Mr. Speaker, I am intrigued by the minister's and the Conservatives' comments, simply because a system that the Conservatives allowed to be exploited is somehow the NDP's fault, a system that the Liberals created, let's give fair attribution.
I will be splitting my time with my friend from Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca.
It is fascinating how, when the Conservatives get caught doing wrong, their first reaction is not to fix the problem, it is to look for someone to blame. We saw it with the so-called minister of undemocratic reform, saying that the problem was the head of Elections Canada. Sheila Fraser is the problem. The problem is the NDP, not his bill. His bill was perfect. The Conservatives' first instinct is to blame others, rather than take any kind of responsibility for a program that they allowed to explode. The minister allowed it to explode under his watch, yet somehow it is somebody else's fault.
Growing up in politics means that we take ownership from time to time of decisions that we make. The Conservatives do not want to take ownership of this decision because the economic impacts on Canadians, on wages, and on the job vacancy rate have been real, and have helped contribute in their own way to the significant problems that the middle-class working Canadians have faced. These problems are that real wages have been stagnant for almost a generation, that we are seeing incredibly high debt loads, and that we are seeing Canadians time and again working harder just to stay in the same place.
The temporary foreign worker program, in a sense, has become the poster child for bad Conservative management of the economy. The Conservatives allowed a program that was meant to be awfully specific, as the minister said. It should be legal, it should be fair, and it should be rare, as opposed to how the Conservatives applied it, where they sped up the process for LMOs to 10 days and allowed companies to slip through the program without any real scrutiny.
We saw it in the most egregious cases. Was it HD Mining? The minister will remind me. It was allowed permits for 200 miners to work in Canada, with almost no scrutiny from the federal government at all.
The government can only play a certain role in our economy, and it should only play a certain role, but one of them is looking out for the public interest. I represent northwestern British Columbia. It is a beautiful place that is resource rich. Oftentimes, when I meet with resource companies, one of the arguments that they use, which is a pretty good one, is to say that these are jobs that cannot be exported. When we are knocking down trees, mining, or fishing, these are jobs that we just physically cannot export. Somehow, the Conservatives found a way to export these jobs too.
We would think that service industry jobs, ones where we have to deal with a customer face to face, rather than telephone banking where people sit on the phones waiting, could not be exported because they have to be done here in Canada. That way, if the economy does well, Canadians should do well. However, Conservatives have somehow ended up creating a system allowing it to be exploited so that even if the economy were to pick up, Canadians would not receive the full benefit.
It is so similar to the Conservatives' policies on resource management in general. Conservatives are very happy with a “rip and ship” attitude to just drop the raw resources and send them somewhere else to have the value added there, not deriving the full benefit that we could, whether it is the mining, oil or forestry industries, all the way down the line. For those watching and listening to this debate who live in the city, and are not connected to the resource sector, know that the cities of this country, which are the economic engines, only survive because of the fuel and energy that are supplied by the rural parts of this country, the resource areas, the agriculture, mining, forestry, and oil sectors. Without the two working in conjunction for a fair and better economy, it is going to be very difficult.
The exploitation of this system cuts both ways. One would argue that the abuses upon the Canadian worker in suppressing and keeping Canadian wages down has a serious and significant effect. It is part of the reason why Canadians have one of the highest personal debt rates in the world. It is one of the reasons why real wages, when adjusted for inflation, have not moved much at all for 35 years. It is one of the reasons why Canadians, when asked about the hope for the next generation, are feeling more and more pessimistic about the opportunities for their children and grandchildren.
All of this has been aided and abetted by bad Conservative policies. They are policies that have gone to such an extreme that only with screaming headlines in the national media do the Conservatives actually react. The minister knows that the Auditor General's report of 2009 pointed out serious problems with the program that he allowed to expand. Did he react? Did he take charge of the situation, and say that this was hurting the Canadian economy, that he would step in and take some ownership? He did not.
We saw the Conservatives making these so-called tough efforts, taking this issue seriously in 2011 when they introduced the blacklist. I am curious if the minister can update us on, since 2011, how many companies ended up on this blacklist for abusing the program? If there are no companies on the blacklist, one would then assume that the program is not being abused.
In Alberta alone, there were only 100 cases last year. Only in the last 30 days has a company ended up on this blacklist. So much for tough-on-crime Conservatives. They really get out there and get tough when it is white collar crime.
Here is the foundation of this, which I am sure frustrates many Conservative-minded people. One would assume that those who sit within the Conservative cabinet would hold Conservative principles toward the economy, such principles as supply and demand, that if an employer is unable to find employees when offering a contract, then that employer would then have a couple of choices: not filling the position or raising the offer.
CEOs of major corporations in our country make that argument all the time. The Conservative government makes that argument when justifying the bonuses it pays to top civil servants, the argument that if we want to attract the best, we have to pay them, that if we want to get better and better people, we have to compensate them accordingly.
However, that same measure does not apply to people who are not in the Conservative world view of being important, people working in the service sector, people working in some of the industries that we have been talking about. When companies come to them and say that they simply cannot find any Canadians willing to accept this wage, the Conservatives tell them that they have a solution and that they will make this temporary foreign worker program.
Today, and every day, 300,000 people went to work under this program in Canada. That is an estimate, by the way. Actual numbers from the Conservatives are a bit like a unicorn, mythological. Every once in a while they make reference to them, but no one has ever actually seen the numbers.
It seems that when one tries to break apart the ideology behind this, it is not a Conservative ideology. It is actually quite a radical ideology that says that the market forces in play should not be allowed to exert their pressures in a natural way, that if employers are offering a wage at a certain level and nobody fills the position, that the employer then has to adjust their offer.
I was in small business before politics. It was pretty obvious to me. It seemed to work out well for most of the successful businesses I knew.
This labour shortage mantra that the minister and others have been ranting about to justify this program has also been shown not to be entirely true. The Parliamentary Budget Office is an office created by the Conservatives. I think they regret that day. I think they regret the day they actually sought to have truth in accounting for government, which was a Reform idea. Every time the Parliamentary Budget Office offers truth to the Conservatives' ideology, they simply reject the evidence that is before them.
Increasingly, from the cancellation of the long-form census to the absolute miserable labour market data that we have in our country, which is decreasingly reliable, it seems the Conservatives much prefer that ideology over evidence. If the evidence does not fit the ideology, well then the they just ignore the evidence.
We see this right now with the Conservative promise for income splitting. It is a $5 billion to $6 billion promise. It is not cheap. It will affect, and help, 14% of Canadians. Eighty-six per cent of Canadians will never see a benefit from this promise. The former finance minister, Hon. Jim Flaherty, a good man, well remembered since his tragic passing, argued publicly and in speeches that this was a very costly program that would not benefit everyone.
Instead of listening to the evidence of his own finance minister and the evidence of economists, as well as the actual hard numbers available, the Conservatives continue the mantra that it must be good because they say it is good. The temporary foreign worker program, again, should be legal, fair and rare, as opposed to the way the Conservatives have allowed abuses to go on.
The minister is going to get up and make all sorts of protestations about the NDP doing this and that, and yet never has there been a moment when I heard him take responsibility for his own creation, his own part in the allowance of the abuses that have gone on under his watch in a program that he augmented and increased. That is a shame. Denial is a long river in Egypt. He should do better on this and actually own up to what he helped create.