Mr. Speaker, the minister is being somewhat less than honest with respect to the role the current government has actually played with the temporary foreign worker program. This is a program that has provided great economic and social benefit for Canadians for many years. Yes, it was a Liberal prime minister who ultimately brought in the program, but the program had been a huge success prior to the current government taking office. It is the current government that embellished, and in essence, put the program into a crisis situation.
If we go into the Prairies, or even into Atlantic Canada and other regions, we would find that there has been a great value to the program. It is the current government that has made a mess of the program. It has turned it into a crisis situation, and the Canadian economy is paying as a direct result of its incompetence.
My question for the minister is with respect to areas of the country where the temporary foreign worker program has proven to be very useful and necessary. I am sure if he did some work by going out and checking with some of those employers, maybe the government would recognize that there is some value to properly fixing the program to get it back on track so that the overall economy would be that much better.
This is a very specific question. Does the minister believe that the temporary foreign worker program has a valuable role to contribute to Canada's economy?