Citizenship and Immigration Committee on April 2nd, 2008

[Daniel Hirschkorn]

That makes sense. Yes, absolutely.

[Colleen Beaumier, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

I think it would benefit everyone.

Having said that, we want to try to minimize the number of illegal workers or underground workers in Canada, for their sake as well as for the government's sake and society's sake. I think what I've heard through this whole process is that we need a temporary workers program that isn't necessarily temporary, that has channels.

Daniel, you're paid by the employer.

[Daniel Hirschkorn]

Yes.

[Colleen Beaumier, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

Depending, I suppose, on the demographics of our areas.... I know who the unscrupulous people are, say, in India, because people from India are a big part of my population. How do you suggest we deal with this? We subcontract a lot of work out, and we bring old traditions into our own immigration process. A payoff is always nice.

[Daniel Hirschkorn]

I'm glad you brought up the issue of unscrupulous foreign recruiters and CSIC members, but I would strongly urge everyone to understand that these people exist in Saskatchewan and in Canada in great numbers. What can we do about them?

When Service Canada gets an LMO, there's a third party on there, so they know who the third party is. I know that Service Canada keeps a record of them. I know that Service Canada blacklists some of them. I know that Service Canada talks to CIC about some of them.

It is a big issue. It could be something as simple as Service Canada maintaining a database of foreign recruiters. If you want to be a third party representative, you must register. For simple registration, you need a physical address. I get contacted by people around the world who have Yahoo! accounts. Do you think I want to work with someone with a Yahoo! account and no phone number and no address?

So we do need something, absolutely.

[Chris Thomas]

The Manitoba government is taking a look right now at a program for licensing all recruiters for that province.

[Daniel Hirschkorn]

And Alberta has gone forward—

[Chris Thomas]

In Manitoba, though, it's going to have a bit more teeth to it. They're literally going to ask the agencies to post a bond and to be completely responsible for any issues that come up. For Alberta, it's just a matter of registering, and a lot of employers think, that's great, they've been registered. But the registration means absolutely nothing. It just means that they've registered their name. It doesn't mean that they've been licensed or that anybody checked any of their credentials. It just means they put their name down on a list saying, “I am a recruiter doing this.” So it has to have a lot more teeth to it there, and they have to have responsibilities for it there.

When you look at the entire process, there can be issues with a candidate, with the recruiter, or with the company. It's a responsibility for all three parties that have to be taken into this, because it's all three parties that sign a contract with the government. So all of them have to be on board with this, and if anyone is not doing their job correctly, that's where the issues usually come up.

[Daniel Hirschkorn]

If I could throw something in to follow up what he said, there are three people involved. I personally have seen workers use work permits to just come over here and go elsewhere. I've seen employers bring workers over here under horrible conditions and not honour their end of the contract, and I've seen third party recruiters muddy the communication between the worker and employer. The worker shows up and says, “I'm making $16 an hour”, and the employer says, “No, I said $10 an hour.” The worker asks where his car is and is told he doesn't get a car, and this sort of thing.

There are three people involved. At times, one of the members will be the guilty party, at times two. You will find companies that work with certain recruitment agencies in quite a poor fashion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I think we'll have to move along now to Mr. St-Cyr.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Thank you very much for being here today.

First of all, I would like to continue with the question of recruiting agencies. Mr. Thomas, you talked about various legislatures. I'm not sure I clearly understood, but one of them—Manitoba, Saskatchewan or Alberta—wants to make the employer responsible, not just the recruiting agency, in cases involving non-compliant practices. Did I understand correctly, and, if so, what province was that?

[Chris Thomas]

Manitoba.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

So you're in favour of this kind of procedure.

[Chris Thomas]

There's really only one way to do this, and it has to be the legal way. Again, where you see a lot of the issues with this program is that there seem to be a lot of loopholes and a lot of missing pieces of information. You get different programs bleeding over from one to another and people thinking that there's one way to do it. There's too much bureaucracy to it there. Again, if we went back to a straightforward, process-driven system where everybody knew where things were sitting, it would make it a lot easier.

