Liberals Ask Auditor General to Investigate Temporary Foreign Worker Program
April 23, 2014
OTTAWA – Liberal Critic for Citizenship & Immigration, Multiculturalism, and Seniors, John McCallum, sent the following letter to the Auditor General of Canada. In it, he expresses his concern over widely-reported abuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, and calls on the Auditor General to undertake an immediate audit of the program.
The Auditor General of Canada
240 Sparks Street
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0G6 Canada
Dear Mr. Ferguson,
I am writing to bring your attention to the increasing use and abuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). I can assure you that it is an issue that is of great concern to many of my Parliamentary colleagues and to Canadians across the country.
To provide you with an idea of how quickly the program has grown we need only look at the past few years. At the end of 2007 there were approximately 300,000 Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) in Canada. During the 2008-2009 recession, just as hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers lost their jobs, this number rose dramatically. By the end of 2012 there were roughly 490,000 TFWs employed in Canada, an increase of 63%.
Over that time there have been increasing media reports about companies which received Government of Canada approval to bring TFWs to our country even when strong evidence later indicated that there were Canadians willing to perform that work. There have even been several reports of Canadian workers actually being forced train TFWs only to then be replaced by those very same workers once the training is complete. Such actions would violate the premise of the program – to provide a supply of labour to fill employment shortages only in such situations where Canadian citizens and permanent residents cannot be found to fill these vacancies. In these instances it is clear that not only did the TFWs not have the necessary skills to perform the job, they were also brought here explicitly to replace Canadian workers.
The growing number of reported abuses of the TFWP suggests that there are very few safeguards in place to ensure the program is used correctly and does displace Canadian workers. Despite the mounting evidence of abuse, the government does not seem eager to fix the program.
Employment and Skills Development Canada won’t even begin an audit of the program until 2015/16. Further, it has set no completion or reporting date for that audit. Meanwhile Canadians will continue to lose their jobs to employers who get the green light from the Government of Canada to replace their workforce with temporary foreign workers.
In the absence of an oversight regime that Canadians can trust, I am asking you as Auditor General to undertake an audit and evaluation of the program as quickly as possible in order to provide your recommendations to the government.
While your predecessor’s 2009 report on “Selecting Foreign Workers Under the Immigration Program” raised many concerns about the TFWP, it did not examine if the program was being used to displace Canadian workers or drive down wages. In considering this request I would point out that on April 16, 2013 128 Members of the House of Commons voted in favour of a Supply Day Motion put forward by Liberal MP, Roger Cuzner which would have struck a special committee to study the program and provide the government with recommendations to strengthen the safeguards around the TFWP in order to prevent its abuse. While a majority of MPs voted against the motion I believe the fact that 42% of the House’s MPs voted in favour illustrates just how important this issue is to those Parliamentarians and the Canadians they represent.
Sincerely,
Hon. John McCallum, P.C., M.P.
Markham—Unionville