Citizenship and Immigration Committee on April 15th, 2008

[Annette Landman]

The idea is good, but it would mean that in the past five years, working hard on all my exams and things like that, I would have flushed $25,000. We've been forced to keep with a lot of rules and regulations and things like that. Ghost consultants have just done whatever they wanted to do, and some of them.... I don't know.

Yes, we need a change somewhere. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know we need a change.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Ms. Landman, for coming here today and giving us your views on immigration consultants.

We'll be making recommendations to government and to the minister at the end of our hearings. Believe you me, your comments and recommendations will be taken into full consideration as well. Thank you.

We'll have a five-minute break while we get our second panel to come to the table.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Maybe we can pry our committee members away from the microphones and get them back to the table.

I want to welcome, from the New Brunswick Multicultural Council, George Maicher, vice-president, Fredericton; from the Government of New Brunswick, Humphrey Sheehan, chief executive officer, Population Growth Secretariat; and Tony Lampart, executive director, Immigration Division, Population Growth Secretariat.

Thank you for coming. We really appreciate it.

I would imagine you gentlemen have opening statements, so I'll just leave it to you to decide who will be making these statements. Go ahead in whatever order you might wish to proceed.

Mr. Maicher, Mr. Sheehan, or Mr. Lampart, go ahead.

[George Maicher, President, New Brunswick Multicultural Council]

Thanks very much, and thank you to the committee for coming again to Fredericton to listen to our input into immigration matters.

I'm going to speak on temporary foreign workers only. I think it's unfortunate that we are not looking at the Iraqi refugee issues, because there are a lot of things involved in those worldwide. And one of the sad things is that there are efforts under way around the world to remove the Christians from Iraq.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Feel free to make any comments you want to about Iraqi refugees, because that's one of the issues we're studying as well. We've been mandated to do temporary and undocumented workers, immigration consultants, and Iraqi refugees. So if you have anything that you want to bring up about Iraqi refugees, please feel free.

[George Maicher]

One of the things that has come up in public discussions worldwide in the last couple of weeks is the fact that there are efforts under way to remove the Christians from Iraq, and the Iraqi Christian community was one of the first Christian communities that existed on earth. So that's unfortunate that our interventions have come to that.

As I was saying, I would like to talk about temporary foreign workers. I'm not going to talk about undocumented workers because this is an area that has to be dealt with in another forum, and maybe my other colleagues from New Brunswick will talk about those.

When we talk about temporary foreign workers, I would like to look at them in two ways. First, I would like to look at the way we handle the program for temporary workers. One of the issues that comes up when we talk about temporary foreign workers is that in a free-enterprise economy--an economy that is being governed by the supply and demand of things like goods and services and inputs into productive capacities and productive processes--there is a supply of work and a demand for work, and there's an equilibrium price that matches the supply of workers and the demand for workers. I'm sometimes afraid that the temporary worker program can be used to depress the local labour market and the wages of the local labour market. I say that, in particular, in regard to the temporary workers who have been brought into the oil sands development in Alberta.

I participated two years ago in a public policy forum conference in Toronto on immigration. There were several different presentations and discussion groups, and one of the discussion groups included Jim Stanford and the person who was the vice-president of human resources of an oil sands company. Jim Stanford, an economist from the United Auto Workers, argued in favour of letting the market work out the supply and demand for workers for the oil sands project, while the person from the oil sands company wanted to have an enforced supply of foreign workers brought into Alberta.

We know that there is a demand for foreign workers from time to time, and that has been dealt with over many, many years. We've had work permits for many years for professional athletes, for actors, for very skilled people who come to Canada to construct complicated factories and those kinds of things. That has been dealt with satisfactorily over many years. It's only in the last number of years that we have been changing our outlook on that, and we have been actually actively going abroad and trying to recruit temporary foreign workers into Canada to perform certain work. It's the same kind of justification that most other countries in the world have used: that they're jobs that Canadians don't want to do and that sort of thing.

When we talk about bringing temporary foreign workers to our country--when we decide that the need exists--we unfortunately treat them with different levels of political and social rights. When we bring temporary foreign workers into Canada, we have the skilled foreign workers and we have the unskilled temporary foreign workers. The skilled foreign workers include people like athletes, actors, people in the arts communities, nannies, and many others whom we allow to come to Canada with a work permit and stay here for periods longer than a year. On the other hand, we have another work permit system in place for unskilled workers we bring into Canada, and they can stay only for a period that is less than a year.

