I thank the chair and the committee members for giving me an opportunity to speak here with you today.
My name is Vincent Wong. I'm a staff lawyer at the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic. We're a not-for profit community legal clinic that serves low income, non-English speaking members of the Chinese and Southeast Asian community in the GTA.
Many of our clients are temporary foreign workers, many of them are in occupations that are considered low-skilled, and all these clients have language barriers to understanding and enforcing their rights. We want to make sure that these workers have their voices heard here today.
Before I go into specific recommendations I want to take a step back and look at what's happening with our temporary foreign workers program on a macro level.
Canada is and historically always has been a nation of immigrants. In recent years the government has created through its immigration policies soaring numbers of temporary residents. For example, between 1995 and 2014 we have seen an increase of 277% in temporary foreign workers, a 303% increase in international students, and a 335% increase in international mobility program participants. If we sum up these categories, that's almost a million temporary residents, not including visitors, in 2014.
Yet at the same time that these temporary resident numbers are soaring, we have not seen corresponding increases in permanent resident approvals. Over the same period of time there was only a 22% increase in permanent resident approvals, which were at 260,000 a year in 2014.
What these numbers suggest is that Canada is moving away from a permanent residency model of immigration and increasingly relying on temporary foreign labour without allowing for corresponding permanent status for newcomers.
Now, systemic abuse and exploitation among temporary foreign workers—and I don't say that all employers are engaged in it, but it is a systemic problem, and it is well documented.... We support the other groups who have come before this committee, particularly those with lived experience, to highlight some of these tough issues.
In the end, the reason there continues to be exploitation is power imbalances that arise from precarious temporary employment status. These problems cannot be resolved in the long run without resolving the underlying cause.
The government can do things to mitigate some of the worst of these abuses, but a shift back towards a permanent residency model of immigration to respond to labour market demands is in our opinion the only way to resolve the problems in the long run. To that extent I agree with Mr. McAlpine.
We therefore have six recommendations for the committee.
The first is a shift from a complaint-driven model of program enforcement to a more proactive enforcement model. Canada is already doing things to shift in that direction, but the biggest reason, aside from the fear of firing and deportation, that this is necessary is that limited time durations for work permits make a complaints process completely ineffective.
For example, a foreign worker may have their visa expire well before any employment complaint goes through due process and is adjudicated upon, and certainly well before any collection happens. Employers know this and therefore know that they can wait it out.
The second recommendation is with respect to easing work permit restrictions, particularly those that tie an employee to one job or one specific employer. Again, the problem is that if an unscrupulous employer knows that the workers can be deported if laid off and that they are not allowed to find another job, they can use that leverage to violate employment health and safety laws with impunity.
We therefore recommend that either open work permits be issued or, in the alternative, that an occupational or sectoral work permit be issued to ease some of this potential for exploitation.
The third recommendation is to eliminate the “four in-four out” rule and to institute a regularization provision for the temporary foreign workers who have found themselves out of status solely because of the execution of that rule.
The fourth recommendation we have is to expand settlement and health services to migrant workers. As one of the most marginalized and exploited groups in our population, temporary foreign workers must be given access to crucial settlement services for newcomers, including language services and health services, in order to meaningfully realize and enforce their rights.
The fifth and probably the most important recommendation is to institute pathways for permanent residency for all those skilled migrant workers. There is of course already a precedent for this, which is the caregiver program, the only NOC skill level C or D occupation that currently has a pathway to permanent residency.
If Canada recognizes that the work of caregivers is important to society and therefore deserving of status, why do we shut out the other workers—the food workers, the janitors, the clerks, the farm workers? Are we saying that these workers are not deserving of the same type of respect?
We therefore recommend that even low-skilled workers have meaningful avenues to permanent residency.
The final recommendation we have is for the international mobility program, which is to ensure viable pathways for permanent residency for people on post-graduate work permits. The current express entry system, unfortunately, bars the vast majority of PGWP holders from immigrating to Canada, because they have to compete in the same pool as other express entry applicants.
Just to experiment, I crunched the numbers for my own self. The most recent score was 484 for the last express entry draw, and I determined that somebody in my position—of my age, having two degrees from U of T including a law degree, having presumably the highest maximum scores in English, and two years of relevant work experience—would still be deported after my work permit expired.
I'm not tooting my own horn, but if somebody in my position were deported because they couldn't meet the score, I imagine that Canada is losing an incredible amount of young talent, people who would be the best suited to settle in Canada and make contributions to economic, cultural, and social life. It just doesn't make sense from a national point of view, wherever you are on the political spectrum, to let these people go.
I will conclude with that.