Mr. Speaker, I am disappointed because, normally, he does his research accurately, as a good academic, and he did not today. He was cutting some corners.
For example, he ascribed the increase in the flow of foreign workers to Canada as being primarily because of loosening of the rules around the wage flexibility and the accelerated labour market opinion.
I am sorry. Here is a news flash. Both of those policies were introduced in April 2012, and both of them were shut down 12 months later, when we saw that it was leading to unintended consequences. Therefore, for only one year were those policies in effect. Only 5% of employers used the wage flexibility.
By the way, the reason we brought it in was that we were getting criticism from the opposition that some temporary foreign workers were getting paid more than Canadians, because the prevailing regional wage rate established by Service Canada is a median, which is more than the usual starting wage rate. Therefore, we were trying to reflect the fact that there is some need for some flexibility in the wage rates, but since no employers were using it, we thought it might be subject to abuse. We shut it down in only 12 months.
To what, then, can we attribute the growth?
By the way, let us get the numbers clear. In 2006, 138,500 temporary foreign workers entered Canada. It is going to be under 200,000 for 2013, when the data come out, so there has been a growth of about 70,000 people. We have gone from the temporary foreign worker program flow representing about 0.7% of the Canadian workforce to representing about 1.1% of the Canadian workforce. That is not an increase by orders of magnitude. It is an increase of about 70,000 people. It is true that a portion, 20,000, of that came in the low-skill stream, but the rest were high skilled. That is the point.