The government should learn from that.
If I were in the labour movement, I would be concerned about the greater reliance on temporary foreign workers. It reminds me of the history of the Chinese when they were brought in to build the railway. As soon as they were used up, they were considered redundant, and the government did what they could to get rid of them.
Having people come here without their families is totally the wrong way to go. To me, one of the big questions is whether, if you're going to build a nation, you build it through temporary foreign workers or you build it through immigration.
We have a problem with the point system. The point system was designed in such a way that it really doesn't let in the people the economy needs. If you're in the trades or if you are going to come and do hard labour or whatever, you should be able to get into this country, because we need that in society. If you can't find anybody in Canada, then it's legitimate to bring in immigrants to do those jobs. That has been part of history. When you look at most of the temporary foreign worker jobs that are coming in, such as truck drivers, I mean, there's no way a truck driver is going to pass the point system the way it's set up. Australia has much better success with the point system, because they give greater relevance to what the economy needs.
The example that comes to me is that we bring in engineers from Pakistan or India, but they do not get to work as engineers. They're unhappy campers. They quit their jobs. They sold what they had and brought their capital here. Then all of a sudden, they find out that chances are that they will never work as engineers. So we have unhappy campers. On the other hand, if a bricklayer from Portugal comes here, and we have a shortage of bricklayers, he finds a job fairly quickly, and he's happy. We have a system that brings in the engineer who cannot be absorbed and keeps out the bricklayer who could be happy and do well.
Of course, the other big issue is the underground economy for the undocumented worker class. Once you bring in a lot of temporary workers, a lot of those folks aren't going to go home when their visas expire. They're going to join the class of undocumented workers. We saw the Auditor General's report that said that 41,000 people have not been kept track of. And there are a lot more. The numbers are something like half a million. It's asking for trouble.
I'm going to put the question to you: Do we need immigrants or do we need temporary foreign workers?