They are, and historically we're very proud of the way that we have used our collective agreements to leverage provincial nominee programs in order to secure real pathways to citizenship, and that's something that we haven't touched enough on.
To your point, Mr. Perron, TFWs have been coming into our membership, absolutely. That's been the case especially in meat plants. We're very proud of the way we have used our contracts to leverage provincial nominee programs in order to secure real pathways to citizenship for migrants.
This is something you probably haven't talked about enough on this call: that the federal government has set up a federal nominee program and provinces have the ability to exercise the nominee program, though Ontario has historically lacked. This has to be seen as a pillar in terms of meeting the needs of the sector.
Having somebody as a migrant, as one of the temporary foreign workers, coming into this country for 30 years and being on a hamster wheel is in nobody's interest. If we're going to build security and stability and longevity in our sector, we need to allow people to come here to lay roots and build lives; that's key.
To your other point, about the inverse relationship between active labour market policy investments and the expansion of the temporary foreign worker program, we're just citing OECD data. This data clearly shows that public investments in such things as activating the underemployed and providing opportunities for people who have taken themselves out of the labour market to upskill—the percentage in terms of Canada's GDP of such investments into those programs—has declined at exactly the same rate that our use of temporary foreign workers has climbed over the last 20 years.