Good afternoon.
As the chair said, my name is Gil McGowan. I'm president of the Alberta Federation of Labour. As you probably know, the AFL is the largest union organization in Alberta. Unions affiliated with our federation represent about 140,000 workers across the province in both the public and private sectors.
At the AFL we deal with a broad range of issues, everything from labour law to workplace health and safety, to oil sands policy, to fighting to preserve our public services. Over the past two years we've been focusing a growing amount of our energy and resources on a new issue, and that's the issue of temporary foreign workers. In particular, as an organization we've been attempting to focus both public and political attention on what we perceive as the growing problems caused by the massive—and we would argue ill-advised and ill-conceived—expansion of the federal government's temporary foreign worker program.
Towards that end, our federation decided about a year ago to establish our own advocacy office for temporary foreign workers, and you heard from our advocate, Yessy Byl, earlier this afternoon.
We opened our advocacy office partly to gain a window into the inner workings of the temporary foreign worker program, but we also did it for purely human and compassionate reasons. Temporary foreign workers were literally showing up on our doorstep with horror stories to tell and nowhere to turn. These were people who had experienced mistreatment and outright abuse at the hands of employers and so-called employment brokers.
But at the time the federal government wasn't helping them and the provincial government wasn't helping them, so we knew we couldn't turn these people away and we knew we couldn't turn away from the issue. That's why we're so pleased that your committee has decided to launch an investigation into what's going on with the temporary foreign worker program.
Alberta has become ground zero for what is essentially a huge social and economic experiment, an experiment that we think is in the process of going horribly wrong. We think your hearings are just what's needed to shine a light in what are frankly some dark corners and to rein in what has become, in our view, a runaway federal program that is no longer functioning in the broader interests of the Canadian public.
With the limited time available to me today, I'd like to do three things. First, I'd like to underline for the members of the committee the scope and scale of the changes that have been made to the temporary foreign worker program over the past five years, changes that have accelerated particularly dramatically since the election of the Harper government in 2006.
Second, I want to talk about how these changes are affecting temporary foreign workers, Canadian workers, and the Canadian labour market, particularly the Alberta labour market.
Finally, I want to highlight a number of concrete policy recommendations that our temporary foreign worker advocate presented in her report, entitled “Alberta's Disposable Workforce”, which I'm told we're not allowed to distribute to you because it's not translated. We will see if we can get over that hurdle, because I think it's important that you guys read what we've seen and the lessons we've drawn from our experience here in Alberta.
When it comes to the scope of the changes that have been made to the temporary foreign worker program, you can't help but use words like “massive”, “sweeping”, and “unprecedented”. It's true that the program has been around for more than 40 years, so the name is not new, but almost everything else is. In particular, the size of the program is new, the kinds of workers brought into the country under the program are new, and the purpose or use to which the program is being put by employers is new. I'd like to take a minute to unpack each of these points, starting with the size of the program.
Until relatively recently, the temporary foreign worker program was a relatively small, sleepy corner of the federal bureaucracy. Ten years ago, for example, the program was used to bring only about 7,000 or 8,000 workers into Alberta each year. But in 2006, which is the last year for which full statistics are available, nearly 24,000 workers were brought into Alberta under the program. This number is significant because it marks the first time in Canadian history that a province brought more people into the country as temporary foreign workers than under the mainline immigration programs. We had more temporary foreign workers in 2006 in Alberta than people accepted as permanent residents.
As large as the 2006 numbers were, we now know that they pale in comparison to the number of temporary foreign workers we have in Alberta today. Just last week, Service Canada told the Calgary Herald that it had processed 100,000 individual applications from Alberta employers looking for temporary foreign workers in 2007—100,000 applications in one province in one year.
Now, we know that all these applications probably didn't actually lead to visas being issued, but we think it's fair to estimate that there are now between 50,000 and 60,000 temporary foreign workers in Alberta alone. Clearly, the temporary foreign worker program is no longer a sleepy corner of the bureaucracy. And clearly, from our perspective, it's being used to do an end run around the mainline immigration system.
As I said, it's not just the size of the program that has changed. There has also been a significant change in the kinds of workers brought into the country under the program. The program was originally designed and conceived for use by professionals--engineers, accountants, professors, specialized technicians. In general, they are workers who are in a better position to take care of themselves in the labour market. But now the doors have been thrown open.
In November 2006, Monte Solberg unveiled the government's now infamous list of occupations under pressure. Here in Alberta there are now more than 170 occupations on that list. In the old days, employers could use the temporary foreign worker program only for a narrow range of workers, and they had to prove that they had literally beaten the bushes looking for Canadians before they were granted the right to use the program. Now, as a result of recent changes, the list is no longer only for professionals. In fact, the majority of occupations on the list and the majority of workers being brought into the country under the program fall into the semi- and low-skilled categories.
But the list isn't only being used to widen the pipe. It's also being used to grease it. If you're an employer and you're hiring for an occupation that's on the list, it is assumed that there's a shortage, so there's no need any more for proof or due diligence.