Linda Duncan

[Petitions, April 30th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising to present two petitions from residents of Alberta and Saskatchewan asking the government to reverse the cuts to postal service.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, clearly I agree, because that is precisely what our motion is. It is to call on the Auditor General to do a program audit of the entire temporary foreign worker program.

However, there is more the government can do in tandem, in parallel, with the work of the Auditor General. For example, it could genuinely step up an enforcement regime. There is actually no on-the-ground surveillance regime for this temporary foreign worker program. The government simply sits back and waits for complaints.

I am informed that the government actually brought the border guards in to deal with McDonald's, which is pretty incredible.

While there is a lot of talk about the penalties, what we do not have is an inspectorate under this program, under labour or immigration or wherever the government wants to have it. They would be people who were fully trained and deployed full time to the regions where there are major numbers of temporary foreign workers.

There is a lot that could be done. We fully support an audit by the Auditor General. There is a lot the government could do. It is the government's responsibility to deliver a credible program that does not prejudice Canadian workers.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, if the hon. member had listened closely, he would have heard not just once but twice that I mentioned that there may be some exceptions where we need to be emphasizing that there may be a need for temporary foreign workers. I mentioned the province of Saskatchewan twice.

The bigger question is whether the government is basing its decision to issue an LMO simply on a company saying, “this is the going rate and this is what we are going to pay our service workers or our oil and gas workers”.

In the case of Alberta, it has been discovered that, in fact, employers have been undercutting salaries. The government has been inappropriately issuing LMOs and driving down salaries.

There can be many reasons for a labour shortage. Maybe the salaries are not appropriate. Maybe there is no appropriate housing or people do not want to relocate. There are a lot of issues. Of course, we have raised the issue of a shortage of affordable housing in this country.

The issues the member raised are exactly what we would like the Auditor General to take a look at. Where exactly are the labour shortages? Do we have enough data on that? Do we need to be supporting Statistics Canada actually starting to analyze the data? Where are the problems with this temporary foreign worker program?

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to rise in support of the motion by my colleague. It is a very sensible motion, and given the nature of the issues that have been arising over the last couple of months, I think it is well overdue.

I am pleased as well to be sharing my time with the member for St. John's South—Mount Pearl.

It is very clear that there is a need for an audit by the Auditor General. The government speaks in terms of its enforcement regime, but its surveillance of the temporary foreign workers program consists of spot audits commissioned by the companies themselves. It is not that there are any credibility questions related to independent auditors it might hire, but I think there has been enough public attention to this issue for it to be time for the Auditor General to come in and do, as per usual, a fabulous job in auditing federal programs.

What are the issues that we have before us? The first issue, I would suggest, is this: do we even know if we have a labour shortage? Do we have a labour shortage for skilled workers, for the service sector? Do we even have reliable data? The response to that by some independent bodies, including the Parliamentary Budget Officer and the C.D. Howe Institute, is that we do not.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer has reported that Canada has continued excess capacity in the Canadian labour market. He also reported that there was only modest growth in real average wages. He also reported that there is little evidence of a national labour shortage in Canada and that there is no evidence supporting an acute national skills mismatch, except in some specific areas. He singled out some of the sectors in Saskatchewan.

He has also reported that there are lower job vacancy rates and higher unemployment, obviously raising some serious issues about how the temporary foreign worker program is addressing the supply of labour and addressing unemployment in Canada.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer has reported that there is a skilled labour shortage of just 32% and an unskilled or semi-skilled labour shortage of 16%. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has suggested the higher proportion of temporary foreign workers in the private sector could be putting downward pressure on private sector job vacancy rates and reducing the number of job vacancies; in other words, it could actually be imperilling the creation of jobs for Canadians, not filling them.

Provincial data also suggests that no provinces are experiencing acute labour shortages or skills mismatches related to the period before the 2008-2009 recession. The C.D. Howe report concurs with the findings of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. It has found little empirical evidence of shortages in many occupations and that the relaxations of conditions for hiring temporary workers resulted in rising unemployment in Alberta and British Columbia.

They suggest that the minimal uniform application fee paid by employers to hire temporary foreign workers offers minimal incentives to seek Canadian workers to fill vacancies. They also found that other countries imposed substantially higher fees, pro-rated per sector.

In other words, they have identified two problems. One is that there is an across-the-board fee, and if dealing with a big sector like the fossil fuel sector, it is probably not a high enough fee to deter the hiring of temporary foreign workers instead of investing in training or investing in searching for a Canadian employee.

To quote Professor Dominique Gross, the author of the C.D. Howe report:

A successful program would encourage employers to attract and train domestic workers for jobs that are permanent and that ensure stability of their business activity in the short-term. The current Canadian program falls short of these goals.

