00:01:46.000I don't know if you know this, but we've actually been in a recession for the majority of the past three years.
00:01:52.120A recession to economists is defined in a technical way where the GDP, the gross domestic product, that's all the goods and services, decline for two quarters in a row, two three-month periods in a row.
00:02:07.320So, you know, that's everything that everyone earns and does and builds in the country.
00:02:12.280So, if for two 90-day periods that number shrinks, you're in a recession.
00:02:18.240But on a per capita basis, Canada has been in recession for actually about ten quarters now.
00:02:27.340There was eight in a row, and then there was a little blip back into a recession.
00:02:30.320So, for more than two years, but most of the time, when you hear people talk about the GDP, they mean as a total number measured in billions or trillions for the whole country.
00:02:44.900Trudeau and now Mark Carney have been covering up the per capita recession that we've been in by bringing in literally millions of new migrants, most of them poor, by the way.
00:02:54.680So, you and I and every Canadian on average is getting poorer, have been for several years.
00:03:02.300But Trudeau and now Carney is bringing in enough foreigners that although we're each getting a smaller slice of the pie, the pie itself grows a tiny bit just because millions of new people are brought in.
00:03:15.120And do you understand what I'm saying?
00:03:16.600You and I are poorer and poorer and poorer and poorer, but to hide that statistic, they brought in millions of people so they could say, oh, no, no, the economy is growing.
00:03:36.160If we had proper news coverage of the per capita recession of these past few years, I think the last election would have been a little bit different.
00:03:43.680The media party is so insistent not to call it a recession on a per capita basis, which is the only one that would interest any individual Canadian.
00:03:52.180I mean, what do you care if some other person does better economically?
00:03:57.680You're personally not doing better, even though the gross economy grows a bit.
00:04:03.000The media party has really hid this from Canadians.
00:04:05.540And it's another reason why they love mass immigration.
00:04:08.220It allows them to hide how poorly our economy is doing for individual families.
00:04:12.140There are a handful of new immigrants who are wealthy or who make the rest of us wealthy, who are very well educated and provide much needed high value goods and services.
00:04:22.140I would think of a highly trained surgeon.
00:04:24.280But they are in the in the tiny minority.
00:04:28.280Most immigrants to Canada are either family reunification, including elderly grandparents, for some reason, who will never contribute economically, but it will immediately get right in line for our free health care and pensions.
00:04:40.740And then there's low skilled migrant labor.
00:04:58.460By the way, the civil war in Syria is over.
00:05:01.080Millions of Syrian migrants are actually returning.
00:05:03.180According to the UN, more than a million have gone back already from Lebanon and Turkey, and the UN thinks there'll be another million coming.
00:05:10.980Why don't we send our Syrian refugees home now that there is no more danger?
00:05:15.560Anyways, anyone from those places had to go through a third country before coming here.
00:05:19.740There just is no flight from Mogadishu to Toronto.
00:05:23.340And international human rights law says you have to apply for refugee status in the first safe country you touch.
00:05:29.840So, by definition, none of these people are genuine.
00:05:34.420A lot of them have just walked in from the United States.
00:05:37.120We have hundreds of thousands of them, including about 5,000, who have now taken over a number of hotels in Niagara Falls,
00:05:44.540replacing the tourism economy there with a welfare economy paid for by you and me.
00:05:49.120Here's some of David Menzies' report from about a month ago.
00:05:52.300It is peak summertime tourism season in Niagara Falls.
00:05:56.720But get a load of this, folks, at this hotel and several others in the city, there is literally no room at the inn.
00:06:06.060Oh, sure, the hotel is jam-packed, but not with tourists flush with cash, but rather with refugee claimants.
00:06:15.980I can tell you, folks, there are about 16,000 hotel rooms in Niagara Falls, and some 2,000 of those rooms are currently housing about 5,000 asylum seekers.
00:06:32.260Naturally, there is quite the cost to that.
00:06:36.180In fact, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada released figures last year showing that the federal government spent some $115 million in housing asylum seekers at hotels in Niagara Falls exclusively,
00:06:53.980and that was just over a period of 12 months.
