Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the motion by my colleague, the member for Markham—Unionville. It is a lengthy motion, so I will not read it out. However, I am really pleased we are debating this in the House.
There is no doubt that over the last number of months, Canadians right across the country, those who live in Canada as permanent residents and Canadian citizens, are really becoming very disturbed by how broken the temporary foreign worker program really is.
At this time, it behooves us not to blame the workers who come to our country. They only come because we have a government that grants them permission to enter the country. It is a government that should be basing the LMOs on real needs not made up needs, according to Kijiji and other such crazy information gathering.
We have to get away from the rhetoric that the temporary foreign workers are coming to our country to steal our jobs. They apply for jobs that are advertised. Often, they are the victims of unscrupulous agents and consultants and end up having to pay huge sums of money. They are coming to our country in good faith as workers. They do not steal our jobs. We bring them here and, as evidence has shown over the last number of weeks, when they are here, not all of them but many of them, are exposed to horrendous abuse. It is abuse that goes as far as threats to their lives, removal from the country and not getting the wages they should.
I am very proud to be a Canadian. Canadians I talk to across the country are very disturbed, as am I, when we hear of the kind of abuse happening. We are a nation that has been built by immigrants, except for the aboriginal people who were already here. Most of us in the House, and across Canada, are either first generation or descendants of immigrants who came here to build our amazing country. Therefore, it is very disturbing for Canadians to know that, first under the Liberal government and now under the Conservative government, there is a different notion of how we look at immigration and our workforce. It is a marked disrespect for the Canadian workforce and Canadians when the government has allowed this program to get out of control, as it has.
For the last three years, I have been raising concerns about the program. It is not just one stream, but we are hearing concerns from nearly all the streams of what is wrong with this pathway to work in Canada. It is not a pathway to citizenship. I heard my colleague say that some do get their citizenship, but when we look at the number of people who come here and the number who are converted into citizenship, the number is quite small.
When we criticize the program and ask for it to be fixed, we hear lots of comments that the NDP is opposed to it, for example, that it wants to shut down the oil sands and put employers out of business. At no time have the New Democrats taken a position that the program needs to be shut down totally. However, we do say that the program is so broken throughout that it needs an independent review so we can fix it and make it work. Yes, we did ask for a moratorium on the low-skilled category because the rationale for temporary foreign workers did not hold true. The stories and the numbers out there were just horrendous.
At the end of the day, we always have to go back to what the government does, which is blaming other people. Instead of answering the questions and dealing with a broken program, it wants to deflect and gets into this blaming and pointing fingers.
Nobody in the opposition, not one MP, has the authority to issue an LMO to get a worker here under any of the categories, let alone the low-skilled categories. There is only one group of people, one government, the Conservative Canadian government, and it rests with the portfolio of the Minister of Employment and Social Development. Only that department can issue an LMO.
I am hearing that due diligence is done, but I want to know what kind of due diligence was done when hundreds of LMOs were given to McDonald's in Victoria, which has high double-digit youth unemployment. What kind of an oversight is that when retail jobs once again are getting LMOs? This feigning of surprise every time we hear of this by the minister is wearing a bit thin. I say that it is time for the government to stand in the House to say it has a broken system, has failed in its oversight and needs to fix this program, and that in order to restore the confidence of Canadians in this program, it will have an independent review. It needs to have that moratorium for the whole low-skilled category. There is one simple reason for that, which is that the abuse and the overindulgence of LMOs is not just limited to the fast food industry. We have also heard of retail workers.
The government has said that as soon as it finds out there is abuse it is quick to act. Therefore, when a prominent national broadcaster broadcasts a teleconference call from the CEO of McDonald's, suddenly we get three employers being put on the blacklist. Once again, another story broke a couple of days ago and we are now finding out that the employer was hiring people in retail across this country to work in malls. The workers were very brave. They went to CBS and the RCMP. They were getting threats against their life. They were being forced to live in a place with the supervisor. They came and reported that their apartment was trashed.
Despite all of that, it is only when this came up in the media again that the employer is now on the blacklist but was not on it earlier. Surely, we cannot say that our enforcement strategy is, “Let's find out what the media does and when we're caught we'll say, 'Oh, my goodness, we didn't know this was happening. We're now going to punish that employer'.”
Let us be clear. At no time will we vilify employers who are playing by the rules the government has made. However, we will vilify and blame employers who are abusing the employees once they are here. We cannot blame the employers totally for the LMOs because that is in the hands of the government. If they are getting them wrongfully, it is also in the hands of the government to investigate, punish, and make sure that things happen. I know wonderful employers. I have been to their workplaces. I have seen that in some categories there is a need. However, I can say that when the program has come into the kind of disrepute that it has right now, there is no saving it without an independent review.
