Mr. Speaker, way more years ago than I care to think about, when I first came here, I had the privilege of travelling with the then minister of immigration, Elinor Caplan, to the Netherlands. We were on a trip to see how other systems worked, and when we stopped in the Netherlands, we were somewhat surprised to learn that it actually had no immigration system. In its history, it was a producer of immigrants. Its experience was entirely with emigration and those who went to the Netherlands entered as temporary foreign workers. It had no concept that these people would actually want to move there and become citizens of the Netherlands.
The emphasis was on temporary foreign workers. Sometimes “temporary” meant several generations in the same country, “foreign” definitely meant foreign, that these folks would live in their own little enclave, and “workers” were the workers in job areas that no person from the Netherlands really wanted. It was an exposure, which I did not appreciate at the time, to how a temporary foreign worker program can actually run amok.
Here we are, 15 years later, and we are in a situation where we have a program that has kind of run out of control. I take it from the minister's remarks that about 80% of the Liberal motion is acceptable to him because it is a recognition that there are anomalies and difficulties in the system for which the program was not intended.
Liberals' understanding of how a temporary foreign worker program should work is that “temporary” should be temporary and “foreign” may well be foreign, but we ultimately want people to come to this country so that “temporary” becomes permanent, “foreign” becomes domestic, and “worker” becomes career. That is a good element of this potential program.
Every nation in the world needs a temporary foreign worker program. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about that. There are work shortages in specific areas and we need a well-designed program. We do not need a program that has these kinds of difficulties.
I wind forward 14 or 15 years, and I was in my office at this time last year when a woman came in to visit me. Members may or may not know, but Scarborough is home to a lot of back-office functions for financial services. Many financial institutions that members would recognize are located in Scarborough and have a number of back-office functions, which are good jobs. This woman was describing her situation to me. Her situation was that her particular financial institution had brought in a number of temporary foreign workers to work with her and her colleagues, and her job was to train these temporary foreign workers so that, after a period of time, they would return to their own home, in this particular case India. Then, at that point, she and her colleagues would turn out the lights and transfer all of those jobs to where the temporary foreign workers were. After hearing that, one would ask why we would design a program along those lines. It was not as if this was an isolated incident.
I will read from a news article:
Another source, who claims to have worked at TD for more than 15 years, wrote in to say the company recently announced the employee's position redundant. In order to receive a severance package, the employee claims he or she had to spend four months training the people the company hired to fill the so-called redundant position. “This has been happening for months at TD,” the email read, adding the company is in a trial phase for such shifts.
This issue blew up at this time last year. Several CEOs of large financial institutions had to go on television to say that it was true and that they were trying to find jobs for the Canadians who were “redundant”. Indeed, some of them did get placed. Under media and possibly even government pressure, they found they had jobs in that institution. However, had there not been that light exposing this temporary foreign worker program, I do not think anything would have happened.
How does it make any sense for a Canadian government program to bring in temporary foreign workers in order that Canadians will no longer have jobs, leaving taxpayers to pay the employment insurance? That does not seem to be a sensible program. If this motion does nothing more than stimulate the government to review that particular anomaly, I think it will be worthwhile.
One issue that keeps coming up is the difficulty with the data, particularly the LMOs and these various acronyms that indicate what the labour market need is in the area. Statistics Canada is in real difficulty these days, which is entirely due to the decisions made in 2010-2011 to degrade its own data. Media reports a while back said that the minister was relying on Kijiji; now he says that he is no longer relying on Kijiji, but we do not know quite what he is relying on. Possibly he has gone from a Kijiji board to a Ouija board, but we are not entirely sure about that.
The problem is that the data quoted by both the government and the opposition are somewhat flawed. What we can say is that the temporary foreign worker program has gone from about 120,000 up to 220,000. At any given time there are about 338,000 temporary foreign workers in this country.
If we look at the data, we start to ask some serious questions. The minister's predecessor was warned about this situation. This is not some issue that has just dropped out of the sky. I will quote:
Evidence suggests that, in some instances, employers are hiring temporary foreign workers in the same occupation and location as Canadians who are collecting EI regular benefits.
How does that possibly make any sense?
It goes on to say, “In January 2012, Albertan employers received positive confirmation”—i.e., they received permission to hire—“1,261 TFW positions for food counter attendants”.
Meanwhile, nearly 350 people made claims for EI in exactly the same category that very year.
It continues:
Furthermore, over 2,200 general farm workers submitted claims for EI in the same month, while employers received approval to hire over 1,500 foreign nationals for the same occupation.
This kind of stuff stops making sense. I do not think any right-thinking Canadian can say why we are using taxpayers' money to have a program to make sure that Canadians cease to have jobs and we in turn pay for it out of our own EI.
I was encouraged by the openness of the minister to many of the proposals in the opposition day motion. I think he is 80% there and I think he could get to 100% by the end of the day if he invited the Auditor General to conduct a review.
I join with my colleague from Malpeque, who said we can walk and chew gum at the same time: we can ask the Auditor General to conduct an audit while we address the problems the minister agrees are in the program in the first place.