00:06:56.980And if you're wondering where these asylum seekers hail, well, we're talking about countries such as Nigeria, Venezuela, Kenya, Turkey, and Colombia.
00:07:07.840Refugee claimants stay for an average of 113 days.
00:07:12.720The daily cost was $208 per person, with money going toward rooms, meals, services, and security.
00:07:22.960And that, by the way, is the first thing you notice, folks, when you go into the hotel lobby.
00:07:28.440There are security guards there who simply tell you, without giving you the reason why, that the hotel is not open to the public and to go next door to the Ramada and check in there.
00:07:43.700So, yeah, I think a lot of people simply can't make ends meet in our economy anymore, and it's a lot more people than maybe we thought before.
00:07:50.020But immigration is still going full guns for the reasons I suggested, but I think it's starting to wear thin.
00:07:55.480Look at some of these headlines just from today.
00:07:57.720Youth unemployment is now at levels seen during a recession, report shows.
00:08:01.660Well, like I say, we have been in a recession for a few years now.
00:08:05.500Here's the StatsCan report, just one of them.
00:08:09.1807.1% unemployment, but that hides how bad it is.
00:08:48.080And why would you and how could you know this when a million foreigners are being brought in specifically to undermine you and undercut you?
00:08:55.940That is expressly the purpose of temporary foreign workers.
00:09:08.240Every dollar paid to an employee is a dollar not left for the business.
00:09:12.960I saw some screeching pundit the other day saying it's racist not to want cheap foreign workers, an underclass of indentured servants here.
00:09:23.040No, I actually think it's the opposite.
00:09:25.120It's racist to have a third world underclass of exploited workers.
00:09:29.120But putting race aside, it's cruel to young Canadians of all racial backgrounds too.
00:09:35.160Here's that racist calling everyone else racist.
00:09:38.420Like, I'm going to be quite frank and honest.
00:09:40.360We are, the Conservative Party and Pierre Polyev and MP Rempel are treading a very dangerous line of what I'm going to call a dog whistle of racism.
00:09:50.180Because if you want to have a conversation about the fact that we have an issue with immigration, we do.
00:09:57.120Not because they're immigrants and they're coming in and taking away.
00:09:59.760It's because our society and our system hasn't kept up.
00:10:08.540But to say it's foreign workers that are taking away jobs from Canadians and the solution is youth to me is simplistic.
00:10:16.120Yeah, no, and I don't think that's going to work anymore.
00:10:18.720I think that has sort of run its course.
00:10:21.200And there's not a lot of patience for the government calling people racist anymore after 10 years of Trudeau doing it.
00:10:26.780I mean, it undercuts you when even a man of the insane left, BC Premier David Eby, says we have to stop bringing in our own replacement workers.
00:10:42.140The temporary foreign worker program is not working.
00:10:44.920It should be cancelled or significantly reformed, Eby said.
00:10:48.140Here in British Columbia, we see an unacceptably high level of unemployment among young people, which has been linked both to the international student visa program as well as the temporary foreign worker program.
00:11:19.340You bring in a million foreign workers desperate for jobs, and I'd say a million because that's students and temporary foreign workers, and they're competing with, I don't know, a million Canadian youth desperate for summer jobs and other jobs, and you've got a race to the bottom.
00:11:35.860The price that capital has to pay for labor goes down.
00:11:40.380I know I'm standing like a commie, but this is not capitalism the way that it is.
00:11:44.520It is not capitalism to bring in the world's poorest people to level down our own economy.
00:11:50.920That's some sort of weird arbitrage going on that disrespects the whole notion of a country, a sovereign country.
00:11:59.360I can see why an oligarch with three passports like Mark Carney likes it, but I think a revolt is brewing.
00:12:05.560Mark Carney's reheated Trudeau minister, Francois-Philippe Champagne, the guy who somehow thought it was a good idea to get a personal mortgage from a bank owned by the Communist Party of China.
00:13:21.500That's what I'm talking about, the public sector.
00:13:23.220And all without the excuse of COVID now.
00:13:25.320These are the people, federal civil servants, who still aren't coming back to the office to work in the main, but they're going to invent a new economy for everyone else in the country.
