Human Resources Committee on May 21st, 2013

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. We still have one member who hasn't arrived, Rodger Cuzner, but he will probably be here shortly.

I'd like to thank the witnesses that have come here today on relatively short notice.

We're dealing with clauses 161 to 166 of Bill C-60, primarily dealing with changes to the temporary foreign worker program.

We are happy to have with us today Joyce Reynolds, the executive vice-president of government affairs with the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association. It's good to see you here today for sure.

A special welcome to Dan Davidson from the Red Barn in Moosomin, Saskatchewan, a small business. We certainly want to hear from you today. Thank you for coming.

From the Air Canada Pilots Association we have Captain Craig Blandford, president. We're happy to see you here—I see you have others as well—and to hear from you with respect to this legislation.

The process is that each of you has about five to seven minutes to present. Then we'll open it up to questions from each of the parties. We'll alternate party to party. You're the first panel for the first hour. Then we'll suspend briefly to allow our second panel to attend.

You'll be with us from now until about 12 o'clock. We'll start with Ms. Reynolds.

[Joyce Reynolds, Executive Vice-President, Government Affairs, Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today about budget implementation measures impacting the temporary foreign worker program.

The temporary foreign worker program is extremely important to our members, particularly in communities in western Canada and in pockets in other parts of the country where labour shortages are acute.

I should be clear that 98% of the 1.1 million workers in Canada's food service industry are Canadians or landed immigrants. Of the 2% of our workforce comprised of TFWs, temporary foreign workers, almost 90% are located in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

I want to give you an idea of the challenges our members are experiencing in sourcing labour. Between 2011 and 2012 the number of restaurants in Saskatchewan grew by 64. With sales growth of 8%, the demand for restaurant employees was estimated to increase by 2000. In reality, employment fell by 400. The unemployment rate in Saskatchewan is 3.8%. Restaurants are delaying expansion plans and reducing their services because they simply can't find workers.

Demographics tell us that the labour shortages our members are experiencing in western Canada will spread across the country and get progressively worse as the labour force ages because our workforce is so skewed toward youth.

About 44% of today's food service workers are 15 to 24 years of age, but this age group has reached its demographic peak and is now in decline. By the year 2021 the population of 15-year-olds to 24-year-olds will decline by 340,000, while our industry's needs will grow by 200,000.

Our members have responded to labour shortages by enhancing their recruitment and retention strategies, increasing wages and benefits, and putting more emphasis on attracting and accommodating under-represented groups, such as aboriginals and persons with disabilities.

A recent survey of CRFA members revealed the extent employers in our industry go to hire individuals from groups under-represented in the Canadian labour market. For example, almost 76% of respondents hire first nation individuals; 84% hire new immigrants; 79% hire persons with disabilities or other abled individuals; and 60% hire social assistance recipients.

Reflecting their preference to recruit domestically, our members have moved far beyond simple job postings in their efforts to attract potential employees, including job fairs and interaction with community groups and social agencies.

Despite these best efforts, in some regions a restaurant's only option is to turn to the temporary foreign worker program.

This program is already cumbersome and costly. We are concerned that the changes proposed will make it more so. However, we also appreciate the need to protect the integrity of the program and to ensure the intent of the program, which is to hire Canadians first, is respected by all users of the program. We are supportive of measures that will ensure that appropriate monitoring and compliance mechanisms are in place, and that abusers of the program are denied access.

We understand the intent of the changes in clause 161 is to give the government authority to deny a labour market opinion, LMO, or revoke an LMO if there are abuses to the program. However, it is difficult to comment on the proposed changes without understanding the parameters of the ministerial instructions.

We are concerned about giving department officials blanket authority to reject an application without due cause or natural justice. What is the oversight process concerning the ability of an individual officer to reject an application? Is there an appeal process? How would it work? What happens to the prospective worker if he or she is already at point of entry or in Canada? If the worker must be returned to their country of origin, who is responsible for the cost? What happens if a Canadian comes forward after the LMO and work permit have been approved to say that they want the temporary foreign worker's job?

The principles that we would like to see established pertaining to clause 161 are as follows:

Public policy considerations in ministerial instructions for rejection or revocation of an opinion must be clear and unambiguous; revoking a work permit should only be considered in egregious cases; and there must be an appeals process.

With regard to imposing a user fee for LMO applications, our members are prepared to help bear the cost of the program, particularly if it leads to improvements that will speed up the application and approvals process. An effective and cost-efficient administration system is in all of our interests.

According to a background document on the TFW program, only 40% of approved LMO positions result in TFW work permits. I want to be clear that employers do not want to obtain or be charged for an LMO without it resulting in a TFW permit.

There is often a lengthy delay between when the employer applies for the LMO and when it is approved. By the time it is approved, the TFW or TFWs identified in the application are no longer available. This is often because TFWs have applied for multiple permits and contract with the first employer whose LMO is approved, or the TFW is not available because embassy officials reject the TFW application following background or health checks. In either case, the employer is forced to begin the application process all over again.

Some principles that we would like to see implemented in the process to establish user fees are as follows. The LMO should apply to the LMO application regardless of the number of TFWs listed on the applications. There should be checks to ensure that the paperwork is in order and that documentation required to verify recruitment activities are the same whether the employer is applying for one worker or ten. There should be a way to fast-track or replace an LMO if the TFW listed in the LMO is no longer available or denied access. The fee for the TFW permit should be set high enough to discourage TFWs from applying for multiple permits with multiple employers.

CRFA would also recommend that the government establish a social insurance number verification process so employers can be sure they are not hiring illegal workers. If that were in place, then CRFA would recommend that in the event a TFW has overstayed his or her work permit and is working illegally, the current employer should bear the cost of deportation and not the Canadian government. However, this could only work if a SIN verification process were in place.

To conclude, Mr. Chairman, the TFW program is critical to the continued viable operation of Canada's restaurant industry, particularly in those regions of the country experiencing acute labour shortages. We are interested in working with you to put policies in place that will reinforce and further strengthen the efficiency, integrity, and reputation of this invaluable program.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you very much, Ms. Reynolds. I'm sure you'll get some questions.

We'll move to Mr. Dan Davidson. Dan, go right ahead.

[Dan Davidson, Owner and President, The Red Barn, Owner, Subway]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thanks, everyone, for having me here.

This is quite an opportunity for a small Saskatchewan boy who's never really spoken in front of many people before, to come to Ottawa, to the Parliament Buildings, to speak to everyone here.

I'm just a small restaurant guy who has a restaurant we built in southeast Saskatchewan when the boom started about five years ago. We found a way to grow our restaurant business by 325% in five years, with 225% growth in employment in the last five years, and it's just a family-run business.

What I've always been happy with is the government has said they want entrepreneurs to grow. One thing with the LMO process, I felt that the government was always behind me, supporting me to make sure I had extra employees if I could not hire.

We are in a tough market where we are right now.

The foreign worker program has been the single most successful government-sponsored effort in assisting companies in Saskatchewan to overcome the manpower shortage problem throughout the province. Most drastically, it is in the outlying rural areas.

Saskatchewan is made up of a few cities and a lot of rural communities. We're considered a larger town of 2,700 people. We are situated right on the Trans-Canada Highway.

Recently, controversies surrounding the RBC outsourcing and the Chinese miners appear to have triggered a review of the foreign worker program. Undoubtedly, measures can be taken to improve the system to ensure that similar controversial practices do not recur. However, we hope this does not jeopardize the interests of the overwhelming majority that have been compliant with and cooperative with the foreign worker program.

This program does work. It's worked for us. It's worked for a lot of southeast Saskatchewan businesses that have found ways to grow drastically and make sure we keep their entrepreneurial spirit going. Our thought process doesn't change to sell. It is in growth mode.

As of February 2013, the province of Saskatchewan has the lowest unemployment rate, at 3.8%, among all the other provinces, compared to the national unemployment rate of 7%. The unemployment rate in Regina, Saskatchewan, our capital city, is 3.7%. It's the lowest among all Canadian cities. The unemployment rate in Saskatoon is at 4.7%, which is the fourth lowest among Canadian cities. Most of Saskatchewan is booming, and we do need the support of our government to help with labour shortages.

