Debates of April 29th, 2014

Opposition Motion—Temporary Foreign Worker Program

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I know the member speaks to the particular local context, because there are many communities in southern Manitoba that are at full employment. Without any access to this program, they would have to radically reduce their operations, lay Canadians off, and in some places, shut their doors. One example of that would be the Maple Leaf pork processing plant in Brandon, Manitoba, but there are many others. I was in Winnipeg on the weekend hearing from employers about these issues.

What we are trying to say is that where there are clearly bona fide skill and labour shortages, where there are jobs that Canadians just are not applying for, even though the wage rate is reasonably high, there should be limited access to this option as a last resort. However, we need tension in the system, and that is really what we are trying to get to here. We need tension so that employers do not think first about applying for people from abroad but think first about raising their wage rates; increasing their investments in training; recruiting energetically among under-represented groups in the labour force, including young Canadians, aboriginal Canadians, disabled Canadians, and newer immigrants; and recruiting in regions in Canada with high unemployment. When employers are looking at options one to ten, the first three options should be raising wages, investing in training, and recruiting Canadians. Only if none of those things have worked should they have limited access to this program.

After a transition plan is put into effect, they will have to file with their labour market opinion application evidence of how they are going to recruit more Canadians so that they can be less dependent on the TFW program.

I will be blunt. There are some employers who have become too used to this program, partly because they think it enhances their productivity. These workers tend to be very reliable, but we do not want them to end up displacing Canadians, intentionally or otherwise. That is why we will be making additional reforms to the program.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

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.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the deputy leader of the Liberal Party clearly indicated that we believe that Canada's Auditor General needs to be brought into the situation. We have expressed that to the Auditor General. We hope that sort of expression of interest in having the Auditor General engaged on this file would be somewhat unanimous here inside the House, because we believe in the importance of the program and Canadians getting that first opportunity for employment. That is the way in which the program was designed.

There is a second component or another issue in relation to the motion the NDP is proposing, and I would like clarification. Could the member specifically indicate if the motion would have an impact in any way on temporary foreign workers who would be used in our agricultural communities? It is a very important question. I am wondering if he can give a clear indication as to whether or not the NDP motion has any impact on temporary foreign workers for our agricultural communities.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the answer is quite simple: no. He is talking about a different program. Earlier today I heard my colleague from Newton—North Delta, the NDP critic in this area, clarify the same thing for the minister. We are really talking about low-skilled occupations. A specific program is being assessed. The program we are talking about is not the same one.

I think it is important to revisit the argument that I often raised in my speech, specifically that regardless of the sectors that will be affected by the matter before us today, we do not want anything to be cancelled. We would like a moratorium until the government figures out how to properly manage this file and the Auditor General has time to examine the issue, as the motion indicates. We could then make the necessary changes to the motion. The program could therefore remain positive, without creating all the major problems that have been raised recently but that we have known about for some time.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Minister of Employment and Social Development and Minister for Multiculturalism]

Mr. Speaker, there was no answer in that response, so let me respond to the question from the member for Winnipeg North again. When I last answered, he had left the House, which is unusual. I thought he lived here.

The answer is that the NDP motion calls for an immediate moratorium on the stream for lower-skilled occupations.

I am the minister and I can certify that the agricultural streams are considered lower skilled, so it is clear that the impact of the motion would be to suspend both the seasonal agriculture worker program and the general agricultural worker stream, which is a subset of the general lower-skilled worker stream.

Perhaps that is not the NDP's intention. I take the member for Newton—North Delta at her word that it was not, apparently, the intention. Perhaps the NDP would like to amend this, because I know the member for Newton—North Delta knows very well that there are a lot of farmers in the Fraser Valley who will be paying her a visit this weekend if in fact she calls for shutting down their berry farms. Therefore, let us have a friendly amendment to the motion.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is not asking that we shut down farms in her region. The problem we are dealing with today was caused by the government's mismanagement. We have to ask for a moratorium so that an independent authority, specifically the Auditor General, can examine the issue. Had the government put its foot down, as they say, instead of waiting for the media to break the story, as in the case of McDonald's, we could have already fixed the problems instead of always blaming the Liberals, although they, too, must answer for their mismanagement of the program.

