Public Accounts committee  It is true that hiring temporary foreign workers presents an opportunity to strengthen recruitment measures. We in fact use this information to increase our labour training and development efforts, as well as provincial and territorial efforts to improve the skills of their popul

Public Accounts committee  Thank you.

Public Accounts committee  There are different groups that we would work with, which we mentioned earlier. The group with refugees and asylum seekers is one particular area of focus. Generally, we look at newcomers as people who arrived in Canada within the last five years.

Public Accounts committee  We are in the process of building these abilities to self-identify. I'd have to get back to you on whether it exists for newcomers. It's certainly our intention. We're rolling out groups individually.

Public Accounts committee  We have taken steps already to increase the look-back period for looking at an employer's pattern of use of employment insurance. I believe that previously we had looked back three months, but now we're looking back 12 months to get a whole year of information on whether any empl

Public Accounts committee  It's part of the assessment process of an application to look at the records of employment of that employer.

Public Accounts committee  When an application is received, that's part of the process.

Public Accounts committee  As I was alluding to earlier, there's rather a complex economic analysis to look at a counterfactual proposition. If the temporary foreign worker wasn't there, what would the wage have been? As I mentioned, we are working with academics on that question and we've also committed t

Public Accounts committee  Sectors have a diverse set of challenges around recruitment and retention of workers. There may be unemployed people in the vicinity of the employer, but perhaps they don't have the right skills or perhaps they're not living in the same location. There are issues of mobility, ret

Public Accounts committee  We indeed need to do more on recruitment of under-represented groups and we've done a number of things in this area. We now require not one but two under-represented groups to be recruited. We're bolstering the requirements of the employers to demonstrate this. We're supporting i

Public Accounts committee  Employers sometimes face challenges in how to access these under-represented groups. It's not immediately apparent what the best recruitment strategies are, so we've been reaching out to make it easier to put the tools in the hands of the employers to do that kind of outreach.

Public Accounts committee  We've had continued efforts for a number of years to strengthen recruitment. We've made major investments in indigenous training and in persons with disabilities working with provinces. We've increased, by over 20%, from—

Public Accounts committee  Over the last two years we've been doing investments with the provinces with a 20% increase in our training programs through transfers to provinces and quite an active investment in skills development for under-represented groups, including significant new efforts on the indigeno

Public Accounts committee  I think it's the difference between on-site inspections and unannounced on-site inspections, so we're considerably far into our ramping up of on-site inspections. The unannounced are what the deputy was referring to. We're figuring out the best ways to do that to make sure our em

Public Accounts committee  Doing that kind of wage analysis is rather complicated. You need to figure out what the wage would otherwise have been in the absence of temporary foreign workers.