Citizenship and Immigration committee  Because this is the number-one issue for the foodservice industry, we've been meeting with government over the last few years on a regular basis. So yes, we have been consulted.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not an immigration expert, clearly, so the only thing that I can do is lay out what the issues are for our industry. I don't disagree with the previous comments either, about the need for changes to the point system. Obviously, we have a lot of lower-skilled occupations with

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As I say, I don't think my members are experts on the system either. All they know is that they need labour and they want to get labour as quickly as they possibly can. They want to see the system overhauled. They want to see the system modernized. I don't know if they would ha

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm going to send copies to the clerk, because I don't have it in both official languages.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I really appreciate the opportunity to provide a food service industry perspective on part 6 of Bill C-50, and to speak to you again about the number one issue facing Canada's $58-billion food service industry. Of course, that is labour shortages. I r

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I agree that we have an opportunity to include Canadian work experience in the criteria for immigrating to Canada. As I said in my presentation, we already have that kind of classification, and a new classification. We just need it to apply to all categories of workers and not ju

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Absolutely we would support provisions that would allow the family members of temporary foreign workers to work as well. My understanding is that the A, B, and O categories permit that, and the C and D categories do not. We have situations where our members are employing temporar

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The labour shortage is the number one issue facing Canada's $58 billion, one-million-employee food service industry, so I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today about the temporary foreign worker program. Canada's labour shortage is

Industry committee  We do appreciate the steps that have been taken by this government in the last year to try to streamline the program. Certainly the labour market opinion process has been streamlined. But there's still a backlog of actual temporary foreign worker applications at foreign embassies

Industry committee  You know, there'll be one or two people in the embassy and they don't have the capacity to process the number of applications that are coming their way. So both those scenarios, actually.

Industry committee  Yes. Again, I appreciate you've already extended it from one year to two years--

Industry committee  --and I think if we were able to get the type of bridging mechanism that we're looking for, that may not be necessary. But until that bridging mechanism is in place, we would like to see the temporary foreign worker period extended.

Industry committee  We were looking for the increase that was provided in the November economic statement this year. But we're looking for that to be further increased over the next five years.

Industry committee  It would be the clawback of their guaranteed income supplement.

Industry committee  We were talking about EI clawback. That would apply to more than only seniors. If you have other higher-earning employees who are on benefits, and they want to earn some additional income by working part-time, we think they should be able to without having all their EI benefits c