Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Scarborough—Guildwood for what I think were broadly constructive comments on the debate.
Let me just correct two things that his Liberal colleagues have been saying in the debate.
First, they claim that we have lowered the advertising requirements for employers to obtain positive labour market opinions. I have confirmed with my officials that there is no corporate memory in my ministry of that having happened. In fact, we have recently increased the requirements for the duration of advertising. This is a period during which employers have to advertise for Canadians at the prevailing regional wage rate for the job before they can apply for an LMO.
Second, Liberal members have suggested that we have extended the work permits to four years. This is a misapprehension. In fact, we put in place a new limit stipulating that a temporary foreign worker can only renew his or her work permit to a maximum of four years and then has to leave Canada for four years. That is actually a restrictive measure that we brought into effect, and it has upset a lot of employers, to be honest.
I think we all agree that we have inadequate labour market information. That is an issue we need to get to, but I want to say one thing about the notion that the Auditor General or somebody can solve this and have a perfect insight into this program, and it is this: sitting here in Ottawa reading data tables does not tell us what the real, lived reality is on the ground in certain regions with full employment, where employers are metaphorically pulling their hair out over these issues of not having enough local labour.
Would the member agree with me that we need to get a bit more of a tactile, local, on-the-ground, real-world view of what is happening in our labour market, and not just a kind of Ottawa-knows-best centralized view of the complexity of our country's labour market?