Thank you.
While we are here speaking to you, the minister and the staff of CIC have been travelling around and have been in Ottawa, Vancouver, and Toronto giving presentations about temporary foreign workers. I have these documents, and from one of them I want to read to you two paragraphs specifically about the temporary foreign workers program.
One of them, the backgrounder, says:
Improvements have been made to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to make the process of hiring temporary foreign workers easier, faster and less costly for employers when they are unable to find Canadians to do the job.
The 2007 budget committed $50.5 million over two years to increase processing [of these workers].
Then there is a PowerPoint presentation that talks about a growing demand on the temporary side, from 100,000 work permits in 2005 to 130,000 in 2007.
That's a 30% increase. It's 30,000 more. This legislative amendment to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act is to deal with this and to address the pressures and modernize the immigration system.
It also said that it would allow CIC greater flexibility regarding the type and number of applications to be processed. What you're hearing is that there's going to be flexibility to deal with the whole notion of getting more workers into Canada on the temporary side.
I think the whole drift is that there is a federal legislative change, Bill C-50, which you mentioned. It's 130,000 in 2007. It is going to grow dramatically, and you're going to see more resources funding, more staff energy, and a lot more flexibility to have a lot more of these temporary foreign workers coming into Canada. That is basically my interpretation of what is in front of Parliament right now.
Your recommendation said that we should go back to the 2002 level--stop expanding it, get it fixed, and not use people as cheap labour. Given that, how do you think labour unions or ordinary workers are going to deal with this legislative change, because instead of stopping it, apparently we are about to massively expand it?