Absolutely. I think it's fundamental to address a lot of the concerns raised during the conversation so far, but also, as a trade union—and you touched on our work a bit, Ms. Kwan—we of course are focused on helping migrant workers, predominantly in the agricultural sector, to assert their rights as well as they can. Currently under the system, a migrant worker is tied to a single employer. That employer may or may not be a responsible employer. There are many responsible employers in the system, but we know from 30 years of doing this that all you have to do is pick up the Globe and Mail or take your mainstream publication to read about all the irresponsible employers. A migrant worker can either put up with that or go back to their source country, which may not be an option.
One theme that has been covered widely is that there are a lot of crooked recruitment firms that have really made hay with the temporary foreign workers program. As it stands now, we have people coming from places like Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, of course, paying upwards of $10,000 for the opportunity to pick tomatoes in Canada. They get that money from loan-sharks. They get the money from organized crime. They get it where they can, because the fact is it is a life-changing opportunity for folks, and there are a bunch of unscrupulous characters and actors in the mix who capitalize on the desperation of workers, which creates a very vulnerable and precarious population.
The truth is, labour mobility within the system will help to some extent with that, but it won't have a dramatic effect on the situation. The only way that changes is if these folks have status—these folks become permanent residents on track to be Canadians. That's the only way to ameliorate vulnerability and precarity in the sector, or else we'll still hear these stories on a regular basis.
The fact of the matter is—I know that I've heard from my colleagues here a desire to expand the caps in sectors—we know through our experience that when a group of highly vulnerable workers in a sector becomes 20%, 30% or 40% of the sector, it's inevitable that it will have an impact on labour standards in the sector. When you get to the point where there are 60% or 70% vulnerable workers in a sector, as we see in primary agriculture—guess what—you get a labour market ghetto. You get a place where no Canadian in their right mind would want to work. You get a place where health and safety standards are pale in comparison to those in other dangerous sectors. You have a place where the only way people ever get a wage increase in those sectors is that the minimum wage rates increase, and even then we have an increasing phenomenon of people being forced to work on the black market, so God knows how much they're getting paid.
It's a big problem. I certainly sympathize with some of the business interests on the line, but to our labour economists on the phone, I would say if you have a bunch of unemployed workers and a bunch of jobs, there's obviously some sort of distortion taking place in the labour market. With the temporary foreign workers program—hundreds of thousands in Canada—there is no opportunity for equilibrium in the market so it never happens.
To the free marketers out there, I guess an argument could be made that the way these jobs get better is if we allow the market to do its thing, and that will not happen when you have sectors that are becoming reliant on migrants.
