The NDP critic for Indigenous Services, Northern Affairs and Crown-Indigenous Relations, MP Lori Idlout (Nunavut), and NDP critic for Women and Gender Equality, Leