Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much to all three of the witnesses for your testimony.
I imagine, Ms. Turtle and Mr. Roberts, that you don't often find yourselves on the same page as Mark Carney, but in this case indeed you are, specifically with respect to the temporary foreign worker program and low-skilled labour shortages.
Mr. Roberts, you made the point, and you're quite right, that unfortunately the HUMA committee isn't empowered to make the kinds of far-reaching recommendations that we might want to see to actually permanently fix the temporary foreign worker program. As much as I regret that, I do hope that through your testimony and through the work we're doing here we'll continue to raise awareness, and perhaps that more comprehensive study will happen as a result of your testimonies. I want to thank you very much for being here and making your presentations.
It seems to me that although on the surface it might not seem like the three of you agreed in your presentations, you did all say that impediments for Canadians to accept some of the jobs, whether they be temporary, seasonal, or otherwise, include wages, labour mobility, and skills training. I think all three of those probably deserve further study in the context of the temporary foreign worker program as well.
I want to ask each of you to reflect for a moment. We've had this massive announcement that the temporary foreign worker program will get at least a temporary fix now. It seems to me the government was shifting some of the responsibility on to employers as if employers were the ones who had mismanaged the program somehow and therefore were to blame for some of the stories we've been seeing in the papers, whether they be about HD Mining or iGate, and it doesn't matter which, as there's been a myriad of them. I would suggest that perhaps it was the government's mismanagement because at the end of the day it's not the employers who are issuing LMOs or ALMOs, it's the government that needs to be reviewing that process and granting those permits. I wonder if you could comment on whether in your experience the problem is employers, or are employers taking advantage of a program that the government has just poorly designed?