Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure today to rise to speak against the budget before us, both on content and on process.
Here we go again. We have a massive budget bill, over 100 pages, impacting innumerable statutes and bills that need to be debated in this House.
My colleagues seem to find this funny. It is not about being able to read. I can assure them I have learned to read at a fairly fast pace and comprehend. It is about Canadians' rights to have the budget debated in this House for transparency and for discussion. It is about giving duly elected members of Parliament an opportunity to do their jobs as elected officials by providing debate and discussion, and asking questions. That is what is being denied once again in this House.
On content, the budget does very little, if anything, to grow jobs for Canadians. It does even less to protect the jobs that exist for Canadians. It does very little to address the major challenges facing everyday Canadian families as they struggle to make ends meet.
The Conservatives are trying to say that they can just rush through the bill, maybe because they really believe there is not much in the bill and they have a lot to hide. Maybe they are too scared to have Canadians look at the bill and know that there are no job creation measures, that there is nothing to make life more affordable and nothing to strengthen the services families rely on. Once again, the government is trying to avoid public scrutiny of the measures it is trying to ram through this House at breakneck speed.
I also want to take the opportunity today to talk a little about an area that really impacts on immigration, citizenship and multiculturalism.
First, the bill continues a pattern with which the government has made us all too familiar. It just keeps concentrating more and more power in the hands of the ministers so they do not have to come back into this House in a parliamentary democracy to have what they are trying to do examined in any way.
The government has made a complete mess of the temporary foreign worker program. We have seen it over and over again in the media, whether it is HD Mining in B.C.; the backlog of the live-in caregiver program, which the minister himself addressed and is facing major problems and needs major overhaul; or the temporary foreign worker program that is currently under scrutiny because of the outsourcing of jobs at RBC. Despite all of that media attention on it, what actions has the government really taken?
Canadians were doing jobs that workers were brought in to do, but Canadians were then asked, “By the way, before you leave, can you train these new workers?” Once again, Canadians are being denied Canadian jobs.
Over the last two weeks, several individuals have contacted my office to tell the same story. They were brought to Canada as skilled workers, only to lose their jobs once they acquired permanent residency, or were let go just before they qualified to apply for permanent residency, and therefore a new batch of temporary foreign workers could be brought in.
Over the last number of weeks we have heard again and again about staggering abuses. The accelerated labour market opinions, only ever meant for highly skilled workers, were used and abused in a way that once again shocked Canadians from coast to coast to coast. Intra-company transfers were an abuse of the system in a massive way. Where are the investigations for all of these and where are the fixes?
The government, by the way, has had an opportunity—no, several opportunities over several years—to fix the temporary foreign worker program. There was, again, an opportunity with this bill, but rather than actually fixing a program that is wrought with flaws, a program that desperately needs an entire overhaul to function and be administered properly, the Conservatives slap Band-Aids on the holes, but only once they are exposed.
Faulty LMOs are being doled out. It is not a problem for the government. It simply gives the minister the power to suspend or revoke work permits that have already been handed out, but only if they are caught and there is public oversight. Once again, this is being done at the same time that the government is cutting funding to CIC and, therefore, limiting the kind of oversight that can be done over these files, over the granting of LMOs and the granting of the permits that go along with them.
Rather than addressing the full scope of the problems with this program, the Conservatives' Band-Aid in this case is another ministerial override when work permits and labour market opinions that have already been approved by them—and this is post-approval, by the way—become political hot potatoes. It is all political expediency and a public relations exercise. This bill's improvements would not get to the heart of the mismanagement of the temporary foreign worker program under the Conservative government.
Next, this bill introduces privilege fees to be set out in regulations for employers that apply for work permits. The minister has announced that this fee would be in addition to the new fees announced in budget 2013 for servicing TFW applications. The intention of the new fee, apparently, is to act as a disincentive for unnecessary use of the program. Of course, given the government's record to date, there is no assurance that these fees would not be passed on to the temporary foreign workers themselves and there is no measure anywhere cited to ensure that they would not be.
The government is now trying to fix problems it created. The last time it tried to fix problems, it allowed employers to pay up to 15% less and, guess what, there was a massive denial of that in the House. Then, outside at a press conference, the minister said that program was gone. The ALMO, which was hastily implemented and then not administered, with very little oversight and abuse, was allowed to happen and has been suspended temporarily—and I would say it was allowed to happen because the ALMOs that were granted went way beyond the parameters that were set out for this particular program.
Once again, I want to say that we in the NDP are not opposed to a temporary foreign worker program that addresses the legitimate needs of skills shortages and acute labour shortages where no Canadians are available to do the work. That is what we stand for and yet, instead of protecting Canadian jobs and addressing the abuses that are happening, the government is once again looking for band-aid solutions.
Forgive my skepticism, but we learned only yesterday that the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development completely disregarded a briefing note that told her of almost 3,000 inappropriate uses of the TFW program almost a year ago. Just a few weeks ago ministers and parliamentary secretaries all feigned surprise and said they moved quickly as soon as they found out there was a problem. In the world I live in, over a year or year and a half of waiting does not indicate that they took action quickly.
This bill would also deny due process to refugees, and I want to mention that. There are all kinds of fees that the minister would no longer have to come to the House to put into place. New Democrats have major concerns about the lack of transparency of the usage of those fees.