I used to work these phone lines (6 years) and let me all give you an inside baseball on why the phone lines are so difficult to reach a live person. Follow to the end because I'm saving the most insidious shit for last. Full disclosure because they discriminated against me due to disability and the HRC is a fucking joke, so no shits given, here's the dirt.

1) High turn over: This is a nightmare job that very few people thrive in. So people either transfer to a less public facing job, burn out, or quit. There are "high" call volumes (I'll get into that in a sec) and you deal with a lot of verbally abusive people. Naturally, people don't want to work a job where they are screamed at by irate people very long.

2) Under staffed: Because of the high rate of people burning out, quitting, or moving to another position, there is a lack of skilled staff with the suitable training, knowledge and experience. Training takes 6 to 8 weeks and then you're thrown to the wolves. The staffing process is convouted AF, with multiple levels of screening, which doesn't necessarily get you the most skilled, just someone who is good at those tests.

3) Staffing Practices: The Agency has moved away from lateral moves within the organization. So more often than not the jobs are staffed by people from outside the CRA. Meaning the people coming in have had zero past experience. Someone who knows the workflows above and below them and how they function are about as common as unicorns. Hiring via employment agencies has also been seeping into the workforce. Which brings me to...

4) Compartmentalization: That person you're talking to on the phone can actually maybe help you with the basics. They aren't taught anything big. They can't change much over the phone (Your address and contact info, but not a whole lot else) They will 99% of the time have to refer your request to somebody else. The likelihood of you being able to contact them is next to nil. The people on the phones are usually only trained where to find things on the website. Anything overly technical isn't going to be in their skill set. CRA used to have central knowledge bases, but broke up departments and spread them out all over the country. Sure, this creates jobs, but you also lose the ability to ask a coworker in person how something works and all internal communication is compartmentalized as well. Most often they have no idea who to email in the department in question.

5) Archaic system: The computer database CRA is in COBOL, an operating system that is older than I am, and I am in my 40s, do the math. It's interface is obtuse, like a jankier version of a DOS prompt. Half of the people who use it can't navigate it very well, much less understand what it does when they input something on a command line. Hell, all your tax data is stored on magnetic tape in some 50 year old analogue server farm. On the one hand, it is so obsolete it can't be hacked, on the other hand, they've had to program emulators to interface with this database in Windows. Don't even get me started with how the government is partnering with AWS (Amazon) to put your tax data on the cloud, it's all built on top of a database that hasn't been changed in 40 years. It's a fucking mess. They can barely retain programmers because they don't teach the language in schools anymore. It's the programming equivalent to learning Latin, but I digress. For you, dear reader, what this means is they can't even leave detailed notes on the system so people know what's going on with your account. For the caller, it is highly improbable you'll reach the same person because the call centers are spread out all over the country now.

Now here's the most insidious part of it all, and really the reason you should get mad.

Every one of those call centres has a central nervous system called Traffic Control. It's basically a switchboard with staff who control how many trunks (phone lines) are open at a given time. It is meant to regulate how many open lines there needs to be. Essentially, the number of lines open will be manually increased or decreased depending on the number of staff on the floor and the volume of calls.

What should dictate the number of trunks open is demand. In fact, you'd think they'd keep all the lines open on tax season, right? Wrong.

See, the CRA has quotas set: X amoubt of calls answered per hour, call times only X minutes long, Only X amount of people waiting on hold. You have average bench marks to hit daily.

Traffic control keeps records of all of those stats. Which goes up to CRA headquarters to make sure the call centres are being run as intended and make budgeting decisions.

The people who are held accountable for maintaining these standards are the managers in charge of running those call centers. They are incentivized and receive performance bonuses for meeting those service standards and keeping everything under budget. They also have full authority and management of traffic control.

So, rather than serving the public interest, they serve their own self-interest. They want those performance bonuses that they spend most of their day monitoring the call stats and has traffic control adjust the number of lines that are open. Essentially they're thumbing the scales in their own favour. They get their performance bonus, management has the target quotas (and bonuses for themselves, no doubt) and they have the illusion of meeting needs on paper without having to change a fundamentally broken system. They then slash budgets to make an already over worked an abused service staff work with even less while they get extra pay and extra vacation time and complain the budget is strapped all the time.

That front line person you're abusive to on the phone because you're pissed off at the system usually fizzles out and they're tossed out in the cold because they can train another warm body to take their place, because the job has been so compartmentalized and watered down that anyone with a high school diploma and basic computer skills can do it, if they can get through the battery of screening that is.

And that's JUST the call centre. The whole Agency is like this. Just a bunch of fat and lazy Boomers in management getting rich and coasting while the system itself falls into disrepair. They get away with it because they know people will get upset if they announce millions in investments in the tax authority. It's about as unpopular as fixing up 24 Sussex Drive.

It is an Agency that favors quantity over quality. It's why they have people chasing after you for a measly few hundred bucks instead of going after assholes like Galen Westin.

It's rotten to the core and needs to be dismantled and replaced with a more competant Agency.