The short answer is, yes, there have been many studies, and I can provide them to the committee. I won't go through the whole list, but I can provide you with probably seven or eight studies done by credible academic sources that demonstrate quite conclusively that the temporary foreign worker program has been used to suppress wages, and that it has increased unemployment rates in areas of the country where employers have used that program most aggressively.
To your earlier point, in defence of the temporary foreign worker program, I want to make it clear that we in the labour movement recognize there is a place for a program like the temporary foreign worker program, as long as it's used sparingly and that the workers brought into the country are used only to supplement the Canadian workforce as opposed to replace it. We are talking about the TPP right now and the labour mobility provisions included in that agreement. We're not talking about the temporary foreign worker program. The distinction I make—and there's a big one, a very important one, that should be front and centre in the minds of legislatures such as yourselves—is that this is a question of control.
We've seen previous governments not get the temporary foreign worker program right. We see the current government struggling with it, but at least you can control it, because it's a federal program. You get to fix it. You get to tweak it. You get to respond to Canadians' concerns. That will not be the case with the labour mobility provisions of the TPP. Once the agreement is signed, then this new approach for bringing temporary foreign workers into the country will no longer be under the control of the federal government. It will be subject to the terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an international agreement that's binding. You won't be able to fix it.
Please, if you're going to bring temporary foreign workers into the country, do it sparingly, and do it in small numbers, but keep it under the control of our elected representatives rather than handing it over to an international treaty that we cannot fix or amend—certainly not easily.