Mr. Speaker, I know my colleague, the member for Kings—Hants, who spoke previously, has particularly pursued the issue of income inequality over the last number of months and years and has had some frustrations in getting that debated. This is a significant issue, particularly in the context of income inequality between immigrant groups and native-born people, but also among immigrant groups as well.
I feel like I am somewhat well-positioned to talk about this. Scarborough—Guildwood is home to pretty well every people group one can possibly name. I can literally march down Markham Road and talk about quite a number of groups that find themselves in Scarborough.
One of the universal issues is the processing times for visitor visas, for family reunification, for citizenship applications, et cetera. In my office, we have somebody who is devoted absolutely full time and she never has a slow day. All she deals with are the frustrations that she has, particularly with the government and the lack of information from it in terms of processing times and access to basic information. This is becoming more and more of an issue for us who have the honour to represent heavily immigrant ridings.
My colleague talked about the economic benefits that flow from an in-flow of immigrants. He comes from Nova Scotia and I represent a riding in the GTA. The GTA adds about 100,000 people on an annual basis, and some of the folks are extraordinarily skilled. They bring employment skills and other skills to our ridings, yet they are finding a lot of frustrations.
The interesting point is with respect to this temporary foreign workers program. Many of my constituents take slightly above entry level jobs at various institutions, both pharmaceutical and financial, where they are doing essentially data processing. Yet I have had representations from those very same people who only arrived here maybe a year ago or two, three or four years ago and have what might well be described as a good job, yet they find themselves training foreign workers and training themselves out of a job. What a perverse policy that effectively says that we welcome them as immigrants, but they have to train their replacement.
These are the frustrations and contradictions that come out of the government. It is the delay. It cannot just make the world go away with a delete button, and it is the contradictory policies between welcoming people who want to make an economic contribution and then having a program which effectively makes them unemployed.
