I acknowledge that there have been a number of initiatives by the government to address individuals who are struggling to find a pathway. We saw the situation where the marks to get in under the express entry were lowered.
The difficulty that we find as counsel is that these initiatives spring up, and we're not given much notice, and then we have clients scrambling and trying to figure out who is going to fit in what scenario. There is a real panic, trying to reach out to clients to say, “Okay, we think you qualify under this one or this one.”
My concern is that while the numbers are.... You've said the “90,000” pathway. Those numbers are going to fill up very quickly, and there is still a huge group of people who are left out of it. I think one of the speakers spoke about undocumented workers. Unfortunately, because they have been caught up in this scheming process, they end up being undocumented; otherwise, they were well-intentioned individuals. I'm not exactly sure what options are available to them, but they need to be addressed.
I take note of the active enforcement steps that have been taken by the government, but we still need to think out of the box and come up with something that's more proactive.
I hear you, Mr. Dhaliwal, that unscrupulous employers will still find ways to sabotage the system, but part of that is educating people who are coming from regions.... I believe, for example, if we look at the students who come in, the bulk of the students come from India and China. I've travelled to India, and I've seen the big signs up there about “Get to Canada”. They're huge, and people are being misled. Some front-end work in shedding the light on what the truth is in terms of options for emigrating to Canada is important. Then, for the workers we have here who have become stuck in these schemes or who otherwise are not getting work, why not use them by matching them up with some good employers—some sort of system? One system I was suggesting was using the ESDC to match these potential workers with genuine employers.
Good work has been done, but there are still a lot of gaps that need to be addressed.