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.