Thank you, Mr. Chair. Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs. My French is only about that much. That's all my French.
I want to thank you for allowing me to come before you to speak, and I'll try to stay within the seven minutes. In fact I think I might finish before the seven minutes.
I just want to say a few words about S.U.C.C.E.S.S. We have been around for 35 years. We currently have 390 employees, and we serve in 18 locations in the lower mainland. We provide settlement, employment, language training, and health care services to youth, adults, families, and seniors.
About undocumented workers and foreign temporary workers, the one thing I want to say is that we don't see too many of them. In fact, in the three months ending in December 2007,—October, November, December—we came into contact with a total of 20,633 individuals, but we would classify less than four per cent of those as “others”, and out of those others a very small minority were undocumented or foreign temporary workers. So we believe that from our perspective—because we actually provide services in so many different languages: Korean, Punjabi, Farsi, Filipino, Tagalog, and so on—our services have not been able to reach them or they have not been coming to our offices to ask for service.
The B.C. government recently introduced the settlement worker in the schools. So to the extent that those undocumented workers and temporary foreign workers have children in school, they might be accessing those services through the school workers. That cannot be assured.
As you have already heard today, many of them do not speak English as their first language. So our recommendation is that perhaps funding should be made available to organizations such as the ones sitting to my right, to allow them to more effectively provide outreach programs for those immigrants. As well, it would be useful if we could make funding accessible for foreign temporary workers as well as the undocumented workers, if we can find a way to do it, to improve their language skills and to provide any funding assistance to them.
You've heard the story about the government not providing medical services and providing limited access to legal assistance. Those are the areas we think are important and we should be providing assistance with. We recommend that we provide integrated services for the existing services that we provide to landed immigrants as well as to the foreign service workers.
The funding requirement, the funding we get now from our provincial government, is basically to allow us to provide services mainly to landed immigrants. There is really no incentive for organizations such as ours to extend our services, even though we would like to, to the temporary foreign workers. It's important now as we are looking at introducing the Canadian experience class, and those people who have been working here as temporary foreign workers...we are encouraging them to apply. We are encouraging them because they do not have to go back to their home residence to apply.
It's critical that during those times they are working here as temporary foreign workers that their experience is good and that they do not encounter situations as described earlier.
It is a good initiative, from our perspective, to create this Canadian experience class. However, it is not sufficient simply to create a class, but during the time they are here as temporary foreign workers we do not accord them the same kinds of services.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's it for me.