Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I would like to talk, first of all, about labour shortages in general, then go on to temporary foreign workers, and finish up with undocumented workers, very briefly.
I think you have to look at what constitutes a labour shortage. Certainly, we have them, as Roslyn just pointed out, in the construction industry. In B.C. it's very apparent, and in other parts of the country. Some people see the temporary foreign worker programs as the best way to deal with them. Some regard that as better than bringing in large numbers of people permanently who may not be needed. If you're in a cyclical industry, like construction, you may not need them in five or ten years. But we also have to look at the extent to which we can use the resources of people already in the country.
Let's say something about temporary foreign worker programs, first of all. In the words of Alan Green, who's a very prominent expert on immigration and labour markets at Queen's, in the 1960s, when we began choosing immigrants on the basis of their qualifications rather than their origins, we did not have the educational facilities in place to meet all our skilled labour shortages. According to Professor Green, we do today, although temporary shortages may occur until they're met by normal market forces.
This conclusion was reached by other people. Human Resources and Development Canada had two researchers who found that there was no reason to believe that globally Canada is suffering from a broad-based shortage of skilled labour or that its workforce cannot fulfill the economy's needs. The researchers found that although there's been an increased frequency of specific labour shortages in certain sectors and occupations in recent years, it doesn't appear that these gaps are more common today than they were in the past or in similar stages in the business cycle.
That's something on which we differ somewhat in our emphasis, Roslyn and I.
One of the issues that I think we have to look at is that employers naturally want to meet their worker shortages as quickly and inexpensively as possible, and if this involves bringing in workers from abroad, they will seek to do so. We have to look, though, at the impact this will have on Canadian workers, taxpayers, and the economy in general. In terms of productivity, for example, labour shortages lead to higher wages, which in turn leads to increased investment in human capital through education and training and through higher productivity levels.
A good case can be made that one of the reasons why growth in productivity in Canada has lagged behind that of the U.S. and other countries in recent years is that we have the highest immigration intake per capita in the world. On this point, a Statistics Canada study released last May reported that between 1980 and 2000, immigration played a role in a 7% drop in the real earnings of Canadians with more than a university undergraduate degree.
There was an interesting precedent for the guest worker programs. The Bracero program in the U.S was created to bring in Mexican temporary workers during the war years. Eventually, in 1964, it was discontinued. The agro industry said they just couldn't afford to do without the cheap labour. When it was discontinued, they made more investment in mechanization, and the productivity actually increased.
What we should be doing is making every effort to draw unemployed Canadians, including aboriginals, women, and older people into the workforce. It doesn't make sense to leave large numbers of people unemployed or underemployed and then bring in workers from outside the country to do work that could be done by people already here. As one senior American government official put it, “immigration fixes undercut efforts to improve public education, create better retraining programs and draw the unemployed into the labour market”.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have temporary foreign workers, but we have to look at this carefully. The Quebec government, incidentally, announced less than two weeks ago that it's going to spend $1 billion on incentives to get welfare recipients and unemployed into the foreign workforce rather than automatically bringing people in from abroad.
I would just make a couple more comments before getting on to temporary foreign workers. On the relationship between immigration and economic prosperity, there were periods in Canada's development when immigration was crucial--for example, the settling of the west before the Americans did it for us--but interestingly, immigration for the most part has not been a critical element in Canadian economic development.
The Economic Council of Canada, for example, found that most of the fastest growth in real per capita income of Canadians in the 20th century occurred at times when net migration was zero or even negative. We also do not require an ever-increasing population or workforce to ensure the prosperity of Canadians, nor will immigration have any significant impact on offsetting the aging of our population. Canadian prosperity depends on sound economic policies that increase productivity and make the best use of the existing workforce.
Now turning specifically to questions of temporary foreign workers, or guest workers, as they're often called, from 2001 to 2006 we saw a dramatic increase in the number of temporary foreign workers in B.C. They increased by 129%, from just under 16,000 to more than 36,000. For Canada as a whole, there was an increase of 76% in that period, from 87,000 to 166,000. We don't have the complete figures yet for 2007, but it looks as though the increase will be even larger.
Canada had a pretty good track record on its initial temporary foreign workers program. It's the seasonal agricultural worker program that began in 1966 to bring in seasonal agricultural workers from, first, the Caribbean and then Mexico in 1974. But in 2006, in response to requests from employers, we established comprehensive lists of what are called occupations under pressure, under which employers can apply for accelerated processing of permits for temporary foreign workers to come here initially for a year. That's now been extended to two years.
With these longer periods, though, we're moving into largely uncharted waters as far as Canada is concerned. Studies done in other countries on these programs have shown there can be a lot of major problems, particularly if foreign workers stay for more than a few months, if they come from countries with significantly lower wage levels, and if they're allowed to bring family members with them.
Some of these problems are that such workers are vulnerable to exploitation. In countries like the U.S., it's been discovered that there's a high level of fraud in the applications. I won't stop to tell you what kind of fraud, but I'll describe it later if you want. Then most people coming from poorer countries want to try to stay indefinitely when their contracts are completed, when their services are no longer required.
What is required to make such a program work is a very extensive system for administering and monitoring the entry and departure of such workers and the application of strict sanctions in the case of employers who hire those who no longer have legal status in Canada. There's now a list of 235 occupations under pressure that are eligible in British Columbia alone for temporary work permits.
In addition to obvious cases like a shortage of people for the construction industry, you also have a long list of occupations that you wouldn't think would be on the list. That includes writers, journalists, photographers, conductors, composers, arrangers, actors, comedians, announcers, broadcasters, athletes, coaches, and real estate agents.
What we have to do is look very carefully at how this program is working, do some research on it, and find out what other people have done.
I think there is a place for temporary foreign workers, but I don't think we have any idea of some of the problems that are coming up, and we should be looking at them.
I have one quick word on undocumented workers. We don't know exactly how many there are, but estimates are that there may be 200,000, and up to 500,000 if family members are included. Apart from the problems they experience of being vulnerable to exploitation, the basic problem is that if their status is legalized, you will have a lot more coming here.
In 1986, the United States granted amnesty to three million illegal workers in the hope of eliminating the problem, but once they got amnesty, there were a lot more coming in, because they expected that they would get amnesty eventually. There were something like 11 million or 12 million of them.
The McCain-Kennedy bill in the U.S. Senate last year included a provision for the regularization of the status of several million illegal workers. It was defeated by public pressure.
It's extremely unwise to give legal status to undocumented workers. If they want to stay here in Canada, they should go back and come here legally, either under permanent immigration or under the temporary foreign workers program.
Those are my comments.