The bottom line is that we are asking for a moratorium, and not the cancellation of the program, so that the Auditor General has the time to review it. It is unfortunate that the Conservatives have pushed us to this point. One would think that a government that claims to be a good manager would have better managed this program.

[Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, NDP, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to the opposition motion.

First of all, this motion calls for all parties in the house to recognize that there have been abuses of the temporary foreign worker program, and I believe that everyone can admit that. It is not just the media that have been talking about this. Abuses have been noted for a number of years and this is not really a point of debate.

The motion also calls for action to be taken—real action, this time—in response to the repetitive abuses of recent years. I will talk about how the Conservative government has tried to fix the problems with its own program, which it then changed, creating the problems we see today.

First of all, the motion asks the government to impose an immediate moratorium on the stream for lower-skilled occupations. Why impose a moratorium? I explained why earlier. We have waited too long. The government has tried to close the loopholes one measure at a time where it could, knowing that various problems have been going on for years. However, with the scandals that are in the news right now, the government can no longer continue to say that it is going to take action and that it is going to put a small band-aid on a hemorrhaging wound hoping that people will forget about it until the next scandal occurs. The government really needs to stop doing that.

Secondly, the motion proposes asking the Auditor General to conduct an in-depth audit to determine the shortcomings of the existing program so that solutions can be implemented. Once again, I am not talking about Band-Aid solutions, but real solutions that will address the real problems created by this program.

I think this motion is extremely worthwhile. It responds to the existing temporary foreign worker crisis, and I would be very interested in seeing all of the parties rise in the House to call for serious action to be taken against the abuse of this program.

I would like to provide clarification on a point that has often been raised by my Conservative colleagues. The NDP is not opposed to temporary foreign workers, far from it. I would like to talk about a case in my riding where the need for temporary foreign workers is quite real.

I want to talk about the Murugan Temple.

This temple was built by incredibly hard-working Tamil people in my community. Many years ago, they had a dream and they collected a lot of money to build a temple for their community. They bought the land and built it one step at a time. They invited an engineer from their home country to make sure the temple would be a source of pride for the community. Indeed, it has an incredibly unique architecture that we can see from the highway. It is a beautiful temple, and I wish members could see it for themselves.

This temple is a cornerstone of our community now and serves a very large Tamil community in the West Island. It is a beautiful building that hosts a lot of festivals. One of the most popular festivals at the temple hosts thousands of people during the summertime, not only from my community or the West Island but from all across Canada and even from other countries. That is how important this temple is.

Today, people in the community are waiting to welcome a priest to the temple to continue their mission and to continue to serve the Tamil community's spiritual needs. However, the government refused the priest's first application submission, and they are still waiting for an answer on the second application.

Yes, I do recognize that people can come to Canada, work on a temporary basis, and serve a real need in a community. I know that well. Therefore, I continue to ask the minister, and other ministers involved in this file, to answer the community's request. This job cannot be fulfilled by anyone in Canada. The community needs someone with specific knowledge to help it continue to grow on a spiritual level.

That being said, just because we need temporary foreign workers does not mean that the program should continue to go on the way it is. As I said earlier, there are serious problems with the program. As the critic for citizenship and immigration, I would like to talk about this issue from a perspective that may be a little different than what we have heard so far in this debate.

In fact, I would like to talk about a study conducted by Ms. Bloemraad from the University of California, who looked at the success Canada has experienced with its immigration system and its pluralistic approach. Ms. Bloemraad is an immigration expert who has studied Canada's immigration system and its success at length. As this researcher said, compared to a number of European countries and our neighbour, the United States, Canada's immigration programs have been very successful because new immigrants to the country integrate and contribute fully to the economy. In general, Canadians see immigration as a very positive way to build Canada, which is not always the case in other countries.

