Mr. Clarke, I agree totally with your presentation. Quite frankly, I find the growth in temporary foreign workers very troubling. When I walk around in my community...95% of the people who came as immigrants would never get in today, and that includes people like Frank Stronach, Magna International; Frank Hasenfratz, Linamar; and from my community directly, Mike Lazaridis, the person who invented Research in Motion and the BlackBerry. It really is incredibly bothersome.
I was noticing that in Alberta, Tim Hortons hired 100 university graduates from the Philippines to work at Tim Hortons restaurants for a year. How stupid can one get? Once the year is over, Tim Hortons is not going to have those people. They're going to be gone. It would seem to me if they wanted to hire people who were going to be staying for a longer term at Tim Hortons, there are a couple of ways of doing it. Number one is to make sure you're not having brain waste, because that's what it is, brain waste. The other one is to enhance the benefits for employees there.
I really feel good that the labour movement is paying attention to this, because this is going to be a debate that we're going to have to have across the country. What kind of country do we want to build? What does it say about our image as Canadians when we will bring in people and exploit them? It's so reminiscent of history, when the Chinese were brought in to build the railway, and when that was done Canada tried to get rid of them. All of a sudden they were redundant: you did your bit to build the nation, now we want you gone. This is along the same kind of thinking. I'd much rather build a nation, and you do that by immigration.
We will always need people who are maybe on the lower end of the labour force. We cannot import labourers into this country because we cannot have a society where you end up with something like Germany, where they had a lot of guest workers and it created problems.
I totally agree with your comments that we have to get back and start teaching the trades in schools, because quite frankly a lot people in the trades do a lot better than people with university degrees.
[Technical difficulties--Editor].... Out of the 428,000, only 251,000 were landed immigrants, and those are scary numbers. They see this as something good, as an asset; they're doing well. I see this as doing badly. What they should be doing is landing these folks, and then all the problems associated with abuses will go away because you all of sudden have people here who have rights and who are not open to exploitation.
So I really hope the labour movement keeps pushing this, because we don't want to go back in time, where we bring in people to exploit them. You want to make sure that we build the nation and not just a low-wage workforce that can be exploited and found to be redundant and sent out of the country.
Thank you.