Absolutely. We went from 20% to 30% for people in the low-wage stream to have access of up to 30% temporary foreign workers on their payroll when we had a million vacancies. Now we're down to about 600,000 vacancies, so that's the tightening of the market that we're talking about. Colleagues in this room would agree that we want to make sure that Canadians take the jobs offered by Canadian firms. What I want to make sure is that the temporary foreign worker program is a last resort. I want youth, indigenous, persons with disabilities, newcomers and now including asylum-seekers to be considered before somebody decides to apply for a labour market impact assessment.
To respond to the tightening labour market, we reduced, in the low-wage stream, the percentage that people can have in their companies from 30% down to 20%...with the exception of construction and health care because those are two priority sectors where there's a high degree of need in those sectors. The agricultural stream is not part of this, and neither is the seasonal agricultural worker program.
Everything that I've just said does not apply to the agriculture stream. In working in close partnership with Minister Miller, we made sure that we scoped in asylum seekers.
What does that mean, colleagues? It means that if you have a newcomer centre or a centre in your area that is responsible for asylum seekers, they can be connected to employers and get those jobs using their skills profile that we now have from IRCC. We have it at ESDC, and those temporary residents should be able to get those jobs before those companies can apply for an LMIA.