00:14:47.720He just finally, finally dropped his retaliatory tariffs.
00:14:51.960So I think what happens is, it's all bravado because you think it feels good to fight with the biggest client in the world.
00:14:59.100But eventually, your businesses are going to say, you've got to stop this and go make your deal with America.
00:15:05.480So I think, yes, in a month or two months, I think India is going to be at the table and they're going to say they're sorry and they're going to try to make a deal with Donald Trump.
00:15:13.900And it will be on Donald Trump's desk, how he wants to deal with Modi.
00:15:23.200But neither did this rocket surgeon's ideas.
00:15:27.100When thinking of what we've gone through the summer, for my part, I've traveled a lot the country, meeting with different workers and different industries.
00:15:36.180Some affected by the tariffs, others also that are much more in sectors that are going through a lot of growth.
00:15:45.240And also, I went two times to Europe, Sweden, Finland, and afterwards in Germany.
00:15:50.740And what our government is really focused right now is obviously on the economy.
00:15:55.040So we need to protect jobs and we need to create some at the same time.
00:15:59.000And we're doing that through three different ways.
00:16:02.920The first one obviously is defense because we're increasing our investments in defense.
00:16:08.300And while we're doing that for our strong, brave Canadian men and women serving our armed forces, at the same time, we're doing it to create jobs.
00:16:20.560And that's why we're working on a defense industrial strategy and want to be using procurement to be able to create jobs in our country.
00:16:29.700The other thing that we're working on is obviously to be closer to Europe and to closer to certain countries in Asia because we know we're too dependent on the U.S. when it comes to trade.
00:16:42.340And that is clearly a focus of what we're doing as a government.
00:16:45.780Yeah, about that, Canada's trade diversification push goes into reverse.
00:16:49.960Let me read you a story from the Globe and Mail.
00:16:51.480Now, for all the talk in Canada about the need for trade diversification, exports to non-U.S. markets declined for the second month in a row in July.
00:16:59.960A stark reminder that the push to reduce the country's exposure to its largest yet unreliable trading partner will be a long process.
00:17:06.820Exports to countries other than the U.S. fell 8.6% in July from the month before after a 4.2% drop in June, according to Statistics Canada.
00:17:16.140As a result, non-U.S. exports as a share of total Canadian shipments to the world dropped back to where they were in October before the election of President Trump.
00:17:24.220In fact, really the only story about diversification in this piece was about the Trans Mountain Pipeline that was this grotesque white elephant.
00:17:33.440That pipeline was first proposed by a private company called Kinder Morgan, American company, that raised all the money themselves and that was working away on a budget of about $6 billion.
00:17:43.040They said, oh, we'll do it. Yeah, $6 billion ought to do it until Trudeau killed the deal by changing the environmental rules.
00:17:51.420And so they just absolutely broke all the rules with Kinder Morgan.
00:17:55.780And then Kinder Morgan was about to sue Canada for probably $10 billion until Trudeau preempted them and just offered them billions and billions and billions just to buy them off.
00:18:07.000And Kinder Morgan couldn't believe it. They took the cash and said, yeah, goodbye, Canada.
00:18:12.340And the pipeline, the liberals took over the pipeline and the final cost was well over $20 billion.
00:18:18.040Only a government could, what, quadruple, quintuple costs on a project that was previously being done by a private company with no government money.
00:18:38.020Since the expanded Trans Mountain Pipeline began operating in May 2024, the share of Canadian crude going to non-U.S. markets has soared, hitting 7.9% in July, up from an average of just 2.7% in 2023.
00:21:40.460Is there – give me the point of view of your members and of your organization, because I really feel strongly about this.
00:21:48.600But obviously, you guys have a different opinion.
00:21:50.780So, we have members across the country and across all sectors, and some of them, very few, just like in the Canadian economy, very few of them do resort to temporary foreign workers' program.
00:22:01.560What we need to give credence to the program, though, is that it is designed to sort of open the tap and close the tap.
00:22:08.220And so, to reflect local labor market needs.
00:22:11.380And it is the immigration program that reflects local labor market needs the most, because all the hoops that employers who do turn to it have to jump through.
