Oh lookee; the CBC is all over employers exploiting the TFW program today.
Look who was telling you all about it a year ago.
Frankly, I think what's pushed this story onto the news agenda is the sheer audacity of the Royal Bank's move to dump their internal IT folks for a call centre in India.
If RBC was some struggling banking operation doing everything it could to stay afloat, maybe this story would have passed unnoticed. But everybody knows, even folks who don't follow this stuff, that RBC is hugely profitable and can well afford to pay Canadian wages to Canadians.
And even though Gord Nixon's spin-twats are working 24/7 to contain the PR disaster, the truth of the matter is that responsibility for this debacle lies not with RBC, but with the Government of Canada.
The Temporary Foreign Worker program has from the beginning been an end run around Canadian labour standards and Canadian workers. Its genesis was in the seasonal importation of black fruit pickers from the Caribbean. Most Canadians were able to let that one slide because... well, you know...
Even then, if we'd been willing to pay a few cents more for a bag of apples at the A&P, this program would have been robbed of its legitimacy.
But now we're well past fruit-picking. We're at coal miners and welders and truck drivers and convenience store clerks... and now we've got Canada's biggest bank horning in on the action.
We're at white collar professionals.
Suddenly the nation takes notice!
This travesty should have been stopped when it started, but better late than never.
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