Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank both our witnesses for sharing their concerns and expertise with us today.
I am from the Okanagan, so we have a fair number of temporary foreign workers, seasonal agricultural workers, in my riding. In the last election, one issue I heard about at one of our immigration debates was specifically that seasonal agricultural workers pay various payroll taxes, like employment insurance and the Canada pension plan, but are obviously not eligible to access those services.
The issue was that simply just exempting them from the requirement would create an uneven playing field for employers to hire seasonal agricultural workers over Canadians, as it would be cheaper without the employer portion of these taxes. I've been trying to get some facts as to why this policy exists and then also how to deal with it.
Do any of you have any comments with regard to the policy of having seasonal agricultural workers pay these taxes or payroll taxes, and how can we best address the situation?