Welcome to the committee again, Minister.
The Auditor General last week said that the department has no strategic plan, no vision, made decisions without considering their cost, risk, potential impact on other programs, and delivery impact. So we have 192,519 temporary foreign workers in Canada. We have fewer families coming in, according to your 2010 targets. We have far fewer, half of the refugees, that are going to be accepted in Canada.
Since 2002, because the former Liberal government changed the point system, people who have low skills or manual labour, including the live-in caregivers, cannot come into Canada as permanent residents through the federal program. So they're coming in. We need low-skilled workers, there's no doubt about that, StatsCan tells you that, yet they cannot come in as permanent residents. How are they coming in? They're coming in as temporary foreign workers. So how many foreign workers do you expect to come in this coming year, 2010?
Let me read you one line that the Auditor General said:
Until it develops a strategic roadmap for the future and it evaluates the performance of its current programs, CIC will not be in a position to demonstrate that its programming best meets the needs of the Canadian labour market.
To make it even worse, she said there's no quality assurance framework to obtain assurance that decisions made by its visa officers are fair and consistent. So there's no plan, and the assurance framework is not there.
Then the third piece are these unscrupulous consultants out there telling people how to lie. It's a small number of them, but they're criminals, basically, and they are abusing the system, yet the victims are the ones who get punished. They lose their money, get deported, or never make it here, or the families never arrive in Canada because of these unscrupulous consultants.
We had a concurrence motion last week where Parliament said “act, please act”. We are sick and tired of these unscrupulous consultants—not all of them, but some of them. And right now there are no regulations. They basically do whatever they can. They can set up shop and—CIC is not working, we know that.
You talked about taking action on this front. When are you going to crack down on these criminals, some, a few? We don't even know where they are. So when are you going to take action?
What is the plan for this coming year, 2010? Are you going to balance the needs of the labour market and also Canada needing permanent residents? We need their kids here, not just their labour. Your October changes deal with some of the abuse, but it does not deal with the core problem of the entire program. In fact, it makes it worse, because you're letting them work four years and then you say to them that they cannot come back for six years. You should do that to the employers rather than the workers. So this is now reversed, and that means the temporary foreign workers have even less power.