Thank you, Denise. That's a very good question, and it really gives considerable concern about the speed with which the government has embarked on its policy redesign, and about the government's budget, which makes references now to making every legal occupation in Canada available for a foreign worker.
The number of instances of abuse or questionable practice is enormous. To give an example, in 2003 the British Columbia trades council found that in the dismantling of a pulp mill, they brought in workers from India and from Thailand while 200 qualified workers were available within the region. The same council has been tracking numbers of unemployed electricians, 7,000; unemployed apprentices, nearly 8,000; journey-level painters, nearly 300; bricklayers, over 300, and so on. So there's a large number of qualified people who are available within the country or even within the region. What we don't have are labour mobility initiatives to put people who are qualified into those particular jobs.
In other cases, whereas there is a rush to redesign the temporary foreign worker program to be very responsive to employers' interest to have workers, there is not the commensurate interest to say, let's make sure we have strong compliance enforcement monitoring mechanisms to make sure these workers have safe working conditions, that they are in fact being paid the prevailing wage, that they're not being exploited, that we don't have situations of Mexican workers paying human traffickers, third-party recruiters, $800 or $1,600 a month to be able to come in and work for a particular employer; so we don't have situations where the agricultural farm workers are responsible in some cases for accommodation and they put 18 South Asian men in a two-bedroom apartment; or the more extreme and grotesque example that since the year 2000 a commercial vegetable farm just outside of Montreal has been bringing in Haitian workers to a blacks-only cafeteria, to facilities that do not have running water. That's since the year 2000, in Canada.
So the number of instances of disingenuous contractual relations with the foreign workers and blatant abuse is enormous. It's very disappointing to see in this budget that $50-some-odd million is going to be to open up this program to every legal occupation in Canada and that the path to citizenship for some of these people is going to be limited to only skilled workers. So are we going to be looking at a case where we're finding a large number of low-skilled workers coming to Canada, who may be interested in staying, but the path to stay, the arbiter of who decides if they're a good immigrant or good citizen, is the employer, not the nation state of Canada?
On the eve of March 21, 47 years of remembering the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I think one thing that's not been said within this context is, who are we talking about bringing in here? We're talking about bringing in people of colour from the global south. And under what terms and conditions are these folks staying?
So these are some very serious concerns, and at a minimum, we should be seeing strong compliance enforcement monitoring mechanisms in place before an employer has to go from advertising a number of weeks to a number of days. I think that's just asking for disaster on the scale that Europe, Germany, has experienced.