We do not have enough local manpower to staff our businesses. The shortage is dramatically more pronounced in the outlying rural areas, where we have small populations, but we still have extreme construction and building going on.

We're huge in natural resources, as you all know. There's potash and oil. We have wind power now. It's all caused construction right along the Trans-Canada Highway in a very small community. All communities have seen growth that they can barely handle.

Employers have continuously advertised their job vacancies, but the simple truth is that it's hard to find Canadian locals to even respond to the advertisements. We run lots of advertisements; we do not get much. We do advertise all around the region. It can be taxing on dollars, but mostly on time, because it doesn't produce anything for us.

I'm going to tell you something. On December 11, 2011, Tim Hortons opened a restaurant on the Trans-Canada Highway right in Moosomin. Thirty days later, the retired police officer and the retired nurse handed the keys back to Tim Hortons. They were 25 employees short. They advertised for two months and could not get anyone. Of course, if the foreign worker program doesn't work quickly enough, and it does lag, people can't survive. They can't.

It's the same with me. Two years ago my heart was falling away from the business. I had just built it. It was a 9,000 square foot restaurant. I have a lot of debt. I financed my life away. I wondered why I did it. I was the one flipping eggs. I had 60 employees. I tried to grow it from 23 to 60 to operate, but I could not operate because I could not get workers. They just weren't out there. The other industries were grabbing them up. Food service and hospitality were the last places people wanted to work.

Another factor that compounds the situation of the food service and hospitality industry is the lack of interest among the available local workforce in joining our industry, as I just said, much less pursuing a long-term career in it.

We are a stepping stone for a lot of people. Given the required hard work and modest pay in our industry, the available local workers are more inclined to pursue more rewarding jobs in the fields of oil, potash, construction. But the biggest growth in numbers of businesses is in food service and hospitality during the booms. All the other businesses grow, but we get phone calls at our restaurant from all the other industries literally asking for one of my employees to go for an interview, “Do you want a job?” They are coming right into our businesses and getting people. We are a stepping stone, so we are always 10, 15, 20 people short.

Now a young entrepreneur who wants to go to the bank and build something new can't. My heart isn't there anymore; I don't want to do it, because I'm too stressed and I can't do my job properly.” It is called maintaining disaster, almost; that is how it is. But when the LMO process came around and I was able to subsidize the market, which is at 3.8% unemployment, my entrepreneur juices started flowing again. A year ago, I built a little strip-mall building and opened a Subway.

I know that if I do my best to hire Canadian workers in my area, my government has my back. They are going to make sure I can grow my business in any way possible, because they are going to give me a foreign worker whom I can hire to bring the situation back. We are businesses that aren't taking advantage of the program; we're utilizing it, because we have to.

They are great people. We're trying to turn these people into residents, if that's their interest, through SINP, the Saskatchewan immigrant nominee program. Because of our small population, we want to retain employees and make sure we can grow our businesses.

That's the most of it. I just wanted to come—thanks for the invitation, Mr. Chairman—to tell a little bit of the Saskatchewan and small-town story of the small business guy who struggles, if he doesn't have opportunities, in a very tight labour market in the stepping stone industry, which is food service and hospitality. It is very important.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you very much, Mr. Davidson.

If any committee members are travelling down Highway 1 at Moosomin, Saskatchewan and want some great food and great hospitality, be sure to stop by at the Red Barn.

Thank you for that presentation. It does give us a sense of the smaller businesses that are operating in the more remote parts of the country where the economy is humming. It's important to hear from people like you, for sure.

We'll now move to Captain Craig Blandford.

Please go ahead on behalf of the pilots.

[Capt Craig Blandford, President, Air Canada Pilots Association]

Mr. Chair, honourable members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to appear before you today. Since I only have 10 minutes at my disposal, I think it would be preferable for you and for everyone if I continued in English. It will be quicker.