Why is Canada so successful? The researcher mentions several factors. I do not have time to get into all of them, but one of the things she mentions is this:

The focus on permanent, rather than temporary, migration has also been critical, since it gives both immigrants and the receiving society a stake in promoting favorable long-term outcomes. Supportive institutions and policies are thus an important part of the story.

In summary, she says that it is very important to give immigrants the opportunity to come in as permanent residents, or to ensure they know, once they are here as temporary workers, that they have the opportunity to become permanent residents and, eventually, Canadian citizens. This is important in the way that Canadians view immigrants, and it motivates newcomers to get involved and become invested in the communities that welcome them. For us here in Canada, this is an important factor in the success of our immigration system.

Historically, Canada has taken in relatively few temporary foreign workers, accepting many more skilled workers in the economic class; these workers came to the country to meet a labour need but were able to settle here. We found that an impressive number of those people applied for citizenship, as compared to the situation in many other countries; they also became involved politically. We have seen their children and their children's children achieve enormous success academically and economically. Why? Because these newcomers were welcomed by Canadian society. They saw a future in Canada and they wanted to become involved in building the wonderful country that is Canada.

However, in recent years, we have unfortunately seen a turnaround in these immigration policies, specifically under the Conservatives. What we found, actually, is that the percentage of temporary foreign workers has soared. I have some figures here. From 2002 to 2012, the number of temporary foreign workers in Canada has more than tripled. In fact, we now accept many more temporary foreign workers than economic class immigrants as permanent residents, so we can see a change in Canada's policy and we have reason to fear the impact on Canada's success in the economic integration of immigrants.

Now, if the number of temporary foreign immigrants has risen so much over these many years, we may well wonder whether there was such a significant increase in the number of jobs that Canadians can no longer fill them. If we had seen that for a year or two, followed by a decline, that might have been another thing. However, that is not the case. What we are actually seeing is an alternative solution to welcoming economic class immigrants on a permanent basis, and that is to give out visas. It is difficult to say why. However, it is certainly not an appealing solution. Ms. Bloemraad's research into the matter at the University of California gives us a good deal of very interesting food for thought.

With that, I look forward to questions from my colleagues.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Minister of Employment and Social Development and Minister for Multiculturalism]

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, the member was completely wrong about the last point she made in her speech.

She presented a myth, a falsehood that we bring in more temporary foreign workers than permanent residents. That is the opposite of the truth. Every year, we bring in about 260,000 new permanent residents. Permanent residents are people who can eventually become citizens. On average, we bring in about 200,000 temporary foreign workers. That number is much lower than the number of permanent residents.

I see this all the time. The left would have us believe that the Conservative government has slashed the number of permanent residents in its immigration program and replaced them with temporary residents. That is not true. It is the opposite of true. I would like the member to set the record straight. She has to acknowledge that most temporary foreign workers by far are here for a few months, that many of them are from developed nations and that they are not seeking permanent residency in Canada.

[Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, NDP, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with some of the things my colleague said. It is true that not all temporary foreign workers want to become permanent residents. I agree with that. However, the important thing is to offer it to those who want it so that they, in turn, can invest themselves in Canadian society.

As for the numbers, that is strange, because the researcher I quoted earlier said this:

...the recent ballooning of temporary visas heralds a new and alarming trend that could upset the pro-immigrant consensus in Canada.

She then provides some numbers. In 2001, 186,788 people held temporary work permits in Canada; by 2010 this number stood at 432,682. That is a significant increase.

Did I say that there are more temporary foreign workers than permanent residents? No, that is not what I meant to say. What I said was that there is a difference between the number of new economic workers and the number of new temporary foreign workers.

There are other permanent residents who are sponsored as spouses, parents or children. However, when it comes to meeting Canada's economic needs, we can see that temporary foreign workers are being given priority more and more often.