Do we have reliable labour and skills data? The Parliamentary Budget Officer and the C.D. Howe Institute say no. Statistics Canada has also now said no. Why? It is because apparently the government, in its wisdom, provided dollars sufficient only to survey employers on work demographics, skills shortages, hiring of temporary foreign workers, and which positions are hard to fill and why. It provided no money to analyze the data and thereby inform the Canadian economy of where there might be gaps, where we might need to be directing our training dollars, whether we needed to give support for mobility, or whether there might be space for temporary foreign workers. Even the minister has been quoted as saying that we must do a better job of collecting detailed labour market information.

The budget was shrunk. For such analyses, it was cut by almost $30 million, and staff at Statistics Canada was cut by over 18%, so we are not going to immediately address the problem.

What information have we gleaned? Has the temporary foreign worker program impacted wages? According to the information obtained through access to information, the answer to that is, yes, in Alberta. Across the board, it has been revealed that for the service sector, labourers, restaurants, nurseries, farm workers, hotels, casinos, and gas stations, hundreds of unlawful temporary foreign worker permits were issued by the current government at wages below the prevailing wage rate for each of those occupations. That indicates a pattern of using temporary foreign workers to drive down Canadian wages.

This evidence merits broader independent review by the Auditor General.

The minister said that he encourages employers to raise wages. I think perhaps the minister has additional powers. He should be going beyond encouraging Canadian employers to employ Canadians or train them. This evidence suggests that his temporary foreign worker program is having the direct opposite effect.

Third, what has been the effect of the temporary foreign worker program on employment for Canadians in the major employment sector, which the government likes to speak of all the time, the oil sands sector?

The first accelerated program, for which there was no LMO required to hire temporary foreign workers in Alberta, was finally ended, but it was replaced with a pilot program, in other words, no LMO required, and has been recently extended. What has that caused?

As I raised in this place, on behalf of Canadian workers, particularly the ironworkers at two major oil sands projects, Husky Energy and Imperial Oil, 65 Canadian ironworkers were laid off and replaced by Croatian temporary foreign workers, in the case of Imperial Oil. In the case of Husky Energy, 300 Canadian workers were replaced by temporary foreign workers.

In the case of Imperial Oil, I have actually been approached by a number of the workers who have been laid off, who have come to meet with me. One of them is a single mother apprentice.

The current government talks all the time about how it is working hand-in-glove with major industry to encourage the support of apprenticeships, yet here we have a scenario in which a single mother, who has gone back to school and is apprenticing, was laid off and replaced by a temporary foreign worker.

Why is that serious? It is because apprentices need that work experience to get their tickets.

I also was approached by an aboriginal apprentice who was laid off. He has a young family and is very seriously concerned about the lack of enforcement of this program in the oil sands sector.

I have also been approached by steamfitters apprenticing in the Esso heavy oil sector in Cold Lake, where apparently eight of 11 of the crew are temporary foreign workers, despite the fact that there are many workers, including Albertans, who would like those jobs. The problem is that the sector is moving so fast that rental rates are skyrocketing and there is simply not a place for people to stay, whereas we are enabling temporary foreign workers to come. We pay their travel and in some places subsidize their housing.

I have heard from welders who cannot get work. They have been waiting for a year where jobs are posted, and they have not been taken up.

I have heard from an insulator where 200 jobs were posted and then removed. That person was then told by the company that it was applying for an LMO to fill those jobs.

Where is the oversight? Where is the inspection? Where is the enforcement? Where is the enforcement and compliance strategy?

I have raised this issue repeatedly with the government. An efficacious regulatory program includes good regulations and rules, fully trained inspectors who ensure that those rules are enforced, and an enforcement and compliance strategy that sets forth how exactly they are going to ensure that this program is complied with.

We are told that there is no on-the-ground surveillance program for this sector, so the obvious question is raised. There is a lot of talk about increased penalties. How on earth are they going to assert these penalties, when the only time violations are raised is when workers who are displaced either come to the official opposition or other opposition members or to the media?

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to this. If we check the record, most likely any changes to the temporary foreign worker program were probably made in one of the multifarious omnibus budget bills. If the government would bring forward these kinds of amendments separately, we might give due consideration to them.

In every occasion that has come to light—for example, serious problems in the restaurant sector—it has been revealed by the Alberta Federation of Labour, after access to information, that it found hundreds upon hundreds of violations by the applicants for LMOs, where they are paying below the wage offered in that sector. We have not seen any action by the government to start better scrutinizing of these LMOs that it is issuing illegally.

There is the issue of the oil sands workers. Iron workers—and I am hearing from other sectors it includes welders and boiler makers—are being replaced by temporary foreign workers. We have repeatedly, as much as a month ago, brought this to the attention of the government. My questions to the minister are these. What can we see in the way of increased surveillance and actual enforcement by the government? How many enforcers does it have available and deployed full time? Are any of those inspectors, or enforcers, deployed to the oil sands?

