In its final report of this term, the round table group of community immigration experts urged Robertson to continue the city’s mentorship program for new immigrants, as well as a groundbreaking study of the impact of temporary foreign worker programs.

The report also urges continuation of the enormously successful Dialogues project, which has senior government funding, to encourage new relationships between immigrant and ethnic communities with Vancouver’s First Nations.

The working group’s report was circulated to councillors earlier this week. I was honoured to co-chair the group with Prof. Dan Hiebert of UBC.

The findings suggest that cities like Surrey, Burnaby and Vancouver, with their high share of recent immigrants, may find their economic recoveries lagging as well.

The case highlights the vulnerability of temporary foreign workers to exploitation and abuse. BC employs more than 60,000 TFWs and has recorded its own cases of extreme mistreatment. (The impact of the expanding TFW program on Vancouver has been a focus of the Mayor’s Working Group on Immigration.)

Gil MacGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, has been in the forefront of the provincial effort to ensure safety and dignity for temporary foreign workers in the province. He was instrumental in winning provincially-funded help centres for TFWs, a measure BC has refused to implement.

But MacGowan warned last month that the province’s failure, four years later, to prosecute anyone for the workplace death of the two workers was a warning sign of lack of provincial commitment to protect this growing workforce.

MacGowan argues the workers faced extra risks because they had not been trained in Canadian workplace safety standards and practices.

A total of 53 charges were laid in the 2007 incident, which killed two and injured four others. But nothing has resulted from the charges.

The Chinese workers were cheated of wages, as well as denied safe working conditions. In the course of the accident investigation, Alberta officials learned that workers on the project had not been paid more than $3 million in wages.

CNRL, the firm building the Horizon mine, transferred that sum to the Alberta government to pay the Chinese workers after they returned home. More than a year after the accident, Alberta officials were still trying to track the workers down in their home country.

“We cannot ignore or fail to enforce our rules just because these are foreign workers,” says MacGowan. ” The government must be more serious about its responsibility to inspect work sites and enforce its rules, or more workers will die or be hurt.”

Are there similar stories in BC? Hard to say. Unlike Alberta and Manitoba, our province has no program to provide protection to this growing group of residents, not even a phone number to call.

With the extension of permits to two years for some lower-skilled categories, BCBC found, “the stock of temporary workers has expanded so that there are now 100,000 more TFWs residing in Canada than are permitted to enter each year. . .

“The stock of foreign workers in BC now sits at around around 70,000.” At least half of those reside in Greater Vancouver and the majority in Vancouver itself.

From the city’s perspective, this means a growing population of workers needing services and support, a matter Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Working Group on Immigration has been assessing.

Only abut 15 percent of BC’s temporary workers in 2008 were in the managerial and professional categories. The rest were skilled and technical, intermediate or unskilled. For a surprising 43.7 percent, the skill level was “not stated.”

Despite the economic downturn, BCBC expects demand for TFWs to continue, especially in the regions. “The program is driven by employer demand, and is designed to fill identified labour shortages where no suitable Canadian workers or permanent residents are available (or prepared to do the work available).”

When they’re no longer needed, most will go home. For the time being, they are an invisible, although disposable, element of the city’s workforce.

As many as one in 10 of the workers in the city many be in some aspect of the program, according to Westender reporter Jessica Barrett. She probes the issue, to be the focus of an upcoming report from the Mayor’s Working Group on Immigration, in this cover story.

And Sun columnist Doug Todd brings together left and right perspectives in this assessment, which challenges the view that TFWs provide long-term benefits to the Canadian economy. At the core of the debate: who benefits from the lower wages paid to TFWs in low-skilled jobs?

If the TFWs had full immigration rights, would the wages stay so low?

Proposed by Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Working Group on Immigration, which I co-chair with UBC professor Dan Hiebert, the pilot project was designed to test what immigrant-serving agencies have long predicted.

A critical obstacle facing new immigrants, they warned, no matter how skilled, is lack of Canadian experience, local networks and on-the-job credentials. A mentorship program changes that by linking a “mentee” — the immigrant — with a mentor, someone in their field who will advise them on their job hunt.

As City Engineer Peter Judd, a mentor himself, told council, the advice could be as simple as adding a cover letter to a resume, something that is never done in some countries.

Today, just five months after it began, the mentorship project celebrated its first group of graduates, many of whom are already on track to new jobs. In one case, an electrical designer from the Philippines who had searched for work for three years, it led to a job with the city itself.

Veronica Zhou, one of the mentees, told council how she had learned the hard way that immigration is “not an easy journey, nor certain.”

An accountant and auditor, with outstanding multinational qualifications from China and work experience with KPMG China, she found herself in Canada on a job hunt that never seemed to end: 79 online applications without a single response, 119 application letters and 20 variations on her resume. She began to lose confidence, both in herself and her professional capabilities.

But a strong support network, including agencies like MOSAIC and Success, as well as the city’s mentorship program, got her on track. She landed a short contract with the city, then secured an offer from the provincial Auditor General.

In a moving account of her journey, Zhou told council “the open heart of Vancouver, the help from strangers, is making Canada a dream destination” for immigrants.

Despite the obvious benefits of the mentorship, both to the city and the mentees, the Vancouver is the first major organization in BC to attempt such a program. Stephen Owen, of the Immigrant Employment Council of BC, said the city’s success could change all that by demonstrating “the simply but powerful tool of mentorship.”

