Citizenship and Immigration Committee on April 16th, 2008

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Mr. St-Cyr, go ahead.

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

Thank you all for being here.

I'll be sharing my speaking time with Mr. Carrier, my Bloc Québécois colleague.

Ms. Logan, you talked about the difficulty involved in recruiting people here. Many people who have been living here for a number of generations, or who are living here without yet being immigrants, refuse to do certain types of work, such as cleaning rooms. That's a comment often made to us by employers who hire temporary foreign workers. In agriculture, employers tell us that local residents don't want to do that kind of work. We've heard that comment for a number of fields.

There are also people who are unemployed, who aren't working at all. So there seems to be something incoherent in our labour market. Supply and demand generally operate in an open market. Lastly, if no one wants to work in certain areas, if no one wants to do certain occupations—such as those in your hotel—a number of people might say that you should raise wages in order to find people who are prepared to do those occupations.

Don't you think that if you offered better working conditions, people from here would be ready to do that work?

[Carol Logan]

Thank you.

First of all, it's specifically the housekeeping room attendant position that we're talking about here at the Prince George Hotel. We're challenged, and it's due to the labour market. It's supply and demand. As you mentioned, people are opting not to take this position. This position pays very well. We pay over $11 for the position of housekeeping room attendant here at the Prince George. We're very proud of the benefits, the perks, and the career opportunities an applicant has.

We do go out and reach to the market. We've worked with community services in trying to get programs together to help a certain sector to say, here's an opportunity. We ran that for a few years, trying to recruit applicants to come into the job. But I can tell you that the young people are just choosing other positions because they're cooler, they're not as challenging, they find it more exciting, they're working with their friends--they don't want these positions.

There was a time when we used to partner with the community colleges. We would get them to come here to do their co-ops and to spend some time and to get some skills in that particular field for a period of months. And they're now telling us, “We don't want that position any longer. We want a different position, or we want a position with a higher status.”

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

Consequently, unless I'm mistaken, if you offered $13, $14, $15 or $16, there wouldn't be any local labour to meet that need.

[Carol Logan]

I don't want to say no, because we hired three people. We're not recruiting lots of people in our housekeeping department. We have about 60 employees, and of that, we recruited three people whom we know we're going to have for a period of two years. To us, two years is a long time. We've been struggling with applicants coming, thinking they can do the job. We do job selection. They get in there and they leave after two weeks, or they leave after two months. It really puts a different level of pressure on that team, that we need to be really highly successful.

This was an opportunity for us to say, “Let's try it. Let's see if it works.” What I like about it is I'm going through the process with these newcomers, these temporary foreign workers, step by step. I'm not being told, this is how it is, or someone's not giving me.... We're going through it slowly. I can tell you, it's six months, and their work ethic and their ability to do the job--

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

I'm going to turn the floor over to Mr. Carrier.

[Robert Carrier, Bloc, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Good morning. Time is going by quickly.

I'll make a brief comment, Ms. Logan. Your hotel is clearly well appreciated, except that if we had been welcomed in French—one of the country's two official languages—it would have been even more pleasant for the Quebeckers here. In Quebec, we receive people in both official languages.

Earlier I was satisfied with your answer and that of Ms. McDonagh regarding your choice, should you be able to use landed immigrants in Canada rather than temporary workers. In the tourism industry especially, it's important to have people who feel they are involved in their country when they welcome tourists.

Ms. Logan, you mentioned the problem that you have with room maintenance staff: local residents don't keep their jobs for very long, unlike temporary workers, who have a two-year contract.

Do you believe they stay because of their contract? If we preferred immigrants and they were really landed immigrants, do you think they would agree to do the same job, if they had a choice between that and another one?

[Carol Logan]

Absolutely. We are happy to hire people who want to do that job, landed immigrants, absolutely. And we've been working with our local association, MISA, here, but we're finding that people have a higher level of qualifications and are therefore not selecting that housekeeping room attendant position.

There was a time when we were getting people who were here on permanent residence who would take those positions and who wanted to do them. But now we're finding--again, I think it's due to the labour market and the change in the labour market--that we don't have that supply; we don't have the numbers to help us, from personal experience.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you.

Ms. Chow.

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

Once the workers come in, how long would it take for you to train them on, say, the housekeeping job, and for them to learn? Would it be a week or...? It's not a big training period.

[Carol Logan]

It's about two weeks.

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

It would take two weeks for them to learn how to do that.

I'm just curious, why El Salvador and not Mexico or India?

[Carol Logan]

That's a good question. The reason it's El Salvador is that our general manager attended the hotel association's conference, and one of the speakers at the conference was Carolina Calderon, representing the embassy to El Salvador. She spoke about it, and that's how we first heard about it. So we made a call, and we started to investigate it.

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

So it was just by chance.

[Carol Logan]

Absolutely, it was by chance. Here, we're struggling; we're trying to find applicants. Let's investigate, let's see how this goes, and let's find out more about it.

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

So it's not really a planned approach that in Nova Scotia we want to get x number of workers from y number of countries?

[Carol Logan]

No.

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

Do you think that would help at all, or should it be left on a more ad hoc basis?

[Carol Logan]

I don't know. For me, it's about who I build a relationship with, who I speak to, and how it works. I liked this process because I was dealing with somebody directly. I was dealing with somebody who was dealing directly with El Salvador, so it made that process very smooth for us.

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

The immigration rules right now say there's this point system. There are 100 points, and you need to get certain points in order to get in. I can't somehow see the people working in your industry right now--even including those in the building trades, because they're not fluent necessarily in English or French or both, and they don't necessarily have university degrees--getting enough points to come in as landed immigrants, so this is almost the only route, right, for them to come?

[Carol Logan]

Well, this is one of the routes. First of all, with regard to their English, we're setting them up, and we're providing them with English training; they do have some English. They have experience in their industries. All three we currently have working with us have experience in the hotel customer service base, so they're coming with that experience.

Two of them have grade 12. Another one has part of a university degree, so they are coming with skills, and they are able to develop and enhance those skills while they're here, and they're learning in two years. It's hard to say what is going to be the outcome.

I hear what you're saying, because when you look at that point system and skilled versus non-skilled, where is housekeeping room attendant going to fall?

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

I don't think they would ever have enough points to make it under the present point system. There's no way they would fit....

[Carol Logan]

There is no way.

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

There's this new experience class under which about 20,000 would be admitted out of say 120,000 or 150,000 temporary foreign workers and actually foreign students. So there's not a chance they would really fit into.... They would never ever be able to be landed immigrants, and it doesn't cover them anyway.

Just out of curiosity, how much do you pay your housekeeping staff in terms of industry standards? You don't necessarily need to tell me about this hotel, just the industry standard.

[Carol Logan]

Under the industry standard, in order to get an approval from Service Canada, we need to pay them $10.35. That is the industry average. We pay more than that here at the Prince George Hotel, but the industry standard is $10.35 for a housekeeping room attendant.