Thank you very much, Minister. It's always a pleasure to see you.
I wish your family health. I hope that everyone recovers soon. My family went through the same thing over the holidays.
I have just a couple of things before I get to my questioning.
I thank Member Zarrillo for presenting this motion, but I would also like to point out that I believe all of the opposition parties were united in the idea of a labour shortage study.
That includes the Bloc Québécois.
Certainly Ms. Zarrillo added the nuance of the care economy, but I think everyone was eagerly interested in studying the labour shortage.
Secondly, to your comment about how last year you were focused on finding jobs, unfortunately, this is part of the reason we find ourselves in the labour shortage situation now. It's my belief, backed up by the economist from your department, that the number of increased jobs we saw—what was previously the one million talked about by the government—was really the natural recovery of the pandemic as people went back to work. Nonetheless it has occurred, and that's a good thing.
That brings us back to the main issue of the day, which is the labour shortage. Many of the items you talked about in your opening statement are items you put in place both within budget 2022 as well as previously. To outline, some of those were the new foreign labour program specifically for agriculture and fish processing. Of course, one can't mention that without recognizing the Auditor General's report, which indicated that working conditions for temporary foreign workers in both agriculture and fish processing were not upheld. Unfortunately, we didn't really have an opportunity to discuss that here.
In addition, the LMIA stipulation that you put in, increasing the validity of the LMIAs, I think was very good. I also have that you referred to the temporary foreign worker program workforce solutions road map. You mentioned some of these items, such as making the seasonal cap exemption permanent. I mentioned previously longer validity for labour market impact assessments, as well as the removal of the 6% refusal to process policy.
What I'm seeing repeatedly, and what was brought up in the last hour by a witness from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce specifically, is that these initiatives by your department, and certainly you and your department are to be commended on these things.... However, the overarching theme is that, despite more budget and program allocations toward these problems, the solutions are not being found, and the overarching problem is with backlogs of immigration processing.
My first question would be, how are you working with and encouraging the Minister of Immigration to process these backlogs? It just seems to me that almost every single program you mentioned that is implemented or brought forward to solve the labour shortage is not being addressed as a result of these immigration backlogs. What are you doing together, please, in an effort to resolve that? Really, all of your suggestions hinge upon the resolution of the backlogs.