Thank you, Chair.
With regard to foreign workers, the skilled worker program has been a significant success, however imperfect, and the wait times have gone down, in my understanding, from six years to about six months. As well, this government has welcomed a record number of immigrants to Canada.
For skilled workers, isn't the starting position the labour market surveys and labour market shortages in the provinces? We know that every province has labour market shortages and there are clear needs.
I am pleased to see that the improvements you are recommending have been accepted by CIC to clarify responsibilities and to conduct structural assessments of the genuineness of both employers and jobs offered. But I have a question.
I understand it would be great information to have--the job and whether the employer can afford to pay, whether they have an apartment for the person to stay in, etc., and to be able to quantify that. The department agrees to work on it, but my concern is that it sounds as if the Government of Canada would be acting like a giant job verification agency, not quite a job placement agency but a job verification agency. It would be very labour intensive. I am wondering how many people you'd have to hire to verify over 50,000 jobs a year, to call the employers or contact them and try to verify, maybe ask for financial statements. You'd have to set up a bureaucracy or beef up the bureaucracy considerably to do so.
In addition to that, how reliable would the information be? For example, if someone who ran a kitchen in a hotel got a call from CIC asking if there had been a job application from a person in Africa who wanted to be a chef, he'd say yes and fill out all the boxes and get back to running his kitchen. How reliable would that information be?
Economic conditions could change or the hotel could close and the person would come here. Wouldn't it be more reliable, or at least as reliable, for the person to know there was a labour shortage of that skill set in that area, in that province at that time, and that there were a number of jobs to go to?