Thank you for that opportunity, but before I do, Roxanne just reminded me that in our community, small things go a long way. The local community city councillor has a lawn sign that has a message on it, “No matter where you're from, we're glad you're our neighbour”. We're printing 500 copies in four languages and it's going to be distributed all over the city. That's a very clear message, alongside the app, coming from the city council itself saying “we're glad you're here”. It's also a very direct counter to the xenophobia that we know comes along with that.
On the temporary foreign worker program, this has been a disastrous program dating back to 2006 and then the just shy of 10 years of ramping up the program with inadequate compliance, monitoring, and enforcement measures. Getting to your question, we now have a situation where the government has issued 635,000 temporary work permits under the two streams of the program. It far outstrips the number of permanent residents we accept, and yet 22% of the people who are on temporary foreign work permits actually gravitate toward PR status. You can't help but look at this and say something went awry. Folks who are on a temporary work permit need to be able to move toward permanent residency with some dignity, with some accessibility, and without the various striations that currently exist. The seasonal agricultural workers will never see an opportunity, despite the fact that some have been coming here for 30-plus years. People who are on spousal work permits, who are dependent on their spouse finishing their academic status, too often slip into the undocumented status.
In my case load alone, I have more than two dozen clients who arrived with proper legal status but because of the flaws in the system have slipped into undocumented or flux systems. Many of them are temporary foreign work permit holders. We need to revisit this. There's a huge pool—the number I just gave you, 635,000, is a big number—and a good chunk of that, far more than 22%, could be moved into PR status if there were some more flexibility in terms of recognizing what has gone wrong with that program.
There are not enough minutes to do a proper response.