I was born and raised in the small coastal town of Springdale, Newfoundland, which is basically a small service community for—believe it or not—the smaller communities outlying Springdale. Much like most of the youth of Newfoundland since Confederation, which is now part of our history, youth have left the town to find work elsewhere in Canada, when they can.

I'm not here to protect work for Newfoundlanders or suggest that it should be protected, but I wanted to give you that as part of the context of what is my moral and ethical character. Pilots are equally mobile; it is an essential and inherent part of our profession. Mobility is essential for us.

I'm no different from many Newfoundlanders. I left home when I was 18 years old. I joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. I graduated from the Royal Military College of Canada. I spent 20 years in the air force, met a nice young lady from Winnipeg, had some children, decided to leave the air force, and I've been with Air Canada as a professional airline pilot now for 15 years. Winnipeg is my home.

The Air Canada Pilots Association is the largest professional pilot group in this country. We represent more than 3,000 pilots who fly the mainline fleet for Air Canada, and I'm the elected president of the pilots association. For some time now we've been concerned about the way the temporary foreign worker program has been abused, as we see it, by certain airlines in the country.

I should point out right from the start that we have no financial stake or interest in this. We're not affected one way or the other, as Air Canada does not take advantage of the temporary foreign worker program whatsoever to recruit pilots. Therefore, we have nothing to gain or lose by what is decided among your committee. However, our association prides itself on championing and being leaders in our profession in Canada, and we feel obliged to speak out when we see foreign-licensed pilots being brought into our country when we know that there remains a pool of qualified Canadian pilots here.

While we understand that this program may be useful in other sectors, as I heard quite eloquently from Dan, we believe it has been abused in the aviation sector.

Aviation is a highly competitive global business which has been and will continue to be subject to dramatic economic swings and nearly constant restructuring. Canada has not been exempt from this volatility. As a result, many highly qualified Canadian pilots are being forced to leave this country to work elsewhere when these restructuring events occur.

One of the most recent examples was in 2010, with the receivership and subsequent demise of Skyservice airlines. About 200 Canadian pilots lost their jobs when that occurred. Yet at the same time as these licensed, qualified Canadian pilots were seeking work—many of them leaving the country to do so—other Canadian companies were using the temporary foreign worker program to bring in foreign-licensed pilots to operate their flights.

We've been drawing attention to this issue for some time, for several years now, yet we feel that very little has been done to address these issues. Prime Minister Harper's recent public statements that problems with the program have been identified and that they will be addressed have reassured us. We also believe that any government that is concerned about its fiscal situation should be concerned about providing such supports to business while simultaneously paying EI benefits to pilots who could be gainfully employed in this country.

Regardless, the abuse of the program resulted in the de-capitalization of Canadian aviation through the loss of this investment and of the many years of training and experience that these pilots are taking to their new employers in other jurisdictions. This results in a brain drain of experienced pilots and their skills which may not be recovered for many years, if at all. Canadian pilots are being forced to leave their country to find work. This is not the same as a Newfoundlander moving to Alberta.

It has also stalled the upward mobility and the careers of younger Canadian pilots. Junior pilots who enter the workforce will typically work for more than one employer over their careers, gaining skills and experience, then moving on to fly progressively larger and more complex aircraft. Airlines such as Air Canada and its competitors are at the apex of this progression. When airlines are allowed to bring in foreign-licensed pilots and pay them at a reduced rate of pay, it damages the career prospects of young Canadians and puts downward pressure on the overall market for their skills.

In short, it works against the economic interests of Canadians. Surely this can't be allowed to continue.

Many believe that a serious pilot shortage exists or is on the horizon. I don't see it that way. What I see is a shortage of pay and of employment opportunities in this country to entice young Canadians to enter the profession. Why would you consider a career with significant financial and training investment, when your mother, father, uncle, aunt—qualified pilots—are sitting at home without work?