One of the unfortunate things we are doing with this process is that we are separating the two groups. We are separating skilled workers from unskilled workers, and we are treating them differently. Skilled workers who come to Canada are able to bring their families. They're able to enrol their children in school in Canada. They're able to bring their families and have them access the Canadian health care system, which is very important, and do all the things temporary foreign workers in the unskilled category, who come for short terms, cannot do.

Another problem area I see in the Canadian temporary foreign worker category is the unfortunate nanny category that allows the importation of indentured labourers into Canada. They are people who are tied to their jobs and their employers, and the employer is not obligated to provide the same kind of work environment that other workers have to receive in terms of hours worked and those kinds of things.

When we talk about the difference between skilled and unskilled workers, people who can stay longer than a year and people who cannot stay, I think it's very important to look at the different rights and benefits that we give to those workers. These include of course the immediate access to the health care system—or in New Brunswick it's after three months. The way we are separating temporary foreign workers in Canada between those two groups, I think in years to come we will look at the situation in the same way we look back now and remember the Chinese head tax and things like quotas that we had for certain people coming into Canada. We all ask how we could have done that, how we could have discriminated so much between one group of workers and another group of workers.

Overall, I think it's very important for the Canadian government to make sure the foreign workers who we are bringing in to Canada will receive the benefits that accrue to people who are residents of Canada, as the health system states: that people who are lawful residents in Canada should have access to the medical system.

In addition to that, I have to address the issue of our deductions from income. People who come to Canada to work in Canada on temporary work permits are still obligated to pay contributions to the Canadian Employment Insurance system and the Canadian pension system. Those people who are coming here on temporary work permits can never benefit from those programs because if their jobs end, they have to leave. So they're paying for something that they're never able to benefit from.

Another thing is that many of the temporary foreign workers we are bringing in are being brought to workplaces that are removed from centres of population. I think it is important, when we look at giving work permits, that the employer be obligated to allow temporary workers to be able to travel to centres of population. One of the problems that arises very often is that when people come here for six or eight months to work—and they come here from the Caribbean or the Philippines—they do not have a car, they cannot drive a car, so it's very difficult for them, with our distances here, to ever get away from the place where they are sleeping and working, if it wasn't for the employer allowing them or providing transportation back and forth.

I think it would be important to make sure that the employer is obligated to provide that transportation for people so they can get out of the very narrow, circumscribed situations they are in.

Thanks very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We'll have Mr. Sheehan or Mr. Lampart.

[Humphrey Sheehan, Chief Executive Officer, Population Growth Secretariat, Government of New Brunswick]

Thank you very much.

Good morning, everyone.

Good day.

On behalf of Premier Shawn Graham and our Minister Greg Byrne, who is responsible for the Population Growth Secretariat, we want to welcome Mr. Doyle and members of the standing committee to New Brunswick.

I would like to talk a little bit about some of the demographic challenges facing New Brunswick and some of the things we're doing about it.

There is no simple solution to the phenomenon of population decline in New Brunswick.

The problem of declining populations is not unique to our province. It is something being examined throughout Canada and the world as governments recognize its significant social and economic implications on society.

In February 2007, Premier Shawn Graham announced the establishment of a Population Growth Secretariat. The mandate of this new organization is to grow the province's population through increased immigration, support of settlement services and multiculturalism, and the attraction of former residents through repatriation and retention activities, particularly as they relate to youth.

Over the summer of 2007, the Population Growth Secretariat conducted a public consultation process, seeking commentary from a wide range of current, future, and former residents of New Brunswick. The consultation engaged individuals and organizations on the challenges and opportunities that arise from the Government of New Brunswick's strategies on self-sufficiency and population growth.

Reversing population decline is not a simple task, nor can government accomplish it alone. Challenges in urban areas are not simply about the number of jobs and the total population. Urban centres are faced with issues of infrastructure and workforce attraction and retention, among others. Most rural communities continue to experience population loss, especially among youth. Businesses across our province, both large and small, face productivity challenges due to labour-force shortages.

In keeping with this, the self-sufficiency task force identified the need to increase New Brunswick's population and labour force and reverse shrinking population trends as the number one reality for New Brunswick if it is to achieve self-sufficiency. The task force said that the province should increase the population by 100,000 people over the next two decades. To help partially counter the impact of an aging workforce, it will be important to take steps to facilitate the full integration of new immigrants, youth, persons with disabilities, and aboriginal people in the labour market. Increasing the labour-force attachment of older workers, immigrants, and aboriginal people will help New Brunswick achieve its full economic and social potential.

Recommendations received during the consultation process have formed the basis of New Brunswick's population growth strategy, "Be Our Future", "Soyez notre avenir".

