The Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) told Today’s Trucking that says immigration remains essential to the industry.
Geoff Wood, CTA senior vice president of policy, said the TFWP will continue to have an important role and must remain a viable option to support the trucking industry.
“Our position is that immigration remains essential to the trucking industry, and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) will continue to have an important role and must remain a viable option to support the trucking industry,” he told Trucknews.com. “Trucking is the backbone of our domestic and international supply chain and the mechanism by which economic growth in multiple sectors will succeed and this key immigration program needs to remain open to legitimate operations. That said, there is no doubt the program needs to be updated—a process we are actively working on with our federal partners—and that a strict known employer program must be implemented. This would ensure workers are treated fairly, paid properly, and have the opportunity to transition to permanent residency if they choose. Scrapping a program that legitimate law abiding employers rely on is not the solution; the real issue is organizations that break the rules while still accessing the program and engage in gross labour abuses all while profiteering off the various schemes that have been allowed to grow. We have communicated this in our CTA testimony to the TRAN Committee and at numerous other engagements with officials at all levels. The focus should be on addressing abuse, not on eliminating immigration or the program itself.”
Manan Gupta, president of Skylake Immigration in Brampton, Ont., said scrapping the TFWP will not fix abuses in the immigration system.
He agreed with the CTA that in critical sectors like trucking, where labour shortages exist, ending the program would hurt compliant businesses and exacerbate shortages.
Gupta echoed Wood’s call for a trusted-employer program and sought stronger reforms, including tougher enforcement, regular audits, serious penalties for violations, public naming of bad employers and a zero-tolerance approach to exploitation or misrepresentation.
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