Mr. Speaker, I am rising today in follow-up to a question that I put to the Minister of Employment and Social Development on September 25.
I commend the government for finally responding to my repeated requests for the minister, through his department, to develop an enforcement and compliance strategy to govern the temporary foreign worker program.
In my four decades of involvement in environmental enforcement and compliance, both domestically and internationally, a clear consensus has developed across the country and around the world that it is important to the credibility of a regulatory regime that there be a publicly available and endorsed enforcement and compliance strategy. It is important that policy also be opened up to the public, to impacted persons, to employers, and to employees to ensure that the government is delivering a credible policy.
I would again like to commend the minister for not only finally responding and producing an enforcement and compliance strategy but also making that available to various parties to provide feedback.
The questions I wish to raise tonight relate to the apparent final strategy that has been released by the government.
In that strategy, which I understand is the final enforcement compliance strategy for now, the government sets forth, to its credit, some clear, publicly known criteria for how it is deciding what the appropriate enforcement responses are to violations under that legislation. To my surprise, the criteria seem to have a few problems. I would like to reiterate one of the issues from the ironworkers, who were impacted by the temporary foreign worker program.
As I have previously raised in the House, there have been a number of occasions in the oil sands sector where in some cases more than 100 Canadian ironworkers have been surreptitiously laid off and replaced by foreign workers. I reached out to the ironworkers to ask what their thoughts were on the proposed enforcement compliance strategy. Here are some of their concerns. I noticed that despite their input, the draft strategy remains exactly the same. As the ironworkers have pointed out, and I agree with them, the fact that an employer has violated the temporary foreign worker program—for example, by replacing Canadian workers with temporary foreign workers—for an economic or competitive advantage, is given a very low rating.
In the system, the government has laid out the kind of offences that may occur under this regulation. Here is what we think the criteria are. There has been a lot of concern expressed by a number of parties with the way the criteria have been assigned. One of those is that an economic advantage is a major factor, and I agree.
I have asked these questions that I would like to put to the parliamentary secretary tonight repeated times in the House. The minister has said that he has quadrupled the number of inspectors. Exactly how many inspectors are now employed? What are their credentials? Are they employed full time? What is their training? How many of those officers are deployed to the oil sands sector?