Citizenship and Immigration committee  When I talk about the American situation, I'm not speaking specifically about Newfoundland. We have linemen here. We don't have thousands of them, but we have enough to keep the province going. We have plenty of electricians in this province, more than for the work available. With respect to bringing in foreign workers on a permanent basis, we're not opposed to that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Talking about the migration of workers from Newfoundland to western Canada, Newfoundland has a history of people migrating to work all over North America and all over the world. I've been an electrician, a technician, a technologist; I've spent all my life in the electrical and electronic business, and I've been one of the fortunate ones.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, there is an area. As a matter of fact, the IBEW just worked a deal with Emera in Nova Scotia, where we sat down with them to bring in linemen from the Philippines, or power line technicians as they call them. So we brought in five on a trial basis, and we've gone back and struck a deal with the employer to bring in twenty more of these people.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, Mr. Komarnicki, with respect to labour mobility assistance, I direct you to have a look at that in my brief and read that, because it is costly to bring in temporary foreign workers. What we're trying to do here is to reach out to people who don't want to leave home, because it's a cost to go and find jobs sometimes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  On the issue the member of the panel raised with respect to temporary foreign workers, I gave the example in the presentation I made, in my opening statement, about the availability of workers just across our borders, living side by side with us. Mr. Telegdi made the point that we have a free trade agreement with the United States.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, the undocumented worker situation is really not an issue where we live in Newfoundland, or on the east coast for that matter. We see that as kind of regionalized to cities like Toronto or Vancouver or places like that. There's obviously not a lot of undocumented workers running around in any numbers anywhere else, other than these cities.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairperson. We've already submitted our brief, and it deals with temporary foreign workers. We're going to talk about the construction industry. First I'll give you a bit of background. We're part of the IBEW, which is the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which was founded in 1891.