Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before this committee. We feel honoured.
I want to start by making some general comments about the undocumented worker situation and the work that has already been done by our union and our employer partners and other organizations in a coordinated effort over the last couple of years to try to bring some resolution.
We cannot continue these 10- to 20-year cycles of masses of undocumented workers fuelling the underground economy in Canada and living in an environment of exploitation and fear. We advocate that the federal government address this issue by recognizing the importance and the contribution to the economy of Canada of these workers. We have laid out what we believe is a common-sense plan to the minister on a number of occasions. I will be leaving our brief with you.
Let me talk in general about the process. The Toronto construction sector accepts the established legal framework of Canada's visa-issuing process. The statutory, regulatory, judicial, and administrative foundations may not be perfect, but they are without parallel in the entire planet. In addition to the formal structures, LIUNA supports the broad range of public NGO- and private-sector-funded interested stakeholders and advocacy groups whose mission is to protect the interests of individuals and specific groups. The core immigration-related issue of process presently facing the construction sector is the structure and ability of the visa-related public policy process to deal in a timely manner with real issues impacting real people in a real way.
We acknowledge and are thankful for the recent success of a system that now competently administers a series of meaningful HRSDC immigration and provincial nominee programs of crucial interest to our industry. Nevertheless, it should not have taken a prolonged, sometimes adversarial, politically driven, and always difficult struggle to achieve this common-sense solution.
LIUNA and the Toronto construction sector are not presumptuous enough to believe that all our requirements will be considered on a forthwith basis, nor should they be. Nevertheless, it is unacceptable that practical industrial-sector-related visa issues cannot be resolved, let alone discussed, in a timely, common-sense manner without policy-makers, whether administrative or political, feeling the overarching time-consuming, politically driven burden of excessive legalism and presumed self-serving confrontation.
Presently, excessive concern with legalistic propriety and political agendas demand that it takes forever to even obtain access to policy-makers and then define patently obvious visa-related issues. This is no way to run an economy. The laws should be there to protect individual and collective rights, not define economic and social need. Public policy should not be left to officials or lawyers. Industrial sectors as well as other stakeholders should be involved in the mix. The visa public policy structure should not treat a vital industrial sector as an ad hoc troublesome interloper requiring political manoeuvring in order to obtain access.
LIUNA supports the introduction of a non-political process that addresses visa-related policy issues in a timely, transparent, and non-adversarial manner. Although such a process must clearly be built around the statutory power and responsibility of a minister, the minister must never control the process. The process should exist for the minister to listen, absorb, and recommend policy solutions in an expeditious manner. The House, this committee, officials, and LIUNA may not accept the minister's solution, but at the very least we should be discussing the solutions to real problems in a more timely and civilized manner.
It is in the above spirit that LIUNA supports the principle of an ongoing, transparent, ministerial-structured public policy forum, as was recently recommended. LIUNA, both as a participant in the building trades and as a broadly based group of citizens, suggests that the time has come for public policy to promote a series of qualitative benchmarks designed to help the Canadian macro-economy and judge the ability and commitment of visa recipients to benefit the overall economy and the individual.
I want to continue by suggesting that immigration policy should be directly tied to some variables of our economy, from time to time, with direct and continued consultation with industry and unions. Given the synergistic nature of the unionized construction industry, our government would benefit from accurate information that could be relayed towards the formation of immigration policy related to the importation of skills on a timely basis. Consultation should not be an isolated event but a formal and continuous process with goal-setting based on the real needs of our industry.
Immigration policy should be organic and flexible, particularly in the determination of skills. In fact, why isn't a carpenter who has been framing houses for four years, and doing it in a credible and honest way, given the same weight as a university student with a three-year or four-year undergraduate degree? We need to have that recognized as being just as important to society. If there is an in-Canada economic class developed for students who are doing undergraduate work, then the same principles should apply to carpenters, who are doing the essential work of this economy.
Immigration goals should focus on a quantitative analysis of the needs of the Canadian economy and move away from simple numeric goals.
Compassion is always an issue and should always be a the forefront.
We cannot escape the reality of numbers. It makes no sense to have unrealistic numbers that can never be processed and that create massive backlogs and an inherent desperation and futility among would-be immigrants to Canada. It makes no sense to continue with that atmosphere of futility.
In closing, I just want to say that I hope the government will see fit, at least during these public hearings, to hold off on any future deportation of undocumented workers. They are an essential component of our industry and an essential component of many other industries and the economy. The vast majority have paid a meaningful and real price for being here. Many are now entrenched in our system and have become an essential component, at least in our industry, of the human resource requirements.
Thank you.