Thank you.
Thank you for your presentations.
Mr. Gurnett, as a politician you know that when you come before committee, you have to have some answers and not sit on the fence, okay?
We're talking about different situations here. We're talking about the temporary worker program, which includes a different group from the people we have living underground and working within our society. Obviously, these people are very necessary, certainly in Toronto and in the building industry. The last time I heard, which was a couple of years ago at hearings, the estimate was that there were 30,000 Polish—and this only covers the Polish community—underground workers. We obviously need these people. If we found them all and deported them, our building industry would fall flat on its face, and it would be a detriment to our economy.
Mr. Diachuk, you were saying that these people need to be ferreted out, that we have to be stricter. If we could get enough police to police people in Revenue Canada and get all our tax revenue in, then we wouldn't have to worry about these people: we could provide them with social assistance and all of the other benefits and bring them into our society.
The only way you're going to find these people and the only way the provinces can clamp down is with more policing, and I think that has to be out of the question.
Mr. Komarnicki was saying that amnesties don't work. Well, we haven't had an amnesty for 35 years. In the last Parliament—and I'm going to be accused of being partisan—one of the things I was very proud of that Joe Volpe brought in was the financing to give these underground workers the ability to come forward, get a work permit, and work for two years, at which time they could apply for permanent resident status from within Canada. I don't know whether you would call that an amnesty. I think everybody's afraid of the word “amnesty”.
Mr. Diachuk, do you have a problem with having these people come out voluntarily? That way, we can check for security, and if they've already learned the language, if their kids are in school, why send them out to start all over again with people who don't have these...?