Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, everyone, for being here this morning.
The program is certainly very important in my area, Sudbury, northern Ontario. This program is a job creator in the sense that if we didn't have these temporary foreign workers in northern Ontario.... It's very hard to recruit people from southern Ontario or the rest of Canada to come to northern Ontario. There are many challenges, so this is a very important program.
I was very interested in reading the report. I know the time frame that we're looking at is from 2013 to 2016. Certainly the angle was more about how we're looking at this, how we can reduce the abuse from employers and ensure they're doing their thorough due diligence to properly advertise and try to recruit across Canada. At the same time, in my reality, in my office, it's more on the other side, saying, “How can we help employers find temporary foreign workers because they can't fill the jobs?” It was very interesting to see the difference in my reality and the approach from the Auditor General's report.
That being said, I was certainly very interested in your comments, Ms. Levonian, with respect to under-represented groups. That has come up in the Auditor General's report. In the majority of the samples taken by the Auditor General's team, they “did not make adequate efforts to appeal to under-represented groups”, so the employers did not do a proper job between 2013 and 2016.
You've come to this committee this morning and told us that you are taking steps to require employers to do more to recruit in these under-represented groups, so I'd like to hear more about your plan to address this situation.