The Population Growth Secretariat has identified numerous policy options from a variety of key sectors, including immigration, multiculturalism and settlement, citizen and youth engagement, repatriation of former New Brunswickers, and, finally, family-friendly programs.

All measures seek to fulfill one of the following: engage New Brunswickers in the need for population growth; attract former New Brunswickers and their families back to the province; attract immigrants to settle in New Brunswick; retain our youth; and improve the family-friendly nature of the province.

By the end of 2009 we will need to increase our population by 6,000. By 2015 we will aim to grow New Brunswick's population by 25,000 people, putting us on track to hit 100,000 more New Brunswickers by 2026. We trust that changes to Canada's immigration program will not adversely affect our population objectives and our provincial nominee program.

Now we'll talk a little bit about temporary foreign workers.

New Brunswick employers are increasingly looking to temporary foreign workers as a means to respond to domestic labour and skill shortages: the IT sector, health, Employers in the trucking, fish and food processing, fish farming and the construction sectors. Many employers are unable to fill vacancies and, as a result, have been actively hiring workers from abroad.

In terms of job growth, New Brunswick has been outpacing the national average and had the second-highest job growth to Alberta last year. In addition, the unemployment rate has been the lowest in many years. In many regions of New Brunswick the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is hovering around 5%. This is a positive development, but will increase the pressure on New Brunswick employers to find suitable workers to fill job vacancies.

The current status: In most cases employers need foreign skilled workers and increasingly lower skilled workers sooner rather than later, and proceed through the temporary work permit process. If a permanent arrangement is sought by the New Brunswick employer and the temporary work permit holder, the provincial nominee program is the major tool used to accomplish this.

Temporary foreign workers with lower national occupational classification code skills are facing one major hurdle while working in New Brunswick: their spouses are not permitted to work. In many cases this is not only causing financial hardship but is also creating dissatisfaction within the families and a clear feeling of discrimination.

Work permit applications can be made by the spouses after the prime applicant has been nominated, but this process can easily take up to 18 months during which time spouses are not permitted to work.

Teenage children of temporary foreign workers face a similar problem. They are not permitted to work after school, which excludes them from many activities that are an inherent part of growing up in Canada.

This matter has been raised by the provinces during a number of FPT meetings. At the last FPT Meeting of Ministers Responsible for Immigration, they asked for a quick solution to this issue.

New Brunswick is pleased that the Government of Canada has recognized the importance of addressing the province's labour challenges and has opened offices in Moncton and Saint John to help expedite labour market opinions and provide services to employers.

New Brunswick is proposing to implement a pilot project that would enable all spouses of non-seasonal temporary foreign workers to work as soon as they have officially landed. In addition, their teenage children should also be given the opportunity to work after school. In this regard, consideration should be given to regulating the number of hours and the type of work they will be permitted to perform.

New Brunswick is proposing the implementation of a two year pilot program that would be evaluated after 18 months.

This would allow us to make a decision as to whether a program of this nature would be beneficial for the rest of Canada as well.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you.

How many temporary foreign workers would New Brunswick have on a seasonal basis, on a yearly basis? The population that comes in, is it small?

[Tony Lampart, Executive Director, Immigration Division, Population Growth Secretariat, Government of New Brunswick]

On the seasonal side, I can't answer the question because we do not follow the progress under federal jurisdiction. Although the temporary foreign worker is also under federal jurisdiction, we are interested, because quite often it leads to permanent residence through a nominee program. Right now I would say we're looking at fewer than 100 a year, but it's growing and it's growing fast. We are constantly being contacted by a number of New Brunswick employers who are inquiring about how to find and recruit foreign workers. So I see this growing in leaps and bounds.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Good. So you're hoping to be able to reverse the population decline and bring in more immigrants to New Brunswick. I would imagine you would have the same problems the four provinces in Atlantic Canada have in trying to keep immigrants in this part of the country. Probably they tend to go to Montreal, Vancouver, or Toronto. I'm from St. John's, Newfoundland, and there would be a problem, I would imagine, in our part of the country as well, because they tend to want to settle in communities that have a lot of immigrants in that part of the country. I don't know how you would address that problem, how to plan to keep immigrants here and keep them from going to Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal. That seems to be the case very often.

[George Maicher]

I would like to talk to that. I think the facts actually talk in favour of Atlantic Canada.

There have been studies coming out that identify and document the success of newcomers coming to this country who are coming to smaller communities and their success in catching up to the Canadian average in terms of income, and the process of integrating into Canada. One of the factors that is helping do that.... Since I'm the president of the Multicultural Council of New Brunswick, we are representing a large number of organizations that are involved in integrating newcomers into our province. Very often I'm saddened when I see people leaving this province to go to Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, because I know exactly what is going to happen.

