Mr. Speaker, we have made reforms to the temporary foreign worker program to ensure that Canadians are first in line for available jobs.
Unfortunately, members of the opposition voted against all of our measures to strengthen the program, particularly the members from the NDP, I might add.
These measures include: the authority to conduct on-line inspections to make sure employers are meeting the conditions of the program; introducing legislative authority to impose significant financial penalties for employers who break the rules, and that may include jail time; the ability to ban non-compliant employers from the program for two years, and immediately add their names to a public blacklist; requiring employers who legitimately rely on temporary foreign workers, due to a lack of qualified Canadian applicants, to have a plan to transition to a Canadian workforce over time; requiring employers to pay temporary foreign workers at the prevailing wage by removing existing wage flexibility; adding questions to employer labour market opinion applications to ensure that the temporary foreign worker program is not used to facilitate the outsourcing of Canadian jobs; introducing fees for employers for LMO processing and increasing the fees for work permits, so that hardworking taxpayers are no longer subsidizing these costs; making English and French the only languages that can be used as a job requirement when hiring through the temporary foreign worker program, and this is a must; and suspending the accelerated labour market opinion process.