Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's a very good point. I think the whole thing you have to look at is that the adjustment period of coming to Canada is a pretty significant one for anyone. If anybody here has ever moved in this country, you know it's a big adjustment just moving from place to place. When you're moving to a whole new country, there are a lot of things you have to adjust to.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Again, I think we're almost violently agreeing here, because we have individuals who have been in this country for several years who are adapting well. By definition, those aren't the kinds of people your constituents would be talking about. While we can't specify who they are, they're talking about people who really can't speak English at all, or they can't make themselves understood to those people.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Me neither. I've seen CEOs of companies who can't become permanent residents because their first language is not English and they don't do business in English because they work with their head offices. But they can talk and they can listen and you wouldn't know from day one. Those are the sorts of people I'm talking about.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Currently, the path to permanent residency is the express entry system. The express entry system has a lot of categories where you can get more points or fewer points, but it has a couple of absolute categories, and one is language. It doesn't matter if you have three Ph.D.s and you're working at a job making a million dollars a year.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure. There are some small firms.... There was a cleaning company in Nova Scotia where the owner was charged. The workers complained. We've seen that abuse at a fairly consistent level all along. There are bad people in the world. Part of it has to do with the recruiting industry overseas.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think it's fair to say that not everyone has the ability to learn a language at the same level. We already recognize that there could be a different language standard, for example, for citizenship. We're talking about skilled workers going to permanent residents—people who are living in their homes, working at jobs, being productive and adding to the Canadian economy.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's a significant problem for anyone whose first language isn't English or French, especially if their first language doesn't have the same alphabet—possibly Turkish or Mandarin or Cyrillic-based. Those individuals have a very hard time writing, and the problem is the language test.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Typically, the abuse doesn't happen because a business is growing and they need workers. Typically, the abuse happens because someone in the community wants to bring in people who aren't qualified. That's a small level of abuse. The biggest level of abuse is from people who abuse the workers who come in by not paying them an adequate wage.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Absolutely. We've come a long way in the last 10 years, when an employee who was paid half the minimum wage to do a job was told that if they didn't like what the employer was paying them they could take them to civil court. Today, employers must pay the median wage and they are inspected.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Marc. We have some very specific and detailed recommendations, and some general ones. First, we ask that Quebec employers be exempted from having to provide workers' names until their LMIAs have been adjudicated, as is done in all other provinces. In Quebec, employers are required to provide the name of the temporary foreign worker with the LMIA application, even though the LMIA has nothing to do with the worker, because they must file for a selection certificate from Quebec immigration at the same time.