One avenue to gain regulatory approval permitting the employment of foreign-licensed pilots is the use of the labour market opinion. The LMO rationalizes and proves that there are no Canadians suitably skilled to fill the available jobs. Under this scenario, I would not be a qualified or skilled pilot to fly with, say, Sunwing Airlines. They fly a 737 airplane. I have not converted or had a type rating on that airplane. I have thousands of hours: I'm a military-trained pilot; I have flown small, medium, and large airplanes all over the world; I've done air-to-air refuelling in NATO AWACS over Bosnia; for 15 years I've flown jet airliners as a first officer and captain at Air Canada, but under the LMO, I wouldn't be skilled or qualified to fly with Sunwing.

The temporary foreign worker program should not be used by airlines as an ongoing subsidy from government used to gain a commercial advantage over their competitors through the avoidance of these type-rating training costs, which are normally accepted in the business.

Air Canada constantly invests in the skills of its pilots as they advance through their careers and operate increasingly large and more complex aircraft. Air Canada's employment practice includes type-rating training as part of our professional development. This training investment not only creates a talented professional workforce able to meet the challenge of global competition, but also makes our airline one of the safest and most highly respected in the world.

There are mechanisms that work and which provide a net benefit to Canadian airlines helping to employ Canadian pilots, based on reciprocity. There are business models that take advantage of our peak winter season to import some foreign pilots to help with it and then use our Canadian pilots in, say, the U.K. in their peak season. There are models that work based on reciprocity.

Canadian companies should be encouraged to invest more in the skills and training of Canadian pilots before being permitted to bring in foreign-licensed pilots. We congratulate the government for the reforms to the temporary foreign worker program that have been announced, and to the extent that they address these issues, we would urge their passage into law.

I should acknowledge here that there are other actions under way within government to address different aspects of this issue. Our association is also taking part in Transport Canada's review of what is known as “wet leasing”. This has become the practice of certain companies, which lease both aircraft and pilots and operate them largely as charter flights to vacation destinations in the Caribbean and Europe.

As I've pointed out above, we're not opposed to labour mobility for professional airline pilots and to the negotiation of reciprocal arrangements between Canada and other jurisdictions. It would allow the movement back and forth of pilots to meet the seasonal demands in different countries and would be beneficial for pilots, operators, and the travelling public. The Air Canada Pilots Association has offered our advice and expertise to assist in such an effort, should the government choose to pursue such an initiative.

Finally, Canada is a country built on and connected by aviation. We have a long history of pilot-training excellence, exemplified by the creation of the Commonwealth air training plan. Our air force, in which I proudly served, exudes safety and professionalism and has throughout its history been the training ground of many pilots, both domestic and foreign.

Here in Canada we hold to a high standard of operations and maintenance, required by our very harsh and unpredictable operating conditions. Air Canada and its pilots are proof that such standards, when maintained, produce one of the safest and most highly respected airlines in the world.

Transport Canada has set, encouraged, and maintained this high level of safety and standards as the government's administrator. A Canadian air operator certificate or a Canadian pilot licence is meaningful and is a recognition that those standards are met.

While I readily admit that we do not have a monopoly on safety and professionalism, in neither of these cases—the leasing of pilots nor the leasing of aircraft—should our standards be lowered. The Canadian public have come to expect these as a given when they fly on a Canadian airline. Their confidence in the safety and reliability of Canadian air transportation must be maintained, and I respectfully encourage you to measure all of your decisions and recommendations with these ethics in mind.

Again, thank you very much for the opportunity. Merci beaucoup.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you very much for bringing the Air Canada pilots' perspective to this issue. We appreciate that there are two sides to each issue, and that's why we like to hear from you.

We'll now open it up to rounds of questioning. We'll start with Mr. Sullivan for five minutes.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Thank you all for being here to tell your stories.

I'm going to start with Air Canada and Captain Blandford.

Over here on the NDP side, we've heard the same stories of the abuse of the temporary foreign worker program. I have talked to pilots who cannot get a job, who have been unemployed for several years, and yet somehow, while people are unemployed, some airlines, and I understand it was Sunwing and Canjet, have been given permission by this government to hire non-Canadians, temporary foreign workers who are sent back after two years, in theory, because they claim there is a shortage.

