Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Welcome to the new witnesses who have joined us for the meeting.
I'm looking at this audit, and I'm focusing on the purpose. The purpose is to determine whether or not the temporary foreign worker program was properly managed. To me, that is the key question here. It's a program that is intended, as we all know, to allow Canadian employers to hire temporary foreign workers for labour shortages, and I would gather that this would be used as a last resort for these employers.
It's very clear that the Auditor General is saying in his report that management of this program “was not complete”. I look on this page, and I have certain things that are jumping out at me that are clearly very troubling.
On page 19, paragraph 5.97, it says, “the Department did not conduct analyses of the labour market to determine whether there was a real labour shortage of caregivers.” To me, that's a fundamental question. The whole point of the program is to fill labour shortages.
As a country, we are bringing in temporary foreign workers for providing care, and we don't know? How can we not know? How can we not know and analyze the information we have? Clearly the federal government has a lot of data. How are we not asking ourselves that simple fundamental question as to whether there's a “real labour shortage”?
Can I have a response from the department?