Where you get a lot of confusion is with a lot of, let's say, third party recruiters and a lot of employers. They may have been involved with a program like the nanny program in the past, and they think that the nanny program is very similar to the temporary foreign worker program, which it isn't. All of a sudden you get a lot of people who create an issue from that, thinking they can follow the same regulations that are in a totally different program, because they don't spend the time to do the research on it from there.

So if we could give more clarification and more streamlining of the processes within these programs, it would make it a lot easier--and again, a defined program.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

In your presentation, you also talked about the issue of employees who have a visa linked to one employer and who might change employers along the way. The testimony heard to date indicates that dealings with an unscrupulous employer complicate matters extremely and are one of the causes of discrimination and problems that may arise. The fact that an employee's livelihood in Canada depends entirely on the employment relationship with that person means that the employer has incredible power over that employee.

I've often asked people, union representatives, refugee advocacy organizations and organizations representing the industry, whether we shouldn't abolish this provision in order to remove a little power from an unscrupulous employer with regard to his employees. Most answered yes, but you are the first one to correctly point out that the problem with employers is that there are costs associated with recruiting foreign workers.

If I understand correctly, you would be in favour of an employee being able to change jobs easily, provided the new employer paid its fair share of the initial costs incurred to bring in that employee.

[Chris Thomas]

That is kind of a two-pronged question. One of the things, obviously, that would come with it there is that if the individual is coming over for an industry, if the person has been defined as having been working as an engineer for the last 10 years, or working in food service for the last 10 years, he or she should have the ability to work within that industry. Obviously that's what the person has been defined as. Recruiters have spent their time, companies have spent their time, the embassy has spent its time defining this person's background as being in food service. So if there's a need for food service, we could have that person come over and work within an industry.

On the idea about the fair compensation, it's very true. For levels 0, A, and B, there is no fee that the employer has to pay in order to bring the person over. They may choose to pay a fee, as they would in the case with Daniel, and follow up like that, but they don't have to.

For NOC C and D, which would be low-skill workers like our workers, the regulation is that you have to pay return airfare and you must pay the cost of recruitment. Where the unfair advantage is coming up is that now—we're seeing this more with the oil and gas industry, construction, and manufacturing—they are waiting for low-skill workers to come to Canada who are not in their industry, driving up to the local McDonald's, the local Tim Hortons, the local A & W, and saying, “You're 10 workers; instead of getting paid $10 or $12 an hour, why don't you guys come and work for us at $25 an hour?”

It's an easier and quicker pathway for them. The problem is that Service Canada says, “Freedom of information rules prevent us from telling you where those workers are going.” So right now, there's no way to get recruitment for the first employer who brought the people over and spent the cost.

On average, if you're looking at a store owner spending, let's say, $3,000 for airfare and recruitment for 10 workers, that's $30,000 about which Service Canada and CIC are just expecting that store owner to say, “Oh well, it's gone. Forget about it.” That's a big investment for somebody to have, and as I say, right now you get some people in the industry who are in lower positions, who are turning around and saying, “Why should I do it legally? Why should I do it correctly? If I do it illegally, I don't have to spend any money to get these people over here, and if I lose them, so what?”

That's the wrong message to be sending.

[Chelsea Jukes]

As an employer who switched LMOs for employees, we've had other drivers come to us from other companies that are involved in the program. That process is relatively easy for an employer who is similar to us, who has bulk LMO allocation.

So I think the issue is, if employees lose their work permit through no cause of their own—that is, they get laid off, in the instance of Dell yesterday in Edmonton—where they had no control over the outcome of their work permit, there could be something built into the system for those instances.

What I fear is that if we allow the transfer of employees throughout industries and throughout carriers or employers en masse, when an employee is not a good fit not only for our company but for Canada, if that employee is free to go to any employer because of his or her work permit, we have no check and balance on where that employee ultimately ends up.

