Mr. Speaker, the Alberta economy is the engine of economic growth for Canada. With an unemployment rate of less than 4.4%, temporary foreign workers are simply a reality for many Alberta employers.
The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration knows, and in fact he has said publicly, that when the Royal Bank attempted to use the TFW program to outsource 45 information technology positions, it was doing so illegally and outside the existing rules of the program.
Why did the government overreact by changing the rules, making the program more expensive and difficult to access, rather than simply enforcing the rules against outsourcing?