Is that really the solution we are looking for? Is that really the path that Canada wants to go down? I would say no, and I am not the only one.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, out of concern, based on discussions or comments both from the Minister of Employment and Social Development and others, including some of the New Democratic members of Parliament, with regard to the agricultural industry, I am wondering if the NDP would be open to a friendly amendment that would make it explicitly clear that temporary foreign workers in the agricultural industry would not be affected by the motion that it is putting forward today. Given what has taken place and how the government seems to be so sure, would New Democrats support a friendly amendment that would make it crystal clear?

[Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, NDP, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his proposal. It would certainly be interesting to look at, considering that our critic, who sponsored today's opposition motion, said that agricultural workers were not targeted because they are in a different category than temporary foreign workers. It is something to look at more closely. We need to make sure that it is clear.

It is important that we keep certain numbers in mind. This program needs to undergo fundamental change. That is exactly what the motion aims to do.

The Auditor General spoke about these problems in 2009. Since then, the Conservatives have told us that they are fixing the problems, but we are still talking about the scandal today. We therefore cannot trust the Conservatives when they tell us not to worry because they have hastily thrown something together to address the issue. They have been saying that for years and we can see that it is not working.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak to this motion on behalf of the Liberal Party.

I would like to deal with the question of this huge mess that has been created in the area of temporary foreign workers: first, how we got into this mess, what the Conservative government did to make the number of temporary foreign workers double; second, why this doubling is a bad thing.

I will talk about why it is bad. It is because it changes our fundamental concept of immigration away from being a country of citizen immigrants and toward being a country of temporary worker immigrants, which Canadians do not want. Second, it is wrong because it costs Canadians jobs. Third, it is wrong because it leads to some exploitation of these temporary foreign workers.

Before I get onto those core points as to why it is damaging, let us just ask this question. How come, over the period of the current government, we got up to 214,000 temporary foreign workers entering the country in 2012 and a stock of some 335,000 such workers in this country in the most recent year? That is a doubling from before. The Conservatives keep talking about tightening, but before they tightened they had to loosen or we would not have doubled those numbers. The government does not let us in on all its secrets of exactly how it loosened, but it had to have loosened up the system or we would not have doubled that number.

We have at least three points coming from the minister's speech.

First, he talked about how we are so strict on wages that now we go by the median wage. However, we all know that not so long ago temporary foreign workers could have below average wages. Initially, some time ago, the Conservatives loosened by allowing workers to come in at below Canadian wages and now they take pride in tightening, bringing it back to the median. One of the reasons why more came here in the first place was because employers were, according to the law, allowed to pay lower wages.

The second point the minister made is that employers were now annoyed because they no longer had access to this accelerated labour market opinion, implying there used to be just that, an accelerated labour market opinion. Until recently, when the Conservatives began their tightening, they had loosened to allow these accelerated labour market opinions which meant that employers had access to a quick and easy way to import these temporary foreign workers.

The third point I would make has to do with the attitude of the government. We all know that famous quote from the president of McDonald's, that the minister gets it, and that might have been the straw that broke the camel's back that caused him to bring in this moratorium. However, clearly what the president of McDonald's had in mind was that the minister was onside with the corporate rationale for bringing in all these temporary foreign workers at the expense of Canadians. Whatever was going through the minister's mind, the members of the corporate sector at least had the impression that he was okay with it. Certainly, he had been the minister for many years and he had seen this explosion of temporary foreign workers over the years, and until very recently he did not appear to have done anything to stop it.

We do not have a full explanation because the Conservatives do not give us the information. However, we certainly know that awhile ago they had some accelerated process to get a labour market opinion that was favourable. They allowed workers in at lower wages, and the government, through the minister, certainly gave the impression to members of corporate Canada that they could go gung-ho to bring in all these temporary foreign workers.

Now that the crisis has hit them, they are being virtuous and tightening up the things that they have already loosened. However, if they are trying to explain why we doubled those numbers and why we got to where we are, we have to look at those loosening measures that they took over a number of years, because do not forget that this explosion of temporary foreign workers has occurred not just in recent months or years, but over the last seven or eight years when the current government has been in office. That is how, technically, they loosened to the point that this explosive growth in temporary foreign workers occurred.

