Mr. Speaker, I am pleased join this debate on an important issue.
I am joining it at a point when the inconsistency for which the Liberal Party has been renowned is on spectacular display, not just on the question of temporary foreign workers but with regard to immigration policy.
We have just heard the member for Scarborough—Guildwood say that this is a program that has merit. A couple of hours ago his leader said that at best it was a limited Band-Aid solution and at worst it was a program that was driving down wages, putting Canadians out of work, and something that was extremely undesirable for the Canadian economy and for Canadian immigration policy.
Which is it? Even after having put forward an opposition day motion, the Liberal Party cannot make up its mind whether it wants a temporary foreign worker program or not and whether it has merit or is a Band-Aid solution that is driving down wages. This again reminds us that the Liberal Party gave us an immigration program that was rampant with abuse. It gave us a temporary foreign worker program that was only that, where there was almost no pathway to permanent residence and where people were expected to be here, be quiet for a short period of time and then go home.
We are in a very different world today. We, in this party and in this government, are delighted to have the opportunity to highlight our reforms, to highlight the improvements we have made to the immigration system generally and to highlight the reforms my colleague, the Minister of Employment and Social Development, has made to the temporary foreign worker program as recently as the beginning of this year and more recent with this moratorium, which shuts down a stream of temporary foreign workers coming into our country and began with the Liberal Party.
If there is abuse in this stream, I would love to hear all the opposition members who have spoken and who have asked question to at least take responsibility for the fact that this stream, which led to the moratorium in recent weeks, a painful decision, because it is always painful to see abuse being committed, was created by a Liberal government, not subject to oversight from the very beginning because of its predilection for avoiding these forms of accountability.
Even on the fundamentals of today's motion that concern my portfolio, we are not sure where the Liberal government stands. The plan that the member for Papineau mentioned has five points. One of them is to increase pathways for immigration for temporary foreign workers to Canada. That is exactly what our government has been doing for eight years.
The motion does not even mention immigration. The motion talks about tightening up the temporary foreign worker program, turning back the clock to an era when we did not let accurate labour market signals, as the Minister of Employment and Social Development was just saying they should do, determine how we built up and formed our labour market, first and foremost, on the basis of Canadian workers, second, on the basis of immigrants and only as a last resort on the basis of temporary foreign workers.
The motion does not even talk about permanent resident as a status to which temporary foreign workers could graduate if they met the criteria. It is not in the motion.
We do not know whether to believe the Liberal leader, who may have made a desperate attempt to change the motion or change the emphasis of the motion. We have not heard an amendment from the Liberals that would bring the word “immigration” into the motion. Do we believe the member for Markham—Unionville, who has been spectacularly inconsistent in discussing the temporary foreign worker program?
We do not know where the Liberals want to go. That is not unusual. It has been their modus operandi for decades. Let us just remind ourselves of some of these stations along the way.
The member for Papineau mentioned that his father had brought in the temporary foreign worker program in the early 1970s. That was at a time when there really was not a pathway for these workers to become immigrants. There was not a program dedicated to making temporary workers and temporary residents permanent. That dead-end pathway was extended to low-skilled workers by the Chrétien government in 2002.
I can speak from personal experience, having worked in our embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s and the early part of this century, that there was a particularly shocking sub-stream of the temporary foreign worker program that came across my desk because, in the minds of those of us in the embassy in Moscow, it was often linked to organized crime. That was the exotic dancer stream of temporary foreign workers brought in by a Liberal government, scaled up to include hundreds of people who not only populated certain establishments, which the members across the way are smiling about because they take this lightly—