Citizenship and Immigration Committee on March 31st, 2008

[David Fairey]

Under the Employment Standards Act of British Columbia, there is a special provision for live-in caregivers to ensure their rights are being protected, because live-in caregivers are living in isolated situations with individual families. The Employment Standards Act requires that those live-in caregivers, who are here on two-year temporary work permits, and their employers be registered with the Employment Standards Branch.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

I understand.

Now I want to understand the British Columbia model. Does the government go further than simply entering the names of these individuals and the places where they work in a registry? Does anyone check with these individuals from time to time to determine whether they are being well treated by their employers and whether the conditions are being met? Beyond good intentions, is there an effective control?

[David Fairey]

I can't speak to the extent to which those workplaces are investigated, except that the Employment Standards Branch knows where those workers are, has the ability to investigate, and should be enforcing the regulations with respect to that employment. The extent to which they are investigated--I don't know; I can't speak to that. However, it ensures a better regulation of that industry or that occupation than we find for other seasonal agricultural workers.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Unlike the colleague who preceded me, I understood that you and Mr. Peppard want to monitor what's being done in the field and to see whether the rules are complied with, because these individuals are highly vulnerable to exploitation. I find that interesting. Mr. Peppard explained that, if potential employers of dubious morality knew they could be investigated at any time, they would probably be more careful. However, those investigations might be difficult to conduct. An unscrupulous employer could very well intimidate his employees, even at the time of the investigation.

Some groups have proposed that foreign workers with temporary permits be entitled to change employers in order to be less vulnerable to those individuals who hold their lives in their hands.

Mr. Peppard and Mr. Fairey, do you agree with that proposal?

[Joe Barrett]

There's no monitoring. They all have the same rights as Canadians. However, they can't leave their jobs and look for another one like a Canadian would do. They are really tied to their employers. They don't have a choice; they have to continue working for that employer. They also can't speak the language and don't know their rights. They come from countries where those rights are not respected.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

I'm going to stop you. You raised those points earlier. I'd like Mr. Fairey to answer my question because my time is limited too.

[David Fairey]

Absolutely. Without the right to change employers, we have a second-class system of indentured slavery, essentially. The temporary farm worker program, where workers are tied to a single employer, makes workers indentured slaves, in the modern sense of the word. There's no other way you can characterize it.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

All right.

Mr. Fairey, our agenda doesn't mention your exact title. At the start of your presentation, you said you were a labour economist. What organization do you work for?

[David Fairey]

I do labour consulting research and policy research.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

So you are self-employed. Who are your main clients?

[David Fairey]

My customers and clients are labour organizations, government agencies, and public policy institutes.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

You also talked about farm workers. Do you agree that these are generally unskilled jobs? I may be wrong. You said in your presentation that an artificial labour shortage had been created by making these kinds of jobs less appealing.

Did I understand correctly?

[David Fairey]

What I believe I said was that, first of all, under the provincial employment standards legislation, the protections for agricultural workers are less than those for other workers. They have fewer rights and their conditions are inferior. These are hazardous jobs; agriculture is a hazardous industry. The agricultural employers are attempting to, in our view, create conditions of shortage unnecessarily--that is, artificial shortage--by pressuring for legislation that provides lower standards, lower wages, so that the domestic labour supply is not going to respond. The farm employers are not behaving like competitors in a free market. They want to have protections and they want to have subsidies. In my view, the temporary farm worker program is a subsidy to these employers.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Mr. St-Cyr.

Ms. Chow.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

I'm hearing three recommendations, and I just want to make sure I'm hearing them correctly. Whoever wants to comment on this, please do.

The first one is to give the visas to the workers within their trade, not to the employer.

Number two is to make sure the workers get the orientation they need when they arrive in Canada, have an arm's-length centre where, if there are problems, they can file some of the complaints in a fair manner.

Third is to make sure there's decent inspection by an inspection team, a SWAT team that is organized by the federal government, the provincial government, and stakeholders, whether those are unions or non-profit organizations. Then there will be the inspection by the provincial government, but with the federal government supporting it.

The advocacy part is that there needs to be a group that will support these workers to make sure these workers, when they don't get the justice they need, will have a group that will support them and advocate for them.

Are those the general outlines of the three or four key recommendations you are looking for? Are there other recommendations? Maybe Mr. Peppard would like to talk about these from the construction side and then from the research side.

Are those the key recommendations? Have I missed other areas of overarching importance?

[Wayne Peppard]

Certainly, I would put in there the credentials recognition as an issue that comes out over and above this, because I didn't get to speak a whole lot about that. It's a huge issue in and of itself.

The key issue here is the vulnerability of temporary foreign workers, whether they're in agriculture or anywhere else. If we can address the issues of vulnerability, then all of that will fade away. We won't be in a position where we have to track individuals or employers or anything, if we make sure the system is working properly.

Number one, I think the key is the visa permit that is attached to the trade. These people, as foreign workers, are invited to work in Canada first and in the province second. If they're invited to Canada, they should work under Canadian standards and have all the rights and responsibilities of a Canadian.

If Citizenship and Immigration recognizes that we need, for example, 20,000 carpenters in the next year, then they should say, “We need 20,000 carpenters; let's go get 20,000 carpenters.” But when they come here as carpenters, their work permits and their visas would be in the industry in which they work--as carpenters--so they can freely move. That takes away their vulnerability. If they're being mistreated, they can move. I think that's of prime importance--absolute prime importance.

Second is the orientation and advocacy. If they are given the right and they know what their rights are, that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be able to use those or go somewhere. Where do they go? If they're given an orientation program by someone they trust who is non-partisan, and that becomes an advocacy group, whether it's for problems they have on the job or--for example, as Joe just had to do with one of the employees who came to us--they have to go to the hospital.... They didn't know the health system. Their employer was not going to walk them through going to the hospital or going to the doctor, getting referred and all of that sort of stuff. There are many implications--and that's a simple one--of what it means to be a foreign worker in a foreign land, not knowing just the language, but also other barriers as a result of that. So an advocacy centre can be much more than just providing support for when an employer abuses an employee.

Finally, if you don't have the compliance team in place, if you don't have a monitoring system...and that's what I meant by tracking. I don't mean tracking the individuals; I mean monitoring the system to see that it works properly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Yes, we understand what you meant by “tracking”, believe you me.

[David Fairey]

Could I just add a couple of other things from our perspective?

The other two points of priority I think are that the employers applying under these programs should have to prove a record of compliance; that is, the non-complying employers with bad records should not participate in the program any more.

The second point would be that the SAWP, particularly, should enable those migrant workers to apply to stay here.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

My earlier question to the other speaker was that the farm workers will never have enough points, and they're not going to get the degrees or the certificates to qualify under the experience class. Under the experience class, there really should be categories A, B, C, D; each of them should have x number, so there's hope for them--if they are working well, if they are settled--that they would be able to become permanent residents eventually and bring their families over. That would be critically important.

[David Fairey]

It's essential to understand that the SAWP program is limited to males who are married.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Oh, really?

[David Fairey]

So all of them have families in Mexico, and if it's women, it's women who have children. So this is very--

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

So they have to leave their kids behind.

[David Fairey]

And some of them come here for years, and are away from their families for four months out of the year. This is a tremendous social problem, so permitting them to apply--

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

You mean just like the live-in caregiver program that has been very successful for a long time.