Why is that explosive growth in temporary foreign workers damaging to the Canadian economy? Here I want to go through the three points I mentioned. First of all, I think the vast majority of Canadians, and certainly we in the Liberal Party, are very attached to a nation-building view of immigration where immigrants come in permanently with their families, get a job, have children, ultimately become citizens, and become Canadians like all of us. That is how this country has treated immigration for decades. I hope that is how we will always treat immigration.

The other way to do it is like in some European countries where they bring in temporary guest workers. They are not citizens, they are in brought in to do a specific job maybe for a year or maybe for two years, they come in and they are shipped out.

The minister a few minutes ago said they were not shifting away from permanent immigration to temporary foreign workers. In a sense he is right because the number of permanent residents who came in was 265,000, but the number of temporary foreign workers was 214,000. Temporary foreign workers are 75% of the permanent immigrants. If we went back eight years that would not be 75%, it would be maybe 30%. We have certainly had an explosive growth of temporary foreign worker intake, relatively stable permanent immigration so that the temporary foreign workers as a per cent of the permanent immigrants has been escalating sharply under the government's watch.

We object to that because we think that is changing the fundamental nature of this country's immigration under the Conservatives' watch in a way that is gradual and subtle enough that not many Canadians will notice. While it is true that some of these temporary foreign workers are offered a pathway to citizenship or permanent residence as the minister stated, the proportion is not very big or else we would have seen the immigration numbers go up as well as the number of temporary foreign workers go up. We have not. We have seen an explosion of temporary foreign workers' stability in permanent immigration.

Let me make a caveat. We are not opposed to temporary foreign workers. We are in favour of temporary foreign workers in those sectors, in those parts of the country where employers, after searching diligently and paying decent wages, cannot find Canadians to do the job. For example, one person in my constituency runs restaurants with specialized food and employs Canadians, but he can only find people outside of the country who can cook this specialized food. We think he should be able to bring those people in and that will allow his restaurants, which are otherwise staffed by Canadians, to function. If they are not allowed in, which they may not be under the government's moratorium, then the restaurants might have to shut down and that would be most unfortunate. We favour a limited number of temporary foreign workers, but not the explosion that the minister has produced.

The first problem is distorting the nature of our immigration and the second problem is jobs for Canadians. I hardly have to even mention this because we have seen it so much on television, from a bank, to a restaurant, to the C.D. Howe Institute which is hardly run by a horde of socialists, their studies show that this has had a substantial positive impact on Canadian unemployment. The minister again talks out of both sides of his mouth because in one breath he says the median wage is very high, they have to come in at the median wage and in the next breath he is lecturing the private sector to pay higher wages. He cannot have it both ways. Wages have been quite stagnant in this country and part of that has been due to this explosion of temporary foreign workers.

C.D. Howe and others have shown that this has had a negative effect on Canadians getting jobs, so that is not how the system is supposed to work. When Canadians see these extreme stories of Canadians who have worked for a restaurant for 20-plus years having to train temporary foreign workers who will then take their own jobs against their will, that resonates with Canadians. It is clearly wrong, but it is something that the government has been allowing to happen with a wink and a nod, if not with open approval.

The third part of the issue is that there has been some exploitation of temporary foreign workers that has been reported in the media. I am not sure of the amount, but certainly there are stories of some restaurants—for example, McDonald's—that apparently require foreign workers to sleep in company houses and accept reduced wages. I am not sure of the truth of that, but certainly there are those allegations.

To recapitulate, the government has deliberately, through a policy of easing—only recently followed by tightening—permitted an explosion of temporary foreign workers. This has had negative effects for Canada: one, it has distorted our immigration away from permanent immigrants toward temporary workers; two, it has created employment problems for Canadians; and three, it has led to a certain amount of exploitation.