There was the case of a young family from the Congo that was adopted by a village and church in P.E.I. They came here last fall and it was terribly cold and they considered maybe leaving. If only they had known what kind of lottery they had won by being adopted by a village in P.E.I., rather than going to Montreal and simply vanishing into the Congolese community.

I had the pleasure of working with a colleague from Rwanda. He had a PhD in soil science--he works in the Department of Agriculture--and he would go once or twice a year to Montreal. He said, “You wouldn't believe, George, what those people who live in the Rwandan community in Montreal believe about Canada. I tell them that it's not true.”

Beyond the fact that I think there's about a 60% retention rate in New Brunswick of newcomers, that's not too bad either.

[Humphrey Sheehan]

Mr. Chair, I would like to add that, obviously, the Atlantic provinces have very common demographic challenges, Newfoundland in particular, but in New Brunswick we're the first province, I believe, to have the provincial nominee program, and we have seen significant growth in that area. Tony and his colleagues have done a pretty good job in recent years. We've gone from 800 only three or four years ago to 1,700 or 1,800 now. The government has set very specific targets for us to achieve. By the year 2015, they want us to increase immigration to 5,000.

We know, obviously, that we can't be successful without some of our colleague organizations, like Mr. Maicher's and the immigrant-serving agencies, to help retain people in the province. In our strategy that we released a couple of months ago, there are a number of recommendations that relate specifically to how we can attract immigrants, how we can make welcoming communities and how we can retain newcomers to the province. Certainly that is a big piece of our strategy to increase the population.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Atlantic Canada is certainly one of the most welcoming places in all of Canada. Immigrants will tell me they love the welcome they get in Newfoundland, when I'm talking to them. But trying to keep the immigrants there, they generally want to go to areas of greater growth and where there are more immigrants, that kind of thing, which is the problem, I suppose.

Mr. Telegdi.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you very much.

We can tell that the chairman is getting closer to home. We started in Vancouver and his disposition has been improving, and we're going to be in heaven when we get to St. John's, I'm sure.

Also, being a bilingual province, my colleagues from the Bloc appreciate that vous parlez français.

Mr. Maicher, when did you come to Canada, what year?

[George Maicher]

Despite my accent, a long time ago. I came, actually, to Ontario first. When we talk about retention, you always have to remember that people who are immigrants freely move around Canada. We came to Ontario, then we lived in Alberta for ten years, and I came to New Brunswick 22 years ago. I came to Canada in 1968. It's a long time ago. I came to Canada in 1968 for a year.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

For a year, and you're still here.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Very good. We came in 1957. We started in Vancouver and ended up in Toronto. I went to the University of Waterloo and I figured I'd travelled enough, so I stayed there.

With respect to welcoming immigrants, on my previous tour we were going through Nova Scotia, and one of the terms that I came across was “FA”. Everybody was an “FA”. I think I got the province right, Nova Scotia. I asked, what's “FA”, and they said “From Away”.

[A voice]

They call them “CFA”s, “Come From Away”.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Yes, CFA.

So we were in Charlottetown and holding hearings, and one of our members, Lui Temelkovski, who has a fairly pronounced accent, as a new member of Parliament, was giving away Canadian pins, and the waitress said to him, “No, I've got lots of those. Give me one from your country. My colleague said, “This is my country”, and she said, “No it's not”. She meant nothing bad by it, but I'm just saying it was the way that she came across, and it always stuck with me.

The other question I have for you is this. What's the visible minority population of New Brunswick?

[George Maicher]

The visible minority population in New Brunswick I think is 4% or 5%. It has been going up between the 2001 census and 2006 census by 26%, whereas in Canada it has been going up between 4% and 5%. This means again that Population Growth Secretariat is doing its job--people are coming here and staying.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

The reason I mention that is in my neck of the woods, in Waterloo, I'm growing used to being able to go around the block and touch every continent. That really is an enriching experience.

I mention that because there's a way you can attract visible minorities, such as allowing more of them to come together as a cluster so they have a community they can relate to, particularly when they start out. Watching migration over the years, that seems to work well, and also going to less populated areas. There are all sorts of places in Ontario where you never saw a visible minority person, except somebody, say a Sikh, comes in and runs a gas station, and brings in family members, and all of a sudden you have the population.

I really appreciated your comments on temporary foreign workers, and particularly when you referred to the Chinese head tax, because that's what Canada did—I wasn't here—to build the railway. They brought in the Chinese. When the job was done, they were looked upon as redundant and they tried to get rid of them. They didn't allow their families to come in.

