Yes, Mr. Chair, thank you.
To the parliamentary secretary, sometimes I have to go out of the room to talk to the media about something we're not talking about here, which is Bill C-50--and also to say good things about our chair compared with other chairs in Ottawa.
It seems to me we could be solving a number of problems with the shortage we're having right now. It doesn't make any sense at all, from a policy perspective, to spend a lot of resources chasing after undocumented workers so we can now deport them out of the country. We'd be better off trying to regularize those workers, because really, they're the result, to a large extent... There has been a huge growth since the new Immigration Act was put in place in 2002, when we said that people with trades and people who want to work hard need not apply because they cannot get in. So what we did was to drive up those numbers.
My community has a lot of university professors and what have you, so we have a pretty high level of education in my community. But when I go around the community, I dare say that 95% of the people who came here as immigrants would not be able to get into this country now if they wanted to get in on this point system. That includes people like the parents of Mike Lazaridis, Frank Stronach, Frank Hasenfratz, and the list goes on.
We really made a huge mistake. We'd be much better off to make up for the mistake that the bureaucrats talked the government of the day into because ministers, unfortunately, did not know what they were doing--then as now. We could use those numbers to correct it, because it was the shortage of workers that drove the people who are in the precarious class of being not documented or not being in status at the present time.
I agree; there isn't a restaurant I can go to in Waterloo region where people aren't complaining that they're really having trouble getting people. It's all a function of totally perverting the point system and totally changing the way that Canada used to do immigration.
Do you have any comments on this?