Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this debate on an important issue.
The temporary foreign worker program is important because it was originally a solution to a problem that was bedevilling employers in Canada and was costing potential economic opportunities and productivity for our economy. It is a program that, managed well, is very important, not just for employers but also for the entire economy, while providing some benefit to businesses that can otherwise not fill jobs with the skilled people they need to have their businesses be a success.
The program is important to the business community as well, especially small businesses and seasonal businesses.
I want to highlight that, as well as the importance to the people who have come as temporary foreign workers. They are filling a real need that cannot be filled by Canadians. It is a win-win because they develop skills or bring their skills to Canada, and are able to support families. In a way, it is a form of helping countries that are less fortunate than Canada to help with their economy and support families in those countries. It is essentially a positive program.
I will be sharing my time, Mr. Speaker, with the member for Toronto Centre.
This has an important purpose for Canada and for businesses, but unfortunately it has begun to go off the rails. That is simply through mismanagement. It is through sheer incompetence. It is not because this program is not needed. It is not because there are not many businesses that need to partake of it. There are. It is because it has simply been mismanaged.
Unfortunately, this situation has led to a crisis. The government has had to make a heavy-handed response that in some cases exacerbates the situation, rather than actually reviewing the program when the original criticism came out and figuring out how to manage it properly.
To work, the temporary foreign worker program has to be targeted where there really is a need. To do that, the government clearly needs to have information about where there is need. As the minister has said, in broad brush strokes, we do not have a shortage of workers to fill jobs, but in specific areas we do. In specific talents and in the specific pockets of the country there are shortages. That is what the temporary foreign worker program is intended to fill.
How do we know where there are those shortages? That is one of the points of mismanagement. The government simply does not have that data. It has not figured out how it can collect that data. The government has not provided that data as a basis under which the temporary foreign worker program can be targeted where there is a need.
The government, as we have heard a number of times today, was using Kijiji to produce facts and figures as to where there were vacancies. Most economists would say that is a pretty woeful substitution for actual facts and figures. The government's latest labour market report points to a job vacancy rate of 1.5%, dramatically less than the 4% vacancy rate that was mentioned on budget day in February, based on scrolling through Kijiji sites and using that as a basis for analysis. It is a very flawed approach.
As the assistant parliamentary budget officer, Mostafa Askari, has said, Canada lacks reliable job data. Statistics Canada could do this work, but it needs to be made a priority. It needs the resources to do it. It could improve its research on job vacancies normally based on surveys of employers rather than website postings that are completely unreliable. By using false data, it is fumbling blindly to really figure out where this program is needed and how to target it. Therefore, it really has not been targeted. In fact, it has been abused.
The numbers of temporary foreign workers have gone up radically since 2005, from 141,000 to 338,000 in 2012. This program, abused this way, has been costly to employers, to workers, to the temporary foreign workers themselves and to the Canadian unemployed. The bottom line is that the businesses that need these workers pay as well.
To give an example of this ballooning, I have gone to the C.D. Howe Institute report, which is also highly critical of this program for having actually driven up unemployment in my province of British Columbia. According to the C.D. Howe report, unemployment in British Columbia has been driven up by more than 4% based on the flood of temporary foreign workers taking jobs that Canadians would otherwise have taken.
This is the example in the C.D. Howe Institute report. In the pilot project for occupations requiring lower levels of formal training, in British Columbia and Alberta the number in 2005 of those workers was 2,041, but by 2008 it had ballooned to 56,540 workers. Clearly, this has been a program completely out of control. Those were for lower skilled people requiring lower levels of training. Therefore, this program has gone off the rails.
One of the long-term consequences of beginning to replace immigration with temporary foreign workers has been seen in Europe in the years after the guest worker program in Germany, a program that was started because the unemployment rate was very low. However, with the flood of temporary workers beginning to create a two-tier worker system in Germany, that led to other problems, such as entrepreneurs and small businesses being driven out of business because of the competition from lower-priced workers in the temporary worker program and also pressures on social services. Therefore, countries like Germany reversed course and went back toward the kind of targeted, high-skilled workers or a very carefully managed program, like we used to have in Canada and no longer have.
There are many examples, and others have given some, of the kind of abuses of this program, whether it is HD Mining Limited in British Columbia, which required Mandarin as a condition for work and when it was not fulfilled by local very capable miners, temporary foreign workers were brought in to fill those jobs, or a number of other instances. This is simply unacceptable, driving unemployment up and based on faulty information statistically.
The cost to the businesses now is that the allegations of abuse have led to some blanket moratorium by the minister to bring a sledgehammer to this problem, which should have been fixed before, could have been fixed before and was just ignored. Of course, that costs the employers and the businesses that really need these temporary foreign workers.
That is not to speak of the impact of this moratorium on the foreign workers themselves right now. For people who are already in Canada, who are in these jobs and are trying to renew their permits, suddenly there is a great deal of uncertainty. It is creating some chaos in the industry.
All of this was unnecessary had the government listened to the Liberals a year ago when we called for a review of this program. The government has known about the program, because its own reports and HRDC have pointed it out. Therefore, it is now time to no longer procrastinate, support the Liberal Party motion, bring in the Auditor General to review the program, make the other improvements and restore it to the program it used to be and can once again be.