Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I thank the members of the committee for welcoming me. I also thank the minister for his presence and the officials for their availability.
I usually sit on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, but I am still familiar with the foreign workers file. There are problems with the temporary foreign workers program.
Minister, I'd like to talk to you about the processing of work permits for sectors deemed nonessential by the federal government. This has been completely frozen in time since the beginning of the pandemic.
Contractors are contacting us all week long, and the cases are multiplying in every riding in Quebec. Even some contractors who are not in our ridings are contacting us to tell us that they are losing contracts and have to pay huge penalties because of delays, and to explain to us that the Labour Market Impact Assessments, the LMIAs, for which they paid are useless because they do not result in the issuance of a work permit.
What can you say to these people today? How is the situation progressing?