Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to speak to something that is very important to Canadians today, and that is the skills and labour shortages. Canadians did not really need a lot of media focus on this. They live this every day and they live this because skilled Canadians apply for jobs and are told they do not have skills. Instead, workers are being brought in under the temporary foreign worker program.
Before I get started, I want to talk about the federal Canada jobs grant for workers and all the advertising that has been done. I have heard today in the House that there is some consultation going on. I have also heard from another member that this program is well researched, there is a lot of data and a lot of plans are being made. The fact is that it does not exist. What it does is creates false hope and gives people misinformation because the government is advertising something that does not exist yet. I would ask us all to take a look at that.
There is another thing I want to focus on today. I have heard a lot about apprenticeships and skills training. I want to talk a bit about my experiences as a high school counsellor and classroom teacher in a high school for a great number of years. Over the last 25 years, I have personally witnessed the decimation of the apprenticeship program and the dismantling of the skills training that used to exist. I will reference British Columbia specifically because that is the province I am very familiar with.
Just over a decade ago, British Columbia stopped funding in the same way for apprenticeship programs, the grants and things that were available, but something else happened over a decade ago. The tuition costs for the courses that apprentices took tripled and quadrupled overnight. There used to be a different fee level for apprenticeship academic courses compared to university degree courses. The government of the day in British Columbia made the fees the same. It did not lower the fees, by the way, it raised the other fees.
In the high school in Nanaimo that I taught in, there was a huge ricochet effect because suddenly many young students from struggling working-class and middle-class families found they could not afford it. Not only were the grants cut at that time in huge amounts, but also, with the costs going up and the student loan program being changed, it shut the door to a whole generation that would have gone into the skills area.
The other thing that happened was a modular program was brought in, which really put the Red Seal in jeopardy across Canada. It had a huge impact in British Columbia. When we talk about the existing skills shortage, I do not think we should talk about it as if it is something that has just been discovered in the last year or two. I believe this has been systematically created over the last few decades.
It is only recently that the CBC covered a story where well-qualified IT people in a bank, and it happened in many banks after that, were laid off. When they were laid off, they were asked, “Before you leave, could you please train these people we are bringing in from other countries? We are going to be paying them a lot less, they can't do your jobs, train them and move on”.
That is not creating and nurturing skill development or utilization of the skills we have in Canada. Now we are hearing not one but hundreds of stories of people who say they came to our country to do these so-called high-tech IT jobs. When they came here they did not find it was all that it was made out to be. Many of them ended up doing other jobs.
There is a pathway to citizenship in there somewhere, but this is what it looks like. If a person is one of those temporary foreign workers who gets a pathway to citizenship and actually gets to apply for permanent residency, guess what happens. Many are coming into MPs' offices and saying that as soon as they get permanent residency, they are laid off because employers would rather bring in another group of temporary foreign workers because they can pay them less.
Therefore, it is very hard for us to believe how serious the Conservatives are about meaningful employment for Canadians where Canadians get to earn a living wage. Instead what we have seen are policies that suppress wages and policies that, from the reports we hear in the agricultural and other sectors, are very abusive relationships in the payment, the recruitment and also in the working lives of some of the workers who come here.
I want to take this opportunity to clarify something that I have said 1,000 times. It appears my colleague from Winnipeg North has not heard it and is deliberately failing to understand it and thus he misrepresents the NDP position on temporary foreign workers. I have said this 1,000 times, so let me say it again, and I hope my colleague is listening this time and that it will actually sink in.
The NDP supports a temporary foreign worker program where no Canadian is available to do the work. We support a program that addresses a specific skill shortage, where the needs are identified and temporary foreign workers come in for a temporary time while Canadian skill sets are grown. In the agricultural sector, where there is an acute shortage in many areas, we support a living wage for all and fair working conditions. With all of that in place, if there still are no Canadians available and able to do the work, that is when we look at a temporary foreign worker program.
It is under the Liberal government, by the way, that the floodgates to temporary foreign workers were opened. I know the huge tsunami of over 400,000 people hit us under the Conservative government, but it could not have taken place without the Liberals, while they were in government, opening up that floodgate. It is important that this be put on the record.
Once again, Canada is a country that has been built through immigration. Almost every one of us, except for a small handful, were either our parents, grandparents or great-great-grandparents came from another country. We came here for a variety of reasons. We came here when there was a labour shortage. I am one of those. I came to Canada when there was a shortage of English teachers in Quebec. I did not come in as a temporary foreign worker. I and my husband came in as permanent residents. That is how we built our country.