[Employment and Social Development, April 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is strong language, but we have yet to see what actions are going to be taken against these major fossil fuel companies in the oil sands. Strong action across the board, some say, overly heavy-handed against the restaurant industry. In this case, this is not the first incident. There was another even more egregious incident with Husky Energy where it replaced 300 Canadian workers with temporary foreign workers and what do we see in response? It is one thing for the government to talk about these strict, serious penalties it is imposing, but who is out there identifying the problems?

We also heard about the strict requirements for LMOs. Well, there is no LMO for the oil sands. It is like open season, so the brokers for workers can just continuously bring in a stream. The question that the ironworkers are asking and it includes welders and other skilled tradespeople who are approaching me over the last month, is who is providing the oversight of these brokers? Are these brokers able to bring temporary foreign workers into the country with no need for any kind of skilled labour shortage study? Where is the action? Who is on the ground to identify violations?

[Employment and Social Development, April 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I wish that I could commend the Minister of Employment and Social Development for the same level of broad consultation and action on the issue of temporary foreign workers. However, we will have a complete debate tomorrow on this topic, and the call for an independent audit by the Auditor General. I look forward to the support from the Government of Canada in the same way that it is starting to reach out on the issue of rail safety.

On April 1, I put a question to the Minister of Employment and Social Development about a concern brought to my attention by ironworkers who work in the oil sands in northern Alberta. Their concern was that 65 Canadian ironworkers were laid off and replaced by temporary foreign workers. Their concern is the dearth of oversight and enforcement in the delivery of the temporary foreign worker program.

Initially it was called the accelerated program in Alberta. There was a call by the industry that there was such a shortage of skilled workers that it should not have to do a labour market analysis, and so it was removed. That program has ended, and now there is a pilot project, which has been extended.

I look forward to a response, given the concerns and the government's response on the service sector, which some would think is heavy-handed. We hope that it is willing to look more widely and to do an in-depth review and consultation, in particular with the workers who are being impacted by this program.

On that day, April 1, the minister responded by alleging that all of the Canadian workers were immediately rehired. He also undertook that the government was going to throw the book at non-compliant employers who violated the temporary foreign worker rules. In fact, this was not what happened. Today I delivered a letter to the minister from the ironworkers, with a very clear outline of the facts of what has occurred on the site over the year.

The facts are that these layoffs were not identified by his department but were identified by the ironworkers themselves. That is their deepest concern, that there is simply no oversight. It was only brought to light when the Canadian workers approached me and I raised the matter with the minister.

As I have mentioned, the ironworkers have informed the minister. That was almost a month ago, and the minister undertook that he would do an investigation. A month later, my understanding is that there still has been no specific action against Imperial Oil, which employed these 65 Canadian ironworkers and then laid them off.

Among those Canadian workers was an aboriginal apprentice. There has been a lot of talk in the House about how the government is supporting Canadian companies to make apprenticeships available, particularly for aboriginal Canadians. This young man was in the middle of his apprenticeship. He has a young child. He was dismissed outright and had to find other work, which he eventually did.

If I were to backtrack, it was the fall of 2013 when the ironworkers were first approached. In the oil sands, there are apparently brokers who bring in both Canadian and temporary foreign workers. The broker had tried to get the ironworkers to certify and approve these workers, but they said, firstly, that they were not appropriately skilled, and, secondly, that there were a lot of Canadian workers that were ready, willing, and able to work on the site. Regardless, Canadians were employed and then removed from the site and replaced with temporary foreign workers.

We have a clear example of a breach of the rules. Sadly, prior to that there were up to 300 Canadian workers who were replaced by temporary foreign workers at another oil sands site.

I would like to hear from the government on what it has been doing over the last month, who has been sent to the site, who exactly is investigating, and when we can expect a response.

[Rail Transportation, April 28th, 2014]

Lake Wabamun.

[Employment, April 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, a few weeks back, I asked the minister if he planned to ensure greater oversight of the temporary foreign workers program in the oil sands.

Canadian iron workers have been laid off and replaced by temporary foreign workers. The minister claimed that every single laid-off Canadian was immediately re-employed, but according to the iron workers, that is not true. They have asked the minister to step up oversight and enforcement. He said he would “throw the book...at non-compliant employers”.

So what action has the minister taken against Husky or Imperial Oil?

[Aboriginal Affairs, April 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, this year the University of Alberta, my alma mater, is awarding its Community Scholar Award to Dr. Cindy Blackstock, in recognition of her long-standing work with communities, organizations, and governments to ensure culturally appropriate and equitable services for first nations children in child welfare, health care, and education.

Is it not time that the government stopped wasting taxpayer dollars opposing efforts to ensure the extension of comparable social and educational services to aboriginal children, as our country has committed to deliver under the Convention on the Rights of the Child? Is it not time to finally recognize the dedicated and constructive efforts by Dr. Blackstock and the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society on behalf of aboriginal children, to respect their experience and advice, and to start implementing the programs all and sundry have endorsed?