How is that possible? How does that actually make any sense in this day and age?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

There are a couple of aspects, as I understand it, to explain how it exists.

First of all, none of us is afraid of good competition, fair Canadian competition in which airlines compete against each other in a competitive environment. We'd like all the airlines to have the same competitive advantage. That goes whether our flight and duty time regulations are different or whether there is one safety standard in this country.

The same goes with respect to training. We've learned how the LMO can be used in some cases, as Dan has said, to help identify a shortage of workers, if it is written properly. What is in our industry a given, absolutely normal cost of doing business is the training of a pilot to fly a particular type of airplane. That training cost is anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000. WestJet does it; we do it; Air Transat does it. Anybody who runs an operational business with airplanes has to train their pilots to fly their particular type of airplane.

The way the LMO has been written to rationalize a shortage of pilots is to say that there are no pilots available who are trained with the type rating to go right in and fly those airplanes. If WestJet laid off all of their pilots, under that LMO, none of them would be qualified to fly at Air Canada. It just doesn't make sense to me, but that's the way I think it is rationalized.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

These two airlines seem to have found a loophole. We've seen what has happened with Air Canada and its mechanics, whereby competitive pressures between them and other airlines forced Air Canada to shut down its maintenance bases despite promises to the contrary.

Are you concerned that these competitive pressures from these smaller airlines will force Air Canada, WestJet, and Air Transat to start adopting these strange and not very Canadian-friendly rules to hire temporary foreign workers themselves and lower their overall costs to try to match Sunwing and CanJet? Are you concerned that this might be coming down the road?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

There is an absolute concern, yes, that airlines could be created in this country that are really shell companies for foreign operators, for which the bulk of the flying is done by an operator who doesn't have a Canadian operator certificate or whose planes are not flown by Canadian pilots.

Again, please, I'm not so naive as to think that other countries don't have excellent standards and safety records and good training systems, but they will be different from Canada's.

We are concerned about the downward pressure. The Air Canada Pilots Association and our pilots have recently agreed with our company to create a low-cost carrier called Rouge. That carrier needs to compete in the marketplace. That airline will be competing with those other carriers who are taking advantage of a lower cost structure through a leasing company for different airplanes and different pilots. I hope that when they lease pilots and airplanes, they are paying good Canadian wages for that work.

What we've agreed to with Air Canada is to keep these jobs in-country. We have those jobs; Air Canada pilots will be flying those airplanes. However, in order to compete, we've been forced to modify and reduce what we would consider the acceptable wage for flying those planes. But we're loyal to the airline. They are trying to make an effort to compete in the market you have just characterized, and we want to help them to do that. There will be Canadian pilots flying those airplanes for Air Canada.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

That is in part as a result of your collective agreement with Air Canada. There is not, I think, a union at Sunwing or CanJet for pilots.

[A voice]

Yes.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Oh, they do have one?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

Yes, they do. I talked to my good friend who is the Canadian president of ALPA on the weekend. Of course, he knew I was coming here. We share exactly the same sentiments when it comes to this. Even though our pilots are not affected, they have some pilots who are unemployed right now who are members of their union.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you very much. Your time is up, Mr. Sullivan. We let you go on a while.

We'll now move to Mr. Butt.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. To the witnesses, thank you, all three of you, for being here.

Perhaps I'll direct some of my questions to the restaurant and food services side and get a better understanding of your interest in the temporary foreign worker program.

Ms. Reynolds, I think you said in your testimony that only about 2% of all the workers employed within the industry across the country—the many small businesses I know—are members of your association. We're not talking about a very significant amount of the workforce. Most of the workforce are Canadians or landed immigrants, and I would assume most are working full-time in these restaurants and that this is their mainstay livelihood.

Could you give me a better sense of this 2% and of the different regions of the country? I think Mr. Davidson very well articulated his specific issue in southeastern Saskatchewan, which might be a heck of a lot different from the case in Mississauga, Ontario, where I am from.

How prevalent is the program and the need for the TFW program for your members across the country in different regions? Do you have a better regional breakdown than just saying that it's 2% across the country?

