Thank you very much for allowing me to speak today.
My name is Terry Parker. I'm the executive director of the Building Trades of Alberta.
We advocate for over 60,000 unionized skilled trades workers across the residential, commercial, industrial and maintenance sectors in Alberta. Our priority is having a strong, safe and sustainable construction industry in Alberta that provides quality careers for Canadian workers while addressing genuine labour needs. We support well-managed immigration as a complement, not a substitute, to investing in domestic workers.
Alberta is in a unique position due to the lack of work for young Albertans. With all the talk of perceived labour shortages, we don't see it in the building trades of Alberta. At points in the last few months, we've seen up to 40% unemployment among our unionized affiliates.
Do not get me wrong. We believe in diversity. We want to bring more young Canadians, more indigenous people, more women and more new Canadians into the trades, but what we're seeing out there currently is that a lot of abuse is happening with the temporary foreign worker program.
Temporary foreign workers are coming into the country, working in the agriculture sector or other sectors and then moving into the construction industry. We're also seeing undocumented workers coming into the country. That is creating wage suppression and making it very hard for our contractors to compete with the unscrupulous contractors who are doing this. We're seeing more safety risks and the displacement of Canadian workers—i.e., our members.
We don't disagree with having temporary foreign workers. At points, we actually utilize them through what we call our ACTIMS program, whereby we work with owners and our contractors to bring in temporary foreign workers at peak periods in order to help us and our contractors fulfill their obligations. However, as I said, we are seeing a number of abuses out there currently.
What we need to see that hasn't been happening is more labour-market opinions and surveys that go back to our contractors and our affiliated unions. They will give more information back to the federal government in order to stop a lot of the practices that are currently happening. We need more oversight by the federal government and the provincial government, more audits, and more monitoring of unscrupulous contractors.
I hope that helps. I'm open to any questions.
Thank you.