Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Pierrefonds—Dollard.
I am pleased to speak to the motion of the member for Newton—North Delta today. This motion deals with the challenges we are facing with regard to the temporary foreign worker program, which has made the headlines a lot recently, particularly last week with the story about McDonald's and the rather harsh comments made by the company's CEO.
As the official opposition's youth critic, I have a unique perspective on this situation. The Standing Committee on Finance is wrapping up its study of youth unemployment, an issue that is related to the motion before us. I will come back to that in a moment.
To begin, it is important to talk about the content of today's motion. We have heard many Conservative members, including the minister, bragging about the program and talking about all of the areas where there is a need for skilled workers. In his speech, the minister listed the various industries that need these workers and that could benefit from this program.
Our motion deals primarily with low-skilled occupations, which is a specific area. We do not want the program to be cancelled. We simply want a moratorium to be imposed. That would give parliamentarians and especially the Auditor General—and this brings me to the second point of the motion—to examine the program and get to the bottom of the problems raised in cases that have been in the media recently but that have been going on for months or even years.
Despite the government's supposed willingness to improve this program, this motion provides an opportunity to get an independent opinion from the Auditor General and an actual report from an independent office, rather than listening to the government's rhetoric and relying on its good faith. This will enable us, as parliamentarians and legislators, to improve this program. We do not want to do away with the program, but there are some major problems with it that will require serious solutions.
Of all the low-skilled areas of work, the most commonly cited examples involved jobs in the fast-food industry. That is especially troubling because, temporary foreign worker program aside, there is another problem, not with youth unemployment but rather with youth underemployment.
According to a Statistics Canada report released two weeks ago, just over a decade ago, most young people working in fast food, at McDonald's and Tim Hortons, for example, and in similar areas, had a high school education or less. Now the majority of young people working in these areas are overqualified. Most have post-secondary education, often at a high level. Some have university degrees.
The problem—which has been raised at the Standing Committee on Finance— is that these young people are not counted as part of the statistics on youth unemployment. They are working, so the government boasts about job creation, but they are obviously working in fields for which they are far too overqualified and they are not meeting needs elsewhere.
I think that members from all the parties agree that the purpose of the temporary foreign worker program should be to bring people here and allow them to make a positive contribution to our communities and our economy, as they do when it comes to employment. We are always more than happy to come up with the best ways to bring people here.
Nonetheless, we want them to come here to do specialized work, where there is truly a labour shortage, and not to fill jobs where there might be an adverse effect on the entire population working in that area.
For example, consider the downward pressure on salaries that is going to affect those same young people I was just talking about. This is not just about getting laid off. These young people are fighting to get a certain number of hours of work in these jobs. As such, they might not necessarily be let go, but their employer will take away a significant number of hours and give them to temporary foreign workers instead, especially in that industry.
The reality is grim. With this motion, we are calling for a moratorium. Essentially, we want to press “pause”. We want to take this opportunity to ask an independent authority to study the issue. The government's words rarely or never seem to lead to real action. Now we will have a report to show how we can fix this program to be sure that its real objectives, objectives that benefit all Canadians, are met.
Let us look at the positive aspect of the program and talk about the skills shortage. It is interesting, because this also shows another aspect of the problem, which is the government's management of this file. We have heard a lot about the famous—or infamous—Kijiji economy, when data was created on Kijiji and other places. Jokes aside, the Parliamentary Budget Officer said that these data regarding the skills shortage are inadequate. This is nothing new. It has been around for some time now.
I want to get back to the study on youth unemployment, which we talked about in 2012 and even before that in 2011. This issue was raised in the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities. We were studying the fact that all of the authorities and even the public service were saying that there was a big problem with the collection of workforce data. It was necessary to improve the analysis of the population's skills and the realities of the job market. The committee, including the Conservative members, decided to recommend that the government look at ways to improve its data collection, to find out how to get better information to understand the realities of the job market.
All parties agree that the job market is going through a considerable transformation. When we look at this entire situation, it is very disturbing to see that the government does not even have access to accurate information. Once again, this is yet another reason to ask the Auditor General to look into this issue. At the risk of repeating myself, an independent authority must examine the temporary foreign worker program.
It is important to point out that this is not an irresponsible proposal. As my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie put it so well earlier today, it is important to distinguish between “cancellation” and “moratorium”.
As I said earlier in my speech, all members of this House agree that we want Canada to be a welcoming country. We want to allow people from other countries who have very specialized, specific skills to come here and help build our communities, improve our economy and fill the gaps in the labour market. However, this must be done in an harmonious, balanced way, which is clearly not the case.
Even though these problems may not be widespread, as the minister claims, there is no reason for the Conservatives to refuse an investigation by the Auditor General. This will simply prove that these are isolated problems and it will be even easier to solve them, as we hope to do with our motion.
I am very pleased to support the motion and I invite my colleagues across the aisle to do the same.