00:22:18.660So, the question that could be raised is more, are those hoops truly doing what they need to be done?
00:22:27.480For example, you know, employers have to demonstrate that they've actively recruited.
00:22:31.520And what we're hearing from employers who've had to turn to those programs is, we tried to recruit locally.
00:22:36.480They're not applying for the positions we've had.
00:22:39.600They're not showing genuine interest or coming to the interviews.
00:22:43.280And so, that's part of the issues that they have is, if they're turning to the temporary foreign worker program, it's because they haven't had any luck or any opportunity to find Canadian labor, and they would rather hire a Canadian.
00:22:56.140But those Canadians just aren't lining up for the jobs on offer as they are on offer.
00:23:01.480You know, I want to put a different point of view to you.
00:23:07.820I think that because everyone is doing it, I mean, you can't go to a fast food restaurant or a drive-thru or a lot of retail companies without there being a temporary foreign worker.
00:23:20.120And so, it's sort of like a mutually assured destruction.
00:23:23.580Everyone's doing it, so everyone has to do it.
00:23:27.180So, I mean, I know a franchisee who has several Tim Hortons, and he tells me, I mean, this was a while ago, he told me this, that he just simply couldn't compete without it.
00:23:38.760And what he meant was he couldn't compete with the other drive-thrus.
00:23:42.840He couldn't compete with the other restaurants because everyone's doing it.
00:23:48.040If McDonald's is doing it, then Tim Hortons has to.
00:23:51.240And if Tim Hortons is doing it, McDonald's has to.
00:23:53.760So, I understand that if one of them tried to break from this way of doing things, they couldn't get the employees.
00:24:00.940But what if we phased out the temporary foreign worker program altogether?
00:24:05.060So, the only people who could apply to work for Tim Hortons were Canadians.
00:24:10.340And, yeah, I think it probably would mean that the salaries would go up a little bit.
00:24:14.400And I got to say, I don't think that's a terrible thing for young people to get an extra buck or two an hour, especially if every competitor is doing it, too.
00:24:24.040So, it wouldn't just be my buddy from Tim Hortons who's on the short end of the stick because he's competitors to McDonald's.
00:24:29.780Like, isn't it that everyone's doing it so everyone has to do it?
00:24:34.000And if we took it away, then everyone could stop doing it?
00:24:36.600So, you have to take into consideration the scope of the TFWP.
00:26:34.420The other element about wage, and this needs to be noted very closely, is businesses aren't government.
00:26:41.140They don't have deep pockets in the ability to go on into deficits exponentially.
00:26:46.480They're not big multinationals that have also deep pockets because they can raise financing very quickly or they can take, you know, be creative with losses.
00:26:56.700They have small margins, small levels of capitalization, increasing wages to the extent that may be required to actually attract domestic labor and stable domestic labor is something that will end up affecting consumers.
00:27:15.360One of them, I think, is probably spot on where you say, I may be confusing the foreign national at my drive-thru for a temporary foreign worker when, in fact, they might be an international student here on that kind of visa.
00:27:30.140And I take your point, but if that is true, and I think it very well could be, in fact, I know a particular student who is working and he's foreign, so there's really no difference.
00:28:01.680And if those folks are in the workforce as well, you don't just have the official temporary foreign workers competing against Canadians.
00:28:10.520You now have all those foreign students.
00:28:13.060So I think you're pointing out another problem.
00:28:18.000I don't think it takes away, in my mind, from the fact that the temporary foreign workers program itself is also a problem.
00:28:26.120But I just think that, I think back to how it was when I was a kid.
00:28:31.020And yeah, all those crappy jobs were the jobs kids wanted.
00:28:35.400That was the first job on the first rung on the ladder of life.
00:28:39.260And I think to other countries where I've been, where they have very modest immigration, and it is their nationals who have those entry-level jobs.
00:30:59.300And so in closing, because remember, foreign workers can only represent between, you know, 10 and 30% of the workforce of a specific employer.
00:31:07.020You're also talking about more job losses.
00:31:10.700You're talking about Canadians potentially losing their jobs.