If we have a legitimate skills shortage that we cannot fill, and it is only temporary, then I can see why we would use a temporary foreign worker program. However, what we are seeing is that while people in the same part of the country, in the same environment, are on employment insurance and are looking for work, the government has allowed a huge number of temporary foreign workers to come into this country and thus suppress wages. It has also created problems for many who have come into this country.
Only yesterday I read an article about a very highly trained IT worker who applied to a huge number of companies. They were all hiring. He thought that being a Canadian and having the skill set he had a crack at the jobs. However, he only heard back from two companies. The rest of them did not even acknowledge the fact that he sent his resumé in. Guess what they did? Guess what has happened to him? He did not get the jobs. Many of the jobs went to what some people call intra-company transfers.
I am going to hear the rhetoric that Conservatives fixed the program, but there is a fundamental flaw, which is that LMOs are given without due diligence and without proper oversight. When they are given that way, Canadians are not aware of the jobs, nor is there an onus on the employer to advertise those jobs in a meaningful way to make sure that it is communicated.
With high unemployment and youth unemployment sitting at double digits, the youth I talk to find it very difficult to talk about the government's economic action plan. They find it very hard to talk about all the jobs being created. All they know is that after getting into huge debt and developing skill sets they thought were going to be in demand, labour is being brought in from other countries, and they are without work. This is where the federal government has to play a role. This is where employers have to play a role as well.
Industry has an absolute obligation to develop the skill sets it needs, not on its own—I am not saying that—but in partnership. This is where the government has a critical role to play. Instead of passing the buck, it has to work with partners and industry. It has to work with community organizations. It has to work with post-secondary institutions and provide scholarships and affordability so that our youth, and those of us who are not so young but are in need of a change in career, can actually go out and get that training.
I talk to many people in their forties and fifties who are still ready and willing to work for the next 15 or 20 years, but they are being laid off. They are looking to transition into other jobs or just to do their own jobs, which are now being filled through so-called intra-company transfers.
The recent changes to the temporary foreign worker program actually failed to address the administration and enforcement. Of course we have rules that say that an LMO can only be given “if”, but who is making sure the “if” is fulfilled? It seems recently that the way the LMOs were handed out was faster than a McDonald's fast food outlet. People could just walk in and say they wanted one and they were given some.
Even those that were meant only for highly skilled workers, such as the ALMOs, were handed out. No wonder the public has very little faith and very little trust that the government is there to protect their interests and to look after jobs for Canadians. B.C. is a prime example. There was the mining fiasco, where Mandarin was required while highly qualified and experienced miners were sitting right there, not being hired.
I was just talking to a young man last week as I was going door to door in my beautiful British Columbia, where the sun was shining. What he said to me was that he had heard all the hype about all the jobs that were going to be available in high tech. He spent lots of money, by the way. It was kind of astounding me when he told me the debt load he had. That debt load was much higher than the total price of the first house I bought after I graduated. That is the kind of debt load our youth are going into the future with.
What he said was that except for working in a bar and occasionally in a restaurant, he has not been able to find any work in his field. This is the field we were encouraging young people to go into, IT.
I do not have to tell members this. They have watched it on television, not that everything we watch on television is true. We have sound evidence in front of us that the IT jobs are being given away. We can call it outsourcing, in-sourcing, intra-company transfers, or the temporary foreign worker program. Whatever we call it, I call it taking jobs out of the hands of Canadians and giving them to people who do not live in Canada.
By the way, I just want to make it clear that when I am talking about taking jobs away from Canadians, it includes everybody who lives right here in Canada and has legal status in Canada as a permanent resident. It includes the people who just arrived a few weeks ago.
On Saturday, I was talking to an engineer who is now working as a taxi driver. He is highly skilled, has built bridges and did all kinds of amazing things in his home country. He came here with his skill set in hand. He got permission to come to Canada because of his skill set. However, when he got here, it was not recognized. That is the kind of tension we are creating.
I am hearing this over and over again. Being an English teacher, data is not really my forte, but all kinds of people are telling us, and I agree with them, that to plan for the future and to address the present needs, we need hard data. It seems that the government has an allergy to data. Having data might actually lead to making informed policy decisions.
Over the last number of years, what the government has done is collect less data, data that is less reliable and is not as thorough. We are hearing from industry, as well, that the data available is really not anything we can base future labour market planning on. That should cause us all some serious concern.
When we make policy statements based on ideology rather than on the needs and the reality on the ground, it can only lead to mishaps.
One last thing I have to say is that we have to pay special attention to the needs of our aboriginal communities and the youth. Having worked very closely with the youth in those communities and having watched the high stress levels and high suicide rates, it is time we engaged them in a meaningful way to take an active part in the workforce.