I have tried to establish the mechanisms through which the government has permitted the explosion to occur and why it is bad. My next question is what we should do about it. Now that we have arrived at this sorry state and the country is an uproar about it, what should we do?

The government has eased up continuously, for many years, so that over many years this growth has occurred. Only recently, under pressure, has it suddenly pretended to, or tried to, tighten up. However, one cannot fix overnight a problem that has been festering and growing for at least five years. One cannot suddenly send these people home. They have children; they have lives; and that is certainly not what we are proposing to do.

If the government had dealt with the problem surgically over the years to prevent the explosion from happening in the first place, it would not be in the sad state of affairs it finds itself in today. Not acting properly for years, it has been forced to act bluntly now, and it has used a sledgehammer approach to declare a moratorium on the whole food services sector, which is a desperate, extreme move. It will definitely hurt some of the bad people, but it will also hurt a large number of good people who will be caught in the crossfire by the government's move, which represents a desperate attempt to save itself when it has gotten itself into this huge Conservative mess. The fact that it has come to this after years of neglect, years of encouragement of inappropriate growth, is sad, but now it is here. That is what it has done, and there will undoubtedly be substantial collateral damage as a consequence of the government's action.

This is what we in the Liberal Party want the government to do. First, we have asked for the Auditor General to investigate. If ever there was a program needing investigation by the Auditor General, this is a prime candidate, because we know from what we hear in the media that there have been abuses. No one denies that. The McDonald's story and others show there have clearly been abuses. Why did these abuses occur? How widespread have they been? What were the mechanisms involved that allowed the explosion of the numbers of temporary foreign workers? This is perfect fodder for an auditor general. It would be good for all Canadians to know how this disaster happened, and the Auditor General is the best person to find out.

I am not saying this just because we want to punish the government with a bad report from the Auditor General. We would not mind that, but that is not the main purpose. The main purpose is that the Auditor General might give us a compass for where to go in the future, because in order to know where to go in the future, it is best to understand where one has been in the past and the present. We do not have very good information on the past and the present because the government will not give it to us; so if we get the Auditor General in, without any limitations on his scope for action, we will get an unbiased, clear, complete report of where we stand today, and knowing where we stand today will help us very much to devise a plan for where we go tomorrow.

Where do we in the Liberal Party want to go in the medium term? It is hard to say precisely, when we are in the middle of a storm and we are in the middle of a crisis of the Conservatives' creation. We cannot suddenly solve a problem overnight that has taken five to ten years to develop.

In the longer run, however, the steady state, what we would want is a system in which the vast majority of Canadians coming to this country are on the track to permanent residence and citizenship, rather than in the temporary foreign worker program. We would also want a situation where the temporary foreign workers do not come at the expense of the jobs of Canadians.

At the same time, if those two conditions could be fulfilled so that the vast majority of our immigrants would be coming permanently and we would have job opportunities for Canadians, of course we would recognize that in the agricultural and specialized sectors—like academia, as the minister said—and many other areas, temporary foreign workers are a good thing. We are not opposed to that in principle, and we know that some sectors depend intimately on them. What we are opposed to is the abuse and the escalating growth that the government has permitted, which has led to all of the problems I have described.

Finally, I know the Conservative government. It loves to blame everything on the Liberal Party, even when it makes no sense. I will give two examples and then I will sit down.

I produced a report showing the explosion of processing times for every category of immigrant, citizen, and visitor from 2007 to 2012. It had gone up everywhere. Let me remind members that 2007 was a year of Conservative government, as was each and every year since until 2012. I was talking about 2007 to 2012 and what had happened then. What was the response of the government to this report? It was all the fault of the Liberals. That is a miraculous fault. I do not understand how it could have been our fault when it was all under the Conservatives' watch.

It is the same argument that this minister is using today with regard to the temporary foreign worker fiasco. It is all the fault of the Liberals, because we brought in this lower-skilled program back in 2002.

