Hiring Foreign Workers When So Many Canadians Are Unemployed
Dear Prime Minister Martin and Fellow MP”s:
On Monday, March 15, The Province (one of two major B.C. daily newspapers, featured a front page story: “Firm To Hire Foreign Workers”. As you may have been told, the story made the following points:
(1) Lower Mainland Steel, a Delta, B.C. construction company, had applied to and been given approval by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada to hire up to 50 foreign workers to do rebar construction work. (Rebars are pieces of steel used to hold cement together.) The article stated that rebar work “is one of the most physically gruelling of all in the construction trades”.
(2) A spokesman with B.C.'s construction-trade unions described the
approval as “outrageous”. Another union spokesman said that there were
plenty of Canadian workers available and that the hiring of foreign workers was “an excuse to drive wages down and support the low bid”.
(3) Brent McIlveen, a director with Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, said that the Delta, B.C. company had 9 weeks to identify individual foreign workers it wished to hire. Up to Monday, HRSDC had not received any requests. The construction company said that it was keeping its options open.
(4)The article pointed out that In December, 2003, work permits were
granted to 11 labourers from India to dismantle a Gold River, B.C. pulp mill. Unionized workers protested “the decision, which they claimed allowed foreign workers to steal jobs from locals in one of the most depressed areas in B.C.”
Setting aside the conflict between union and non-union forces, this
incident highlights a dangerous issue: the government of Canada arrogantly ignoring the employment needs of its own people. Here are some significant facts:
(1) Officially, over 1.3 million Canadians are looking for work.
Unofficially, hundreds of thousands of others have given up looking,
temporarily or permanently. The real number of unemployed is close to 2 million.
(2) The federal government has been repeatedly warned by experts about the employment needs of its own citizens, yet it continues its mass immigration policies which are forcing long-term Canadians into direct employment competition with newly-arrived immigrants for a scarce number of jobs.
(3) The federal government, especially its Department of Citizenship and Immigration, continues to declare, with no evidence, that
Canada needs or will need hundreds of thousands of skilled workers.
(4) Ignoring or distorting Stats Can figures regarding visible minority employment, the federal government instituted a number of equity employment measures which were completely unjustified and which actively discriminate against long-term Canadians.. Equity employment sectors of the federal government have grown exponentially, as have their claims about unfair treatment of visible minorities, yet almost everything the equity employment advocates claim has no factual basis. The result is that visible minorities are being given preferential treatment in employment and long-term Canadians have been told to go to the back of the employment line. (For details, see Dr. Martin Loney's “The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, And Preferential Hiring In Canada”.)
Every level of government (some levels much more so than others) in Canada is guilty of treating its own citizens as disposables in the stampede towards political correctness on mass immigration policies. It is time for the federal government to dismantle its entire visible minority equity employment apparatus, to reduce its immigration levels to a sane 50,000 annual level and to do their duty towards their own unemployed. And it is time for provincial and municipal governments also to become responsible to their long-term citizens.
Best wishes,
Dan Murray
Immigration Watch Canada