[Joyce Reynolds]

Yes, 90% of the TFWs in our industry are in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

The majority would be in Alberta. Back in the mid-2000s, when the economy was booming in Alberta, our industry was in a crisis situation in that market, as was noted. Franchisees were throwing the keys back at franchisers saying that they couldn't do it: “no people; can't do it”. Parts of restaurant operations were being shut down and hours of service were being cut. There were huge lineups out the door, and people from the oil patch were coming in and recruiting people right from behind the counter at restaurants.

The situation was really critical. The temporary foreign worker program has become.... Well, I don't know what would have happened to our industry in that market at that time.

The other thing that happened as a result of the temporary foreign worker program is this. You have to understand that some restaurants are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so you have to cover three shifts a day. If we could recruit 30% to 40% of our workers, then we still had to cover off the other hours. It was often the late hours—people had child care needs and transportation problems—and the temporary foreign worker program allowed us to make up that other 60% to 70%.

What happened was it really stabilized the operations. The managers in the operation were doing everything, working 16-hour days, cleaning toilets. They were not training. They were not managing. They were doing all the work of employees who should have been at the restaurant. Graduates from community college who they would bring in to manage the restaurants would quit on them after a short period, telling them they weren't hired to do all those jobs, but were hired to manage the restaurant. When they were able to bring in temporary foreign workers, they were able to stabilize their operations to a great extent.

The demands in Alberta have spread to Saskatchewan and have spread to Manitoba, and there are pockets in northern regions in every province in which there is a real, critical shortage of workers for our industry.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Do you want to comment on that, or do you want me to ask my supplementary question, which may be more specific?

[Dan Davidson]

You go ahead.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Mr. Davidson, you have been directly involved in this program for several years now. I think you recognize the fact that we uncovered some shortcomings in the current program, which perhaps have led to some abuse of the program, which was never intended. It was actually a previous government that brought it in, for a good reason, because there was a demand for this type of labour. It was needed in certain parts of the country, and it made sense to supplement the regular Canadian workforce.

What we're trying to do is look at the changes in this bill to make the program stronger and more effective but still allow you the same level of access to it, because you're a good operator and you're using the program for what it's intended to do. We are tightening it up, so I want to ask your opinion on a couple of those aspects.

First, there certainly is going to be much greater employer accountability for the individuals who are hired through the program and for what they are specifically doing, so that they are not replacing Canadian workers.

I'll get you to comment on that first of all, whether you're comfortable with that.

Second—

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

And we'll conclude with that second.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

I'm sorry.

Second, we are going to be bringing in...well, it's proposed to bring in a fee-based process whereby the employer is going to need to have some financial skin in the game, too, to pay to get the LMO process, etc., so that you can get access to those temporary foreign workers.

Did you want to quickly comment on either of those two points and whether you think those are fair changes that are being proposed?

I'm done. Thank you.

[Dan Davidson]

On the tightening up of the LMO process and making the businesses a little more translucent to make sure they're hiring all the Canadian workers first, I think there's nothing wrong with that at all. Even for me, I do all of the LMO processing and everything myself. We use an agent to outsource sometimes, but we do the paperwork ourselves. If I'm forced to do a little more of that to make sure we have the proper number of people coming in to run our business, I'm prepared to do that.

The fast-track LMO process worries me a little. Sometimes labour can change, I find. I can lose three to four people just like that, then an LMO expires, and then the process takes too long. It takes 90 days. I get into a situation of being behind all of a sudden, where I don't start operating the same way either, and that's not good.

As for the best way for me to have it, whether they have regions where they have the fast-track process still, in regions where they show that the unemployment rate is below 4%, let's say, and you still have some fast-track processes.... I do realize there are issues and problems, and we're not going to paint all of Canada with the same brush because there are certain parts of Canada that shouldn't...and probably that process should be made more difficult and it should be more timely. But for some of the areas, like ours, and for any other areas that show extreme labour shortages, that timeframe can't go on too long.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

The time is up, but there was also a question about adding a fee, if you want to make a very short response.