Foreign Worker, Local Neighbour from TFW Vancouver on Vimeo.

Research conducted for Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Working Group on Immigration has discovered that more than 37,000 Vancouver residents are here on temporary foreign workers’ permits, doing jobs as varied as live-in caregiving, construction and engineering.

Some of their voices are in this video.

Who are these people and what are their impacts on the city? No doubt they contribute to the economy, because each one is here at the command of an employer.

But what are their impacts on housing, transportation and other city services? Are their rights protected? What happens if they wish to quit their job, or are fired?

All these issues are explored in Foreign Worker, Local Neighbour, a Working Group project that sponsored a packed forum Saturday at the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library.

Should the programs be scrapped, as many at the forum urged? Or should they be reformed, as others proposed?

The Working Group is seeking wider public feedback and will publish its preliminary conclusions in a report to mayor and council in July. In the meantime, your comments and observations are welcome, either directly to me or through the Foreign Worker, Local Neighbour website.

If Vancouver City Council passes the motion I have proposed for our next meeting, it will be the first in Canada, as far as I know, to urge the government to change direction and ensure everyone who was promised this opportunity can realize the dream of reuniting their family in this country, often after a wait of many, many years.

In this column, scheduled for publication in Philippine News Today, I set out the case for restoring the number of visas to last year’s level:

The federal government’s decision to slash the number of visas available for family reunification is a cruel and unacceptable betrayal of Canada’s commitment to new immigrants.
The prospect of reuniting grandparents with their children and grandchildren in Canada is one of the most cherished dreams of many immigrant families, a dream that may only be realized after many years of hard work and struggle.
During those years, new immigrants make a priceless contribution to Canada’s prosperity, often working for substandard wages in occupations far below the careers they trained for at home.
For many, the reward for these sacrifices is the prospect of reuniting parents with their extended family in Canada.
Now, that dream may be denied.
Altlhough Canada admitted 16,000 people on family reunification visas last year, Ottawa has decided only 11,000 can come in 2011.
As many as 140,000 are in the queue. Many on the list have already been waiting five, six or seven years.
Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland says that wait may now stretch to 13 years. People will literally die on the waiting list to join their loved ones.
How does Immigration Minister Jason Kenney justify these cuts?
“There have to be choices made,” he says.
“I know that the most popular thing we could do politically would be to say that this year, we’re going to go from 14,000 to 100,000 parents and grandparents.
“But it wouldn’t be responsible because that means fewer economic immigrants coming and paying taxes, or fewer refugees to save from refugee camps.”
Who is he kidding? This policy has nothing to do with refugees.
Nor is Ottawa really interested in “economic immigrants” who are “paying taxes.”
The dramatic expansion of the temporary foreign worker programs demonstrates that reality.
Ottawa is admitting tens of thousands of these temporary workers, who can only stay for short terms, have limited access to immigration and are dependent on individual employers.
They pay minimal taxes, they work hard and they get sent home when no longer needed.
While the temporary programs expand, Ottawa is cutting back, even in the skilled foreign worker program it claims is a priority. The number of workers to admitted this year will decline to 56,000 from 70,000 last year. Another 300,000 are on that waiting list.
Despite the Conservatives claims to support immigrant communities, events of the last few months show a new reality.
Funding for immigrant services agencies have been frozen or rolled back, with the impact particularly severe in eastern Canada.
Here in BC, where the province runs employment centres, a radical restructuring driven by budget pressures may lead to widespread cuts in existing services.
Now Ottawa is cutting back on family reunification and immigration for skilled workers.
Canada owes much of its economic strength to the contribution of immigrants and their extended families.
But Jason Kenney’s new policy will deny them their dream of family reunification.

The issue is a top priority for review by the Mayor’s Working Group on Immigration, which I co-chair with Dan Hiebert, a director of Metropolis, an academic research centre focussing on immigration issues.

(The allegations in the suit remain unproved and are categorically denied by Denny’s.)

Workers on temporary permits, which require them to return home at the end of their contract, are rapidly outstripping new immigrants as participants in Canada’s work force.

Lawyers for the complainants in the $10 million action say the workers were recruited in the Philippines after paying a $6,000 recruiter’s fee and then deployed across the province. They now say they have been denied wages, overtime and travel charges they are entitled to under their contracts.

Once a Filipino worker has made the long journey to BC and is pouring coffee or flipping burgers, his or her existence is entirely dependent on their employer under the terms of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Their visa does not make them an immigrant. They cannot work for someone if they quit their job or are fired. They are supposed to be flown home at their employer’s expense when the work ends.

Reality tells a different story. Winnipeg citizens were outraged in the days before Christmas by the heart-rending story of the “Three Amigos,” three Filipino men who remained in Canada and worked illegally after their job with an Alberta gas station ended abruptly. Faced with deportation, they begged to stay so they could find work to support their families.

Such workers often join the underground economy, putting an unknown pressure on housing stock and city services. Vulnerable to deportation, they may work in unsafe conditions, with inadequate training and low wages.

Alberta has established special offices to provide support to foreign workers in that province. In BC, all support must come from immigrant settlement services which are not only not funded for the work but are facing a massive restructuring and reduction of contract funding.

What is the impact of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program on Vancouver, its immigration settlement services and on the workers themselves? The Mayor’s Working Group on Immigration has decided to investigate for itself and city staff are preparing a competitive bid process to find suitable contractors to shine a light on this poorly-understood issue.