Let me give the House two numbers. In 2005, the last year of the Liberal government, there were 4,307 temporary foreign workers in the lower-skilled program. In 2012, the most recent year for which we have data, there were 30,267. I suppose it is all the fault of the Liberals that the number grew from 4,000 to 30,000 over all these years under the Conservatives' watch. It is all our fault that the number of lower-skilled temporary workers multiplied by seven under the Conservatives' time in power, just as it is the fault of the Liberals that the processing time for immigrants has gone up 1500% or more under the watch of the Conservatives. It seems to be in their DNA, even though it makes zero sense.

Let me repeat what I said at the beginning. Not only is this a huge mess that has taken years to get into and will take years to get out of, but it is a Conservative mess. It is a mess that belongs to nobody else. I believe that Canadians do not have confidence that the Conservatives will be able to fix this mess, which they took oh so many years to create. Sadly, for a little while longer, it is a Conservative government, so we have to look to it for leadership in the solution to the mess it created.

My first recommendation to the government would be, as my colleague said in question period, to request the Auditor General to do an immediate and urgent review of this whole program, so we can get some impression of where we stand. From that, we might get some idea of how we might go forward.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Minister of Employment and Social Development and Minister for Multiculturalism]

Mr. Speaker, I must admit my disappointment. I know the member for Markham—Unionville is a very intelligent man. He is an economist.

By the way, if I am not mistaken, he was an economist at RBC, at which he was just pointing fingers. Am I right about that? Was it the RBC, member?

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

It was, indeed, Mr. Speaker.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Southeast, AB]

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.

[The Deputy Speaker, Joe Comartin]

We only have a few minutes left, so I do want the member for Markham—Unionville to have his opportunity to respond.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his reference to the Royal Bank. These days, I love all the banks the same, and the insurance companies.

I guess my answer to the minister is that the onus is on him. In order to have had this huge growth, they have to have loosened somehow. If my theories as to what were the loosening elements might not be totally accurate, the onus is on him to tell us what it was that made that growth so high. The only reason we do not know is the secretiveness of the government.

So, if he could elucidate on that and clarify why this exponential growth took place in the first place, I am sure all Canadians would be grateful.

[The Deputy Speaker, Joe Comartin]

We have time for one more short question.

The hon. member for Scarborough—Guildwood, ask a short question, please.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Mr. Speaker, during question period, the minister had great fun saying that various members of the opposition, particularly the member for Papineau, had submitted requests under this particular piece of legislation. It struck me, and I wondered whether it strikes the hon. member, that possibly there are so many members from both the opposition and the government side coming to the minister about specific issues due to the fact that this program is actually in such a mess that individual members have to intervene on behalf of constituents to straighten out the messes created by the minister in the first place.

That is question one.

Question two has to do with the fact that some financial institutions have been using this program in a way that no one, and I cannot even imagine the minister, would have contemplated; namely, using Canadians to train temporary foreign workers so that the Canadians, at the end of the training, no longer have jobs.

Now—

[The Deputy Speaker, Joe Comartin]

Order, please.

The hon. member for Markham—Unionville has one minute, maximum, to respond.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, on the first point, it is a little like immigration. I think the hon. member knows, as I do, that if anything, the number of people coming to us with problems on immigration has increased exponentially, partly because Conservative MPs do not do much on that topic, so we get people from their ridings as well. For whatever reason, the numbers and the burden have increased. Does that mean the immigration system is in a mess? Maybe it does.

The point I would make is that a member of Parliament of any party has a responsibility to pursue the needs of his or her constituents. Just because I were to ask the minister about a temporary foreign worker, representing my constituents, does not mean that I necessarily favour the program and it should not provide the government with ammunition to try to shoot us down. We are simply doing our job representing our constituents, and it is a phony bit of ammunition to use, as if it does not have any other arguments, to try to shoot us down when we raise legitimate points on the temporary foreign worker program.

[The Deputy Speaker, Joe Comartin]

Order, please. It being 5:15 p.m., it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the business of supply.

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[The Deputy Speaker, Joe Comartin]

All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.