Citizenship and Immigration Committee on April 1st, 2008

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

What I was trying to get at was whether you agreed, given that the waiting times are so long.... Arbitrary decisions are made and there is no appeal. All this has made the system untenable, and people are ready to do everything--even lie, in certain cases--because they have the impression that they have no reasonable choice to make it through the system. The government wants to go ahead with guidelines from the minister rather than policies adopted by the House. Ultimately, rather than accusing people of lying, are we not encouraging them through our system to do anything to make it?

[Yessy Byl]

It is encouraging that. Quite frankly, and pardon me for saying so, we're already operating solely on the basis of ministerial discretion and a system of guidelines. Very many of our rules are strictly guidelines and policies, and people don't have a clue what their rights are, if any.

The rules change on a daily basis, and what we need is a cohesive legislative system that protects people's rights. You can't do that through guidelines. As I've said, that's the basis on which we've been operating for the last years: it's all guidelines.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Mr. St-Cyr.

Ms. Chow is next.

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

President Diachuk, I have a question about the advocacy centre. Of course, you know that Alberta is one of the very few provinces that had the foresight to set up an advocacy centre. We just came from British Columbia and there's no such thing. The people there said, “Isn't it wonderful, in Alberta you have such a centre”. It's not big enough, and obviously it's overworked.

Do you think that given the federal-provincial relationship—the mandate of labour laws is really provincial—the federal government should provide some kind of incentive fund or some kind of support or direction? I don't know what kind, but something to encourage the provinces to establish and expand advocacy centres for the foreign workers.

How would you assist? You talked about the federal role. What precisely could that role be?

[Bill Diachuk]

Madam Chow, I'm a little bit of a protectionist, being a former politician, like Jim. I think, and I've said this publicly, the federal government's temporary foreign worker program was a good idea, but they lacked collaboration with the provinces.

The discussion here was about the illegal workers. I know for a fact that some of the workers who were brought in here by the Kyiv Labor Youth Center to Brooks, Alberta, or to Red Deer are now working illegally in Toronto. So I think that where employers are hiring these illegal workers, this is something the Ontario government has to clamp down on, because, first of all, they're definitely abusing the system, and secondly, they may not even be working safely.

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

That's all provincial responsibility. The federal—

[Bill Diachuk]

Yes, there are provincial responsibilities that have not...and I have argued with my former colleagues in Alberta for many years to get some of this done. I have indicated to you that I complimented the former minister of immigration, Iris Evans, when she appointed these two workers. And they're flogged with work, but that was overdue maybe five years. The federal government has to say to the provinces, “We have this legislation, but labour standards and everything are provincial matters. Get on it.”

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

We can encourage them. Should we do the encouragement by funding or just moral suasion?

[Bill Diachuk]

You're talking to an Albertan who doesn't need funding—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Bill Diachuk]

—but I do say that it has to be more than encouragement. It has to be an agreement, a working agreement.

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

Some kind of agreement, okay.

[Jim Gurnett]

If I can, I'll just supplement that very quickly, a little bit, and I go into more detail in our full paper that accompanies this submission today.

One of the things we've said would be that if as part of the LMO being issued by an employer there was a fee attached that employers had to pay that was equivalent to the per-person funding for immigrants, that would create a funding pool to ensure that instead of having to depend on the province, a whole range of services—related not just to labour market employment standards but to other settlement issues—could be made available through organizations that are expert at this kind of work, in an equitable way to all temporary workers.

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

So it would be collected by HRSDC and then transferred to the province—here, for example.

[Jim Gurnett]

That's right.

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

Okay.

Since you just finished speaking, let me ask you this. What do you think currently the minister is doing right or wrong? What do we need more of or less of? How do you see what's happening currently? You mentioned it briefly.

[Jim Gurnett]

Our point, and it would be about not only the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration but the overall approach, is that the enthusiasm for temporary workers is a dangerous and incorrect direction to go in. We do need to do something in the way of bandages to deal with this whole range of problems that we now have in our communities for the workers and for the rest of the community. But fundamentally, the minister should go back and re-examine all the reasons why they got into this and why they're continuing to pursue it so enthusiastically.

I met with the previous Minister of Citizenship and Immigration in November of 2006 and spent time going through a whole list of predicted problems that would arise if we started this dramatic increase in temporary workers. The next day the minister announced measures to bring far more temporary workers, and sure enough, every issue in the year and a half since then, we're now dealing with this as community organizations.

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

I have a last question for Madam Byl. You haven't had a chance to answer my questions yet.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Be very brief.

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

You talked about overseas recruiters sometimes charging huge fees. According to the immigration rules, they're not supposed to.

What do you think of the idea of having some kind of agreement between Canada and the source country—let's say Mexico—to say to the Mexican government that they really need to make sure people who are assisting or companies who recruit overseas are operating in the most legal manner, according to both Canadian and Mexican law?

[Yessy Byl]

I think it's critical. We've heard too many horror stories about families being forced to give mortgages on their family homes to recruiters in some of the foreign countries and of people being held hostage as a result.

I don't think it's difficult for the government to say that you can only bring temporary foreign workers from countries that protect the rights, that prohibit the charging of fees. We already do it. We do it in the context of the agricultural program; to some degree we do it with domestic living caregivers. Why can we not extend that to temporary foreign workers generally?

I will say that some of the worst stories stem from the abuses of recruiters in conjunction with the employers, and that should be controlled, absolutely.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Ms. Chow.

Mr. Komarnicki.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

That was a very interesting presentation. While the questions have obviously covered quite a range of areas, my sense tells me that what you're saying to us is that you'd like to see a realignment of the immigration system to better align it with the economic needs and eventual settlement and integration of the communities. We want to get the right people to the right place at the right time and ensure that they succeed in centres outside, let's say, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Have I capsulized what you're trying to tell me? You can respond one after the other.

[Jim Gurnett]

That's very much the heart of our position, that we could do a much better job of immigration and make temporary workers an almost unnecessary issue.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

As a corollary to that, I think Ms. Byl was telling us that it takes eight months to get a labour market opinion for temporary foreign workers, which obviously for an employer would hardly be acceptable. There are some steps taken to expedite the process; there are some offices open in Vancouver and Alberta and in fact out east. But some skilled workers have to wait for years to get in, to get through the system. It seems there's a blockage there or a problem that is creating other problems that we may try to resolve in some other way.

Would you agree with me that the answer would be to try to deal with the fundamental issue of getting the people who need to be here quicker and much more expeditiously?