00:31:13.700So we need to consider that in the whole element.
00:31:16.360And that's why there's a need for an LMIA assessment.
00:31:18.860That is why that process, which doesn't exist in their international mobility program, the LMIA process is important and there's value to it because the employer has to demonstrate there's going to be a positive impact to the labor market.
00:31:34.420Government employees are supposed to be going through and saying, is this actually going to help keep jobs or retain jobs in Canada?
00:31:41.980And have they done everything they can to recruit?
00:31:44.500By scrapping the TFWP, you're not even allowing employers to make that case.
00:31:50.160Just for our viewers, LMIA, if I'm not mistaken, that's labor market impact assessment.
00:31:56.020It sure feels like they're gaming that system.
00:31:59.060I recently found an online database that's searchable by map and by geography.
00:32:05.260There's thousands and thousands of these temporary foreign worker help wanted basically ads.
00:32:11.920And so many of them are like, just like I just started going through them and seeing the different jobs there.
00:32:20.440And they were urban jobs in often in restaurants or retail.
00:32:25.120I actually saw one job that was for a psychiatrist that paid up to $400,000.
00:32:30.520It was very confusing to me because on the one hand, you had like that job.
00:32:36.300And on the other hand, you had jobs basically undercutting minimum wage, those starter jobs that teenagers would take.
00:32:43.460But the main thing I took away from that was how promiscuous this all was.
00:32:50.240This wasn't a temporary solution like I mentioned the berry farmer who needed help.
00:32:55.960It feels like it's a permanent, new, general approach to employment in this country.
00:33:03.920And even if the arguments you make are true, and I'm skeptical, you have a permanent underclass that is pushing down wages.
00:33:14.140Even Premier Eby, the communist premier of British Columbia, has acknowledged that this is depressing employment opportunities for British Columbians.
00:33:23.760I think even if your employers that you represent are right, that they need it, I would say, well, of course they're right because it's in their interest to reduce wages.
00:33:36.540I just think that we have a permanent underclass now of exploited foreign workers.
00:33:43.840And that's maybe in the interest of an employer to pay a few bucks an hour less.
00:33:49.980But I just don't think that socially and culturally and economically it helps anyone else.
00:33:55.000Maybe I'm starting to sound like a communist myself.
00:33:57.940So the language you're using actually seems to contribute to them being perceived as an underclass because that would not be the language that many small business owners would employ.
00:34:07.860They are an integral part of the whole supply chain of making sure that we get the services and the goods that we can appreciate.
00:34:17.640And we need to value as Canadian society anyone and everyone from the cashier and the coffee barista, coffee barista, all the way through to the civil engineer and the physicians that we see.
00:34:31.800So I do think that within Canada, we need to revisit how we perceive different roles and maybe it would open up Canadian views willingness to proceed in career in trades vis-a-vis seeking education in STEM, etc.
00:34:48.060Because we do tend to stigmatize those lower wage jobs and we shouldn't.
00:34:52.680And the fact that TFWs or immigrants occupy this job shouldn't at any point stigmatize any occupation.
00:34:59.700If someone is working, regardless of where they're working, that's great.
00:35:03.940They are contributing to Canadian society.
00:35:07.860And again, the argument of prevailing wage is based on a lot of myths and doesn't recognize to the extent the government's tried to counter that in recent years.
00:35:19.200For example, there's a prevailing wage requirement when you're hiring someone through the temporary foreign worker program.
00:35:24.100Again, that is the program that Podiev is saying he wants to get rid of.
00:35:28.000And there are so many requirements in that program that actually tries to mitigate all these myths that people are saying that it's taking Canadian jobs.
00:35:38.140Well, Canadians would have had the chance to apply.
00:35:40.240They would have had a chance to see the conditions as they are being presented to the foreign workers.
00:35:44.440They have to pay the prevailing minimum wage.
00:35:48.520That is, or sorry, prevailing wage, not the minimum wage, prevailing wage.
00:35:53.400That's the median wage for the occupation of the region, which is often higher than the minimum wage.
00:35:59.020That is what they need to advertise if they want to have access to the LMIA, and that's what they need to pay.
