Open letter to Nathan Cullen, minister of municipal affairs for British Columbia,
I read Binny Paul’s August article on the work of your ministry to meet the need to increase provincial control of immigration with great interest. Certainly, if we are require 10,000 additional medical personnel to meet our health needs, then new and fresh approaches to meeting that need are now called for.
READ MORE: B.C. asks federal government for more autonomy over immigration to solve labour shortage
Of course this new initiative does not address why government and the medical professions have not trained enough Canadians to meet our needs in the first place or haven’t long since streamlined the process of reviewing and retraining people who wish to come here from other countries to practice.
One of the advantages you cite in the article is that PNP, the provincial nominee program, is cost-neutral. Is that because the countries where the invited medical staff were trained have already borne the costs of their training? What’s the government’s position on the morality of meeting our health needs at the expense of those of other countries?
But the greatest question raised by the article is posed by the difference in the government’s approach between attracting foreign staff to come here permanently to meet our health needs and importing foreign workers on a temporary basis to harvest our food, work in meat processing plants or care for our elderly or our children. Agricultural workers were considered so important to our food security during the pandemic that their work was deemed essential as was that of those who did the work of personal care for our vulnerable aging parents and grandparents.
These workers are permitted to come, (as in being issued a temporary permit). They are not invited and certainly not to stay. Is the difference between professions and labour so great that it simply does not occur to us to treat people the same way? Put more specifically, would your government consider recommending that we simply offer essential farm and personal care workers the status of permanent residents when they arrive? That one sweeping change would bring about much social good and overdue justice.
It would make our health services instantly available to those who work here for us. Similarly, it would give them the protection of our labour code so that they could refuse dangerous work or be paid appropriately for their work with some protection from reprisals, a basic civil protection Canadians take for granted.
There is a difference between immigrants and migrants but it is an artificial one created to allow the federal government control over the labour supply in a way which benefits companies at the expense of the people who work for them. In its increasing involvement, will the provincial government give the needs of farm, food and care workers the same attention it wants to focus on those who work in health care?
Robert Hart, MSW
Terrace, B.C.
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michael.willcock@terracestandard.com