Sometimes there's a reason an employee is dismissed on a particular work permit. So we very much do due diligence when we get an applicant for driver who has been here from, say, Roberge Trucking, or a Yanke, or a Bison Transport.

We definitely want to do all the background checks to ensure the reasons that employee left that company, because we don't want to continue a cycle of somebody we just don't need, who was just a bad hire or a bad fit. So I would caution you on opening that up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Good. Thank you.

Ms. Grewal, do you have a question?

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

First of all, I would like to thank all of you for coming and for your time. Your presentations were very informative.

I have a very simple question for Ms. Jukes.

Chelsea, what's the procedure under which the drivers come to Canada? Should they be fluent in English? What are the skills they require? Could you please explain that?

[Chelsea Jukes]

Definitely.

We're just now looking at going to countries where the first language is not English. Up until 2008, we've predominantly brought in drivers whose first language was English, so we didn't have the language issue.

We are doing an extensive research program in trips to Ukraine, which would be, for our company, the next place we would bring drivers from. Having said that, there's a huge language barrier. It's probably the only barrier. There are lots of different challenges in every country that you go to, and as a company we try to research and understand what those are going to be.

In Ukraine, they have similar driving conditions; they use similar equipment—all of those things check out. It's a language issue. Right now we're trying to get some clarity on identifying within our own workforce what is an optimal level of English and what it correlates to, whether it's the Canadian Language Benchmarks or, when they're leaving their home country and being assessed at a Canadian embassy, using the IELP, or whatever testing mechanism it may be, and trying to align so that we know what level we need to bring.

I'm meeting tomorrow with the Saskatchewan Transportation Association representatives to try to come together as carriers to say we don't want to compromise safety and we don't want to compromise a person's quality of life. When you don't speak a language in a country, your quality of life is that much less than that of somebody who does.

We want to address all of those things and make sure that when we bring somebody from, say, a place like Ukraine, their level of English is at a point where they're going to get by and will improve substantially with training, which we provide on the post-arrival end, covered by the employer, with certified ESL teachers and with a defined path to where they're going, so that they can become prominent and successful members of our society. It's just in the research stage for drivers right now, but we know it's something we have to work with governments on.

What we fear is that somebody is going to come in and impose a certain level: you have to be a level eight or a level six. I worked for the University of Saskatchewan; the international students we brought to our university didn't have a level six. We have to make sure we identify the appropriate level of English—not to compromise any of those things, but so as not have a government infrastructure impose a level that's unattainable, because then we hinder the program all over again.

We as carriers are trying to find out who we need to talk to at the government, whether it's Service Canada or the PN level. Right now, it's the Alberta PN who's likely going to come with a defined level for truck drivers first. So it's a question of finding those key people to say, “We want to work with you. Come to our company, interview our drivers, learn for yourselves what is required for English to do the job.”

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

How long does it take for those drivers to come?

[Chelsea Jukes]

I was first in Ukraine in September, and we will not see our first Ukrainian drivers until June. I went in September and I interviewed in Ukrainian, through a translator—I don't speak Ukrainian--and I said, “You are an excellent candidate. You speak no English.” Then I went back in February and re-interviewed those drivers, and it was amazing to see the improvement from September to February in their English level, and they're going to improve even more until June. In June we will do another interview to assess their English, and then we'll bring them. And as soon as they hit the ground, they're going into post-English training with our company.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

In total, how many truck drivers have come into your company in the time since you started?

[Chelsea Jukes]

We've had a lot. We've processed or fielded applicant inquiries from over a thousand people since 2006. As I said, we have 91 foreign workers working for our company right now. We've lost 175, though; that's a huge number—lots at the beginning, when we were learning the process. Lots went home after two years as a result.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Even so, those 90 are all a good experience for you, are they? They're good workers, and there are no problems?