The problem with the temporary foreign worker program is that in many cases, with lower skills, we're dealing with putting them in a position of servitude. I really shake my head.

Under today's rules, 95% of the people who came to this country as immigrants would never get in. I just have to look at people like Frank Stronach of Magna International; he wouldn't be here. Frank Hasenfratz of Linamar wouldn't be here. In my community.... I love this thing the BlackBerry, invented by Mr. Mike Lazaridis, who came here as a young boy, six years old, in the mid-1960s; his father would never be allowed in. I shake my head and I wonder what we're doing.

To the provincial people, I commend you. Using the provincial nominee program is excellent. We have gone coast to coast, and one of the questions I ask employers is “If you had a chance of hiring somebody who got here as a landed immigrant, who was here with their family, and temporary foreign workers with low skills can't bring their families, which doesn't make for a very healthy environment for them, would you prefer a temporary foreign worker or would you prefer a landed immigrant?” The answer has always been the landed immigrant. What really disturbs me is that we're keeping out people who obviously have helped build this country.

You mentioned undocumented workers. We have something like 200,000 to 500,000 undocumented workers. These are people who came here, for the most part, legally and their visas expired. One of the people referred to them as having “precarious status” in terms of immigration. The reason they used that terminology is that they don't want to create the impression that all these people who are undocumented now snuck in. There was a huge growth in the undocumented population between 2002, when the point system was changed, and now. People are saying we need mechanics, we need bricklayers, and these people can't get in.

From your end, provincially, I think you can push the federal government to open up as to who comes to this country. If you look at what happened to the waves of immigrants that came—the Hungarians, the Germans, the Italians, the Portuguese—they came here and they came here with a dream, which was to start a new life and to work hard. They themselves struggled, brought up their kids, and the kids have done really well. It built a wonderful mosaic.

So whatever you can do to push for a more sane point system that is not elitist.... The one we have now is elitist. Our educational systems, I've found, discriminate against trades. They don't teach trades in the schools. When I went to school, there used to be a vocational school option, which got eliminated because people said vocational schools were for dummies. Well, you know, we have a lot of university grads who are driving cabs and not working in their areas.

I'm not sure which province we talked to, but one province in the Maritimes asked that, instead of deporting undocumented workers, we send them to the Maritimes. It's a very necessary pool. If you took out the undocumented workers from Toronto, they would go into a major recession in the building trades, because we just don't have them.

So whatever you can do as a province to push for that would, I think, be very useful. We are in a competition for immigrants with other nations, and it's getting to the point that immigrants will go elsewhere, because we have a very cumbersome system. It doesn't have to be that cumbersome for the landed immigrant to come in. It can be just as effective and as quick as it is in the temporary foreign worker program, if we want to do it. So we need some push in that area.

Mr. Maicher, you mentioned undocumented workers. How many do you think you have? I know it's a tough question, but how many would you say you might have in the Maritimes whom you're aware of? Do you have any idea?

[George Maicher]

I don't think we have many. I have no idea of how many we have. I don't think really that there are too many of them in New Brunswick or in Atlantic Canada. It's just that one of the things here is that you know everybody. You cannot just be submerged.

One of the big benefits of living here is that you know everybody; one of the big disadvantages of living here is that you know everybody. You cannot really say: “You know that Andrew Telegdi man? I don't know what he's doing.” You could say: “Yeah, he's my cousin. I don't like him either”—those kinds of things.

One thing I would like to add about the temporary foreign worker program for unskilled workers is that no permanent relationship can be established between an employer and an employee. It would be much better if an employer could recall the same worker year after year. It would make the worker more valuable to the employer, and it would make the employee's future much more secure. They could say, this is what my life is going to be. They could plan, they could buy something, because they're going to go back to work to pick tobacco on the tobacco farm or pick tomatoes in Leamington and those kinds of things that they're going to do, for four months or five months.

The way it is right now, it's always a new hiring process. You cannot match one employee with an employer over many years. I'm talking about unskilled people.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Mr. St-Cyr.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for being here.

First, I would like to make a slight correction to what Mr. Doyle said. The Atlantic provinces are certainly among the places that are most welcoming to immigrants, but so is Quebec. We will all have no problem agreeing on that.

More seriously, the brief you submitted to us dealt with a pilot project in New Brunswick to allow spouses of temporary foreign workers, not seasonal workers, you said, to work once they landed.

Can you explain why you think seasonal workers should be excluded? I do have an idea, but I would like to hear you on that point.