I, too, would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to present. I'm representing the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour. We're an umbrella organization for 30 affiliate unions in the province, representing about 500 locals and 70,000 working women and men throughout Newfoundland and Labrador.
Our role is mostly an advocacy role. We are trying to improve labour laws, establish workplace rights, build strong public services. We're also involved in quite a number of social justice issues. Today we welcome the opportunity to talk about the temporary foreign worker program and some of the problems we see in it.
Currently, we believe it's been too much, too fast. Since 2005, there has been quite an aggressive expansion in our country. In many places in Canada, in many sectors in our economy, it is no longer a last resort for employers but a first option.
In the last little while, we've seen frequent so-called improvements to the program—expedited procedures, another processing office opening, another occupation under pressure, and pilot projects. It's been one measure after another. In our opinion, this rapid expansion has come at the expense of proper monitoring, accountability, transparency, enforcement, and, most important, protection for guest workers.
It is our understanding that in 2006 HRSDC reported a 36% increase in employer applications. This was followed by a whopping increase of 65% in the first half of 2007 over the first half of 2006.
The role of government, as noted on your website, is to make it easier, faster, and less costly for employers to hire temporary foreign workers, rather than to facilitate a well-thought-out labour market and training strategy for our country.
With respect to the temporary foreign worker program in Newfoundland and Labrador, we have not yet developed a list of occupations under pressure between the two levels of government. Between 2005 and 2007, we've each year had 1,200 to 1,500 labour market opinions, not all of which have resulted in temporary foreign workers.
Most of these have been in high-skilled jobs in the offshore. We have had engineers, some physicians, but not many low-skilled jobs yet. We know from talking to the local people from HRSDC or Service Canada that there is an increase in the number of inquiries about this program, a growing interest in it.
We need to be aware that sometimes it's not labour shortages that we're talking about in the country. Rather, it's a wage shortage. We shouldn't confuse the two. In a number of cases, temporary foreign workers were actually brought into the country to replace workers in jobs held by people who live here.
In our opinion, it's also undermining labour relations. When a labour market opinion is developed, in many cases the definition of a labour dispute is very narrow. If unions and the employer are in negotiations, this is often left out of account. When you're in the middle of a round of bargaining, the introduction of temporary foreign workers in a workplace can cause quite a lot of stress.
There are a number of examples. We have them in our presentation, and you probably heard them as you travelled the country. There are places where the program has been used in the middle of labour disputes. The most recent one involved our national union, the Canadian Auto Workers in Windsor, Ontario, and a fish plant.
In many cases, as I said, we believe this has been fast-tracked too fast. A lot of things fall to the wayside when we expand programs really quickly, and I think we've seen that in this case. We've seen news reports of exploitation and abuse, because we haven't had enough time to put the proper monitoring procedures in place. There are a lot of workers and a lot of workplaces to try to keep track of. And we can't, in all cases, guarantee that these workers' rights are being protected.
We would also argue that this makes for somewhat bad labour market policy, because we're not looking at a strategy for the country. We're looking at individual needs versus what's best in terms of the entire labour market. Also, it's an awfully short-term measure for what is really a longer-term demographic problem for our country.
We would argue that it also makes quite bad immigration policy. We should ask ourselves if we want employers to be the gatekeepers for immigration, or is this something that should be handled in the public sphere?
Not always are we seeing temporary foreign workers treated like guests in our country. We see many examples of living conditions being inadequate. You're probably familiar with the case in Barrie, Ontario. A police officer, after viewing the place where some people were living, said they were economic slaves.
Our position at the Federation of Labour is that if these people, newcomers to our country who are working under this program, are good enough to work here, they certainly are good enough to live here and to bring their families with them. If they are good enough to build our factories and to serve our coffee, they're good enough to be full citizens.
So rather than accelerating the temporary foreign worker program, we might look at an immigration policy and at the reform of immigration policy as the principal means of averting labour and skill shortages. We should look at increasing the proportion of family class immigrants. And we should integrate, certainly, the planning and implementation of immigration and labour market policy at the national and provincial levels.
We've included a number of recommendations. This program certainly needs to be reviewed. We should seriously look at how quickly it's being expanded and maybe put a moratorium on it. We should look at investing, as a nation, in the development of a long-term labour market and training strategy for our country and at integrating immigration planning with the labour market needs of our nation.
We've also included some specific recommendations on the temporary foreign worker program. There was a great analysis done of this program by the Canadian Labour Congress, which I've noted on the last sheet. It could be further reading for you--I'm sure you don't have enough after 52 panels. And there are some other particular recommendations about involving unions, particularly when occupations under stress are being developed.
Unions are part of the labour market. We are a key stakeholder in the economy, and we certainly should be included in any consultations and in the implementation of this program.
Thank you.