Mr. Speaker, I would like to share my time with my colleague, the member for Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel.
I would like to begin where I left off on my question to the previous speaker. The thesis of my remarks is that the proposition put forward by the government is fundamentally flawed and illogical. Let me begin by stating what its proposition is, and then I want to explain why I claim it to be flawed and illogical.
The government claims that the purpose of the temporary foreign worker program is to provide only temporary work and only where there is an extreme labour shortage. Then the government talks as if it is suddenly surprised, whoops, that there is a problem out there. We have 340,000 temporary foreign workers, and in 2006 we only had 140,000. Then the government announced reforms, as of this budget.
That makes no sense, because this surge in temporary foreign workers was in fact a deliberate creation of the government since it came into power in 2006. Since that time we have gone from 140,000 to 340,000, over an unfortunate period of seven long years of Conservative government. Over that time, it has deliberately caused that number to grow exponentially.
It is not as if the government was not warned earlier. It was taken to task by the Auditor General in 2009. What did it do? The government expressed concern and said it would review, and it said it a number of times. However, nothing has changed.
My point is that this is not a problem that the Conservatives have just discovered. This is a problem it has deliberately created since it came to office.
I repeat, this is not a new problem. This is a problem that the Conservative government has deliberately created since it came to office.
I note that even though the numbers have gone from 140,000 to 338,000, that might be explainable if we had a sudden drop in unemployment and an increase in labour shortages. However, the unemployment rate today is in fact higher than it was in 2006, and the overall vacancy rate in the economy, according to Bank of Canada figures, is approximately the same as it has been on average over the past 20 years.
The next question is this. If the Conservatives deliberately created this crisis over the last seven years, why and how? To answer that question I think we need a little historical perspective.
The temporary foreign worker program was brought in many years ago by a Liberal government and, in my opinion, if properly managed, it is a very good and very valuable program. However, the way it was managed under Liberal governments was that we had to achieve a balance between the interests of employers, the interests of Canadian workers and the interests of foreign workers. As long as that balance is maintained across these three groups, it is a very successful program. In terms of Canadian workers, those workers had to have first call for available jobs. The current government, self-evidently, has failed to achieve this.
In terms of the temporary foreign workers, they had to be treated fairly and be subject to the same laws as other Canadian workers. The government has violated that, because now, under certain circumstances, temporary foreign workers can be paid 15% less than the going wage. Third, the interests of employers have to be looked after, because in certain circumstances and in certain sectors, like agriculture for example, there are clearly labour shortages, there are clearly some jobs that cannot be filled by Canadians and there is a clear need for temporary foreign workers. As long as the system is managed in a balanced way, respecting the interests of all of those three groups, then it is a good program.
The problem with the Conservatives, and the reason the program has become a big mess since they came to power in 2006, is that they no longer had a balanced approach. They gave all the weight to the employers and none of the weight to the Canadian and foreign workers. The Conservatives just listened to employers, turned a blind eye and turned their back on stuff so that employers could get whatever they wanted.
I do not blame the employers. Employers are out there to make money, and if the government turns a blind eye and lets them covertly do what they are not really supposed to do, a lot of employers will do it. The problem is the administration of the system by the government. I do not blame employers for taking advantage of deliberate government laxness; I blame the government for creating that laxness in the first place, for deliberately building up these numbers to unprecedented levels and for totally disrespecting the rights of Canadian and foreign workers.
There are a couple of other issues I would like to mention. First, in terms of the unwarranted influx of these foreign workers, I have a high-tech riding and I have received letters from a number of my constituents who work in the tech sector. One of my constituents wrote:
These Indian/Multinational companies are proving to Immigration that skills are not available but this is not true. All the skills are available in abundance locally and it is only the work of the Immigration lawyers who cook the application to make it look like the skills are not available.
The government allows these immigration lawyers to get these phony stories in and immediately allows these foreign workers in to displace people like my Canadian constituent in Markham.
There is also the question of immigration through landed immigrants, who ultimately become citizens and raise their family in this country, versus temporary immigration through temporary foreign workers or what are sometimes called “guest workers” in certain European countries. We in the Liberal Party have a preference for the first category of immigration. We think the way to build our country is to bring people in from foreign lands, let them settle here, let them become citizens and let them raise their family. We acknowledge that temporary foreign workers have an important role, but the fact that these temporary foreign workers have gone up to 340,000, which is more than the annual intake of regular immigrants, is not good for the structure of immigration for this country. As I said earlier, that is a deliberate plan by the Conservatives to create this situation.
Lastly, it is not good for the poorest countries in the world. Consider a poor country like Bangladesh, which imports products from countries like China and India. Given that China and India will now have to pay higher tariffs, the products that Bangladesh exports to Canada will now cost more.
In other words, what the current government is doing is not only penalizing China and India, but it is also penalizing the very poorest countries of the world.
So for all of these reasons, in conclusion I will say that the Conservative government's explanation is totally illogical, that this is not a problem the Conservatives have just discovered but a problem they have deliberately created over their period in office, and they have deliberately created it because they have given zero weight to Canadian and foreign workers and all the weight to the companies.