As my colleagues says, and the Canadian people are missing any opportunity for input. If that Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration were dealing with these issues, we might be touring the country, going from coast to coast, to get input from Canadians as to whether they would approve of this massive fundamental overhaul, this huge policy shift in how we welcome newcomers to this country.
The only thing that I can think of is, and I have talked with my colleagues, it reminds us of the further indication of the Americanization of Canadian politics. This is very much an American phenomena that we see in the American Congress. Its budget bills, its appropriation bills, are often stuffed full of a hundred other little bits and pieces that an individual senator or congressman might want in, in exchange for passing that piece of legislation. It looks like the Manhattan phone book by the time its budget bills get passed.
This is sort of what the Conservatives have done here. They have taken a budget implementation bill that has to be passed by the time we recess Parliament. It would give the spending authority for the government to go through with its fiscal plan. It is completely inappropriate and unfair to slip this heavy piece of immigration legislation into the budget implementation bill.
Let me tell members what we should be debating right now, just as an aside. I was hoping that in this federal budget this Conservative government would undertake some of the things it promised to do, such as plug some of the outrageous tax haven loopholes that still exist today.
I remember when the Conservatives were in opposition. I used to sit with them on this side of the House, berating the Liberal finance minister, saying, “Why do you allow people like the former prime minister to put all of their holdings offshore as tax fugitives to avoid paying their fair share of taxes?”, and the Conservatives used to agree with us. That used to meet the old nod test.
Now that the Conservatives have had three budgets and one fiscal economic update, which we could call a third mini budget, they have not chosen to plug those loopholes. One of their own right-wing columnists, actually, Diane Francis, who calls herself a practising Conservative, has written five articles in a row in the last month in the Financial Post, slamming corporate Canada for shielding its money offshore.
She calls it economic treason, I believe that is the term she used, when Canadians willingly avoid paying taxes in the country that allowed them to profit and become healthy, wealthy and wise. Yet, this government repeatedly refuses to address that fiscal concern that could have been an element of this budget that we could be debating here today.
Another thing she pointed out is there is a tax haven option for family trust funds where Canadians can expatriate all of their family trust holdings and allow their kids to live as trust fund kids in Canada, never paying a penny of income tax. Because once they expatriate that money, it is tax free; they pay a one-time 25% exit tax. They set it up in a tax fugitive country where we have a tax treaty and their kids and their kids's kids, generations of Canadians, can be living off of that trust fund never paying any taxes in this country.
She says it is quite frequent and that is appalling. Why we willingly forgo that amount of tax revenue should be debated in the House of Commons. Canadians, I find, do not mind paying their fair share of taxes as long as everyone is paying their fair share of taxes.
Those things should be debated today. Instead, we are put in the awkward position of having to debate immigration policy during a budget implementation bill.
On that line, I come from the building trades. I used to be the head of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners of America and we used to deal with this issue of temporary foreign workers all the time. I can tell members that this is an issue of our immigration laws that we have to have a look at because there is a tendency to rely more and more on temporary foreign workers.
Let me just say right from the start that it is not a human resources labour market strategy to bring in foreign workers to fill job vacancies. That is not a strategy at all. There is no future in that and it undermines local wage scales. It causes social unrest and social problems in the community where these influxes of foreign workers come in. Often the foreign workers do not receive the same benefits and rights that local workers do.
Let me give one example in the province of British Columbia that was a disastrous thing because the applicants for foreign workers are often disingenuous in their applications.
The Gold River pulp mill in Tahsis shut down. The whole town was out of work. Eighty millwrights were required to tear the old plant down to sell it to China, where it was going to be rebuilt. There were 80 unemployed millwrights in town who built that mill. The millwrights in Gold River knew every nut and bolt in that pulp mill because they were the ones who put it together, but when the company official that bought the mill wanted foreign workers to come in, he filled out all the necessary forms and where it said, “Did you try to find Canadian workers to do this job?”, he ticked off, “Yes”. On the question, “What was the reason you did not use Canadian workers?”, he put down, and we have a copy of this, “The cost was too high”.
This foreign owner who scooped up the pulp and paper mill to move it offshore would not hire Canadian workers to even dismantle the plant because the cost was too high, so he brought in a bunch of South Asian workers from India, sleeping 12 to a hotel room, to tear down the plant, while the unemployed men and women in Tahsis, B.C. were on the other side of the gate looking in while somebody else was eating their lunch. That is a recent example of the temporary foreign worker phenomenon that is sweeping the country. The company got away with doing that.
In another example on the other coast, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald was building a new printing press, a very high tech precision operation. It is a machine that is twice as long as this room and it has to be levelled off to one-one-thousandths of an inch, to the micron, so the paper rollers are running accurately. The Swiss company that manufactures the mill said it could not find any qualified Canadian workers to do it, so the Government of Canada let it bring in its own workers to install it.
We are talking a couple of years worth of highly skilled work for Canadian workers. Guess what? There were 800 unemployed Canadian millwrights in the Atlantic region alone. I know because they were members of my union on the job board, on the dispatch board, from St. John's, Newfoundland and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Saint John, New Brunswick. They were all sitting there unemployed while somebody else was allowed in to eat their lunch because the Government of Canada accepted the word of these applicants that would say they could not find any skilled Canadians, that it was far too complex for the Canadian workers.
One guy actually pulled a hair out of his head when he was arguing this to the government, saying, “We have to set these machines thinner than the thickness of this hair”. What does he think Canadian workers do every day of the week? What does he think skilled millwrights do in this country? If they have any hair on their head, they are measuring the tolerances of paper mills right across the country, because we build printing presses in every city in Canada, and we could have built the one in Halifax, Nova Scotia too if the Government of Canada would have just said no and let Canadian workers have those jobs. What is this zeal we have for giving away Canadian jobs?
I will say one last thing on the subject. If there are labour market shortages in the skilled trades, some of the aboriginal communities have chronic unemployment situations. We have--