00:36:03.820And then afterwards, once you've done all those, jumped through those hoops, if you do happen to have a foreign worker that comes, because many LMIAs are approved and never actually have a foreign worker come into the country because the work permit is not approved or the LMIA expires before identifying the right talent.
00:36:22.560If you do have them come, you are subject to the employer compliance regime.
00:36:28.760So not only do they have provincial or federal labor codes, they have the Canadian government, ESDC, and IRCC that can come in and inspect and ensure that you meet the terms.
00:36:41.700It seems to me our entire immigration process has moved away from any sort of enforcement.
00:36:47.880Deportation orders are no longer even a thing.
00:36:50.500There are no in-person meetings now for migrants to our country.
00:36:54.920Is it – how often – can you cite a number?
00:36:58.440How often is a temporary foreign worker investigated and found against – like, is it even one in a thousand?
00:37:07.360Like, it seems to me that abuse is the name of the game.
00:37:10.580I see little TikTok videos of foreign nationals teaching fellow foreign nationals how to game the system on everything from LMIAs to how to use food banks instead of paying for groceries.
00:37:25.920Like, I feel like the whole world is looking at Canada and thinking, those guys are chumps.
00:39:17.560We've gotten comments from members saying, like, especially farms and in agricultural sectors, they often have seen the same workers come back to their farms for over a decade.
00:39:27.960And they say, if I was mistreating my employee, that employee would not be coming back every single year.
00:39:34.160I treat them like they're family members.
00:39:36.060I make sure they've got good housing, that they're fed, that they've got social activities, and that they're treated respectfully in the workplace.
00:39:44.140So, that's the other thing we need to consider is if these foreign workers are coming back on a recurring basis, particularly for seasonal, you are talking about that being an indicator of the fact that they're not that badly treated.
00:39:57.760That doesn't mean there aren't bad actors, but you need to recognize there are also some very good actors in the system.
00:40:02.940You know, I was reading a tweet by a Sikh Canadian who was saying that some companies who use the temporary foreign workers program, the workers actually pay the company, kind of a bribe or a shakedown or a commission.
00:40:19.780They pay to get the job, that it's sort of a fake job, and the whole thing is a sham, just a way to immigrate to Canada.
00:40:28.160And I mean, use the example of the farm workers who return every year.
00:40:31.520And that's actually my favorite example.
00:40:33.480I knew a berry farmer in southern Alberta who did that from Mexico.
00:40:38.320And that seems legit, as opposed to, I mean, I haven't been able to chase down this rumor by this Canadian, this Sikh Canadian fellow,
00:40:47.300who was saying that he is aware of temporary foreign workers who essentially bribed their way into Canada by actually paying the company to hire them.
00:40:57.160And it's a sham, just like these diploma mills are shams for international students.
00:41:01.740I guess I'll have to do some more investigating myself, because I do not believe it's as compliant as you say.
00:41:07.200Let me make a final comment, and then I'm going to invite you to sum up your case.
00:41:10.560Because I'd like to stop for a second and say thanks to you for coming on, because I know I'm peppering you with some objections and questions.
00:41:16.300And I think you're doing a pretty good job of making the case for your company, your organization, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
00:42:47.280I'm in these other countries where they actually hire their own local people.
00:42:50.400And maybe the cost of living is a little higher.
00:42:52.120But I tell you one thing, they're cohesive socially.
00:42:55.500They absolutely respect those blue-collar workers.
00:42:58.020In my view, when you bring in a foreign underclass, whether it's to pick cotton 250 years ago or to mop up toilets today, I think that's what stigmatizes.
00:43:10.380When you say these jobs are too crappy for our own citizens.
00:43:14.420So I think that foreign workers actually – that project stigmatizes the working class, not the other way around.
00:43:22.720Let me let you finish things up because you've been doing a great job on behalf of the CFIB.
00:43:28.020So thank you for giving me some final comments.
00:43:30.780With regards to labor costs, as I referenced, ultimately small business owners that do resort to the TFWP, they resort to it at their last step.
00:43:42.160They have tried to find local labor and they haven't been successful to.
00:43:45.060It's not about keeping labor costs down.
