Sound familiar?

The high price of low-cost immigrant labour
Lloyd Brown-John, Special to The Windsor Star
Published: Friday, January 18, 2008
Under the enhanced economic immigrant program, an immigrant's value included a Labour Market Opinion. In other words, an opinion on whether the prospective economic immigrants skills were needed in Canada.

Very unobtrusively, the feds have established teams of bureaucrats in Calgary, Vancouver and other major cities to assist employers in hiring low-skilled foreign workers. The LMO criteria have been scaled back to permit visas for offshore labour to be employed often as a recruitment tool of first choice rather than a last resort.

For example, after two Chinese workers died in the collapse of an oil storage tank in the tarsands area of northern Alberta and, after a second tank collapse, the contract with a Chinese contractor was cancelled. Thereafter, the 300 Chinese workers brought in to Canada and residing in a remote camp with neither health nor safety assurances were returned to China.

All of this change in criteria for employment in Canada took place without any reference to Parliament. The federal government just quietly changed the rules so that in Alberta, for example, in 2006 more than 60,000 permits were granted to admit low-paid and low-qualification immigrants into jobs in Alberta alone.
The federal government is aiding and abetting the emergence of a largely hidden underclass in Canada. We do need unskilled labour but, as a country which still retains some pride of purpose and dignity of human condition, do we need to encourage development of a class of people largely deprived of the basic rights to health, safety and a decent wage?

Are Canadians really prepared to support maltreatment of other humans under the pretext of low-cost labour in our country? Somehow, I hope our politicians have the courage to ask embarrassing questions.

LLoyd Brown-John is professor emeritus, public administration, at the University of Windsor.

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