Thank you, Mr. Chair and esteemed colleagues. I have five copies of my quick notes, which I'll just pass on to you.
We have an opportunity to relay the concerns of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. I sit on the national board of the CME, whose member companies have been involved in the foreign worker program and the SINP, the provincial nominee program, over the last five years. I could certainly speak to the benefits of the programs, but I guess the purpose of the hearing today is to find out what areas we can do better collectively in, and perhaps the areas of concern for us and our members.
The first area I'd like to raise is the lack of apparent cooperation and communication among the provincial organizations, Service Canada, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada. What we found throughout the process is that different levels of government operate in silos; there's very little exchange of information and documentation, both electronically and physically. Therefore, we are having significant delays in processing.
We also found that information seemed to be processed at every level, without any integral impact on the different levels of the government, including the visa posts. Our issue here is that throughout the process, the foreign worker program does not operate on its own; it actually needs cooperation from the visa posts and the local and provincial offices. Unfortunately, we do not see any kind of effective cooperation at that level.
The second area of concern I'd like to raise is the duplication of required documents. Generally, when people apply for temporary work permits, the documentation is also required for the provincial nominee program and for the permanent residency applications as well. It creates a huge problem for the applicant, making the processing difficult and causing significant delays.
In terms of the labour market opinion rules, we have a significant problem in terms of the advertising requirements and the fact that we're required to prove and re-prove that certain types of skills are still in shortage, even though both the provinces and the federal government do have their own skill shortage lists—and these are nationally published lists—but these are not necessarily considered by Service Canada for LMO purposes.
I had alluded to the difficulty with processing times, and some of our members also encountered difficulties from additional information requests after the original application was made. As an example, when the wage became an issue or was perceived to be an issue by Service Canada, one of our member companies was actually required to produce a union contract to prove that the employees were going to be paid x number of dollars. It just creates a difficult environment, where the lack of trust becomes very apparent, and it's not necessarily a productive work environment.
We are also finding that once the LMO is done, once the block of visas is approved in principle, it is very difficult to go through the process and actually get those visas, especially if you need any assistance from the visa post, from which it's impossible to get any consistent answer. Most of the time you don't even get anybody answering the phone, because the work hours are so limited at the visa post overseas. When we have any kind of information...the only reference is to go to the website and find the answer we're looking for there, which is almost impossible.
So there are a lot of areas that they could improve upon. As a business association, and commercial businesses ourselves, we see the relevance and the benefit of the programs, but hopefully with cooperation on both sides, you'll be able to improve the overall performance significantly.
Thank you very much.