the Ministry, told a session at this year's Lac Carling Congress.
"The slightly scary thing is the process for doing it hasn't changed in about 130 years," Steele said.
The current registration process is paper-based, involves almost every stakeholder possible in the public sector, and is far more complex than it needs to be, said Steele and AndrC)e MC)tivier of Service Canada. Consumers have to provide several different agencies and government departments with the same information over and over, and wait weeks or months for SIN numbers and birth, marriage and death certificates.
MC)tivier said the process is time-consuming and can be emotionally difficult in the case of death certificates, when people have to notify governments about tax and benefit issues.
"They have to figure out who to talk to; they complete several applications," she said. "This is a nightmare in a moment that you are most vulnerable."
The process of applying for death certificates is the next service that Ontario and Service Canada hope to modernize.
The first phase of the project involves developing an electronic application form for registration, birth certificates and SIN numbers, as well as SIN notification.
"Our plan is to have an early version of this process up and running (this) fall," Steele said. "It will for the first time enable parents to access three services from a single transaction."
The project is to roll out hospital-by-hospital and municipality-by-municipality. By the beginning of the 2006 fiscal year, Ottawa and Queen's Park expect province-wide implementation.
Instead of taking six months for the current process to spit out the final documents, the new electronic system is register births and issue the SIN number "within hours."
"What we're seeing here is a unique opportunity to not just address broader issues of citizen-centred government, but to take that next leap forward b & to a much more integrated, citizen-centred solution," said MC)tivier.
Medical practitioners and parents will still need to authenticate births. Hospitals will keep a paper record containing a signature, but hospital staff members will have the authority to submit the data electronically to the Ministry, which will in turn transfer the information to the federal government.
Initially, landed immigrants will not be included in the process because of increased authentication concerns, MC)tivier said.
Privacy is at the forefront of officials' concerns when implementing the project, both Steele and MC)tivier stressed. Service Canada is working on a new code of practices for the use of personal information, which will impose penalties for improper use and will lay down guidelines for how to deal with personal data.
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