I will be moving an amendment a bit later, but right now I will read out what the amendment will be. I will take a moment to move it before I finish speaking.
I will be making an amendment to the motion moved by my colleague from Beauport—Limoilou for the imposition of an immediate moratorium on the stream for lower-skills occupations, which includes fast food services and restaurant jobs. I know my colleagues across the way are not going to have a problem with that because they just voted for it the other night. Really, it is to make sure that there is a constructive review of that program and, until that happens, that moratorium remains in place.
We have got to get to the stage when we have to start being proactive. We need to review and revise this program so that LMOs are issued not only when employers have satisfied the conditions but the government has data that it can rely on. Only the other day, the Kijiji data was removed from the government's website and now we are suddenly finding out that the labour crisis is not as the government has talked about for the last few years. What we need is data.
I know my colleagues across the way have an allergy to data, science, and informed opinion, but the numbers cannot be made up for labour market opinions by grabbing them from the air. We need sound data. Data was collected, by the way, by Statistics Canada that has gathered dust because the government did not think analyzing that data was a priority. This is a government that does not like to make decisions based on fact.
I really appreciated the minister admitting yesterday that there is no overall labour or skills shortage. I had the privilege of being at Cloverdale Kwantlen university campus on Friday. It was truly amazing. The room was packed as far as I could see of young people living in Canada, who are in the trades program, welding and other courses. They are worried because they have friends who are qualified welders and cannot get jobs. They are aware of the fact that they have finished their prerequisites and some of them cannot get placements. For them, it is horrendous to realize that while they are busy investing in their career paths, the doorway is being shut to them, and they see a very bleak future.
I met a wonderful young man who had a Bachelor of Science degree and really wanted to go into the science field, but seeing no jobs there, then chose to go into welding. Now he has a question to ask of us, which is this. Why is it, with skilled tradespeople right here in Canada, the doors seem to be wide open to temporary foreign workers?
As members know, New Democrats have asked for a moratorium on the lower-skilled category, but I want to make it clear that does not include seasonal agricultural workers, because that is a separate stream that has a completely separate application form and code, nor does it include the live-in caregivers program, though we want to include them in the independent audit because we are hearing of all kinds of abuses and difficulties that live-in caregivers are experiencing once they are here. We need to address the whole program, not just components of it.
These young men and women went to the microphone and made passionate pleas. They do not have anything against the temporary foreign workers who come here because they realize that they are coming here to make a living, but they are questioning the wisdom of our legislature in this country right now of the current government as it gives away the jobs that they should have.
We have heard stories from Alberta and B.C. We are hearing stories from coast to coast to coast, not only from the low-skilled stream but from other categories as well. Sometimes I wince when I hear the term “low-skilled stream”, but that is the category in this program. It does not show any disrespect for the work done by people who work in these categories.
I have seen innumerable young people living in Canada who tell me “Mrs. Sims, we would love to be able to work at McDonald's. We would love to be able to work.” There was a time when we saw that as prime training grounds. I remember, as a high school counsellor, saying that to students who said they were going to work at McDonald's. I would say it is a great training ground. It did not matter whether they were going to go into the medical or engineer field or any other job, it was a starting place. Now many young people are telling me that those doors are shut to them. I am hearing from young people and not just young people. C.D. Howe, not a think tank I often agree with, recently produced some research. This is a think tank that normally supports the government. It has said that in Alberta and B.C. 4% unemployment could be attributed to the increase in the numbers for the lower-skilled category. That alone should force my colleagues across the way to stop and do some serious thinking about this.
It is time to stop pointing fingers. We are willing to sit down with the government and look for a way forward. We do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. What we do want is something that works for Canada and works for everyone who lives here.
There are new Canadians who worked very hard, and some of them had to wait a very long time to get into Canada. Now they are here, whether they came through the refugee stream or through family reunification. The government has turned that stream into a lottery system and has basically shut the door on family reunification. Despite that, people have come to this country with hopes and dreams. They are often the people who would be going into these entry-level jobs. What they are now telling me, what they are telling us coast to coast to coast, is they do not have access to those entry-level jobs.
This is a very serious situation. What we are going to do is support this motion, but at this stage I am moving an amendment.
I move that the motion be amended by adding the following, “and the imposition of an immediate moratorium on the stream for lower-skilled occupations, which include fast food, service, and restaurant jobs.”