00:43:48.220There are a lot of costs and responsibilities associated with the TFWP.
00:43:52.060And those that I am talking about, or those I'm representing, or those that are looking to and striving to be compliant with the program, we're not talking about the unscrupulous.
00:44:00.280We're – unfortunately, a lot of this political debacle is putting everyone together.
00:44:06.740And what we are hearing is, without the foreign labor to turn over the beds or to be in the kitchen, they'd have to close rooms.
00:44:14.660They would have to shut down or reduce store hours or just close down their business operations.
00:44:22.300And so the question we then need to understand is, the Canadian labor, we've been saying for ages, and we know there are certain sectors that have had or are likely to have persisting labor shortages.
00:44:36.860But we haven't developed a plan or recognized that we would need labor in all sorts of jobs.
00:44:41.560Whenever there are workforce development plans being rolled out, they're being rolled out and targeted at, like, clean energy, tech sector, whatever is new and sexy on the agenda at that moment in time.
00:44:54.460But there is little consideration being given as to what type of plans or linkages that we provide to help individuals or to get Canadians to apply to jobs who may not necessarily be in the geographical area,
00:45:06.480but within Canada, across the country, at all skill levels or types of jobs.
00:45:14.040So, you know, would a youth from the Toronto area consider potentially working in hospitality services and turning beds in Jasper?
00:45:22.240Those are some of the questions that we need to consider as a society is, what can we do to create those bridges?
00:45:30.720And until the Canadian workforce is there and is applying for those jobs and is willing to take those jobs, and like you said, we do take away that stigma, the TFWP is needed.
00:45:43.720Otherwise, what is happening is you're taking away what was supposed to be a Band-Aid without having healed the wound, without having found the solution.
00:45:51.160What I'm hearing when Podiev is saying, scrap the program, they're basically saying, we're going to pull the rug from everyone, and you'll have to make do otherwise.
00:46:02.320And they presume that there's going to be a labour to backfill.
00:46:05.540They presume that where the jobs are is where the people are.
00:46:08.320They presume that people will be right away willing to take a job in occupation they may have not previously been at,
00:46:15.960and that may not necessarily align with their education level.
00:46:19.320That's a lot of presumptions, and I think it gets to that much later on.
00:46:25.680And as I referenced, even an ESDC evaluation of the program or of Canadian society overall identified that the main reasons Canadians are taking the jobs on offer
00:46:37.140that are being posted under the TFWP is not wage.
00:46:43.060It is actually the working conditions, and it is actually the labour intensiveness of the job.
00:46:52.760So those are some of the things to keep in mind as well as, you know, are Canadians going to be taking shifts that are overnight?
00:47:00.520Are Canadians going to be taking shifts that are in the weekends that may not have traditional daycare services available?
00:47:07.760And then the last piece, and sorry, I will just do this thing, is they complement Canadian labour, because just think about it.
00:47:15.060Even how many Canadians might try to bring in a live-in caregiver to help with their senior parents,
00:47:20.500or how many might bring in a nanny to take care of their kids when daycare isn't necessarily accessible or is long waiting lists in various regions across Canada?
00:47:31.300They are the chef that enables the front of the house to operate.
00:47:35.680They are the ones that clean up the rooms that enable there to be rooms that are open to host events for the event planners that are Canadians,
00:47:43.240the hostess that are Canadians, and et cetera.
00:47:46.260So we can't forget that there is a complementary element.
00:47:51.380Right now, the Canadian labour is not in those positions.
00:47:54.480We're applying for those positions that are being sought to be filled through the TFWP.
00:48:00.060Christina, you said an awful lot of things there, and I'm tempted to rebutt or challenge some of them,
00:48:05.660but I did promise you to have the last word, and it's because I'm grateful to you for coming on the show,
00:48:10.880because we are skeptical of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program,
00:48:13.920and I don't think you've convinced me to change my mind,
00:48:17.080but you've certainly allowed our viewers to hear a full broadcast of the other side of the story.
00:48:25.220And I'm grateful to you, and I appreciate the CFIB,
00:48:28.180and we've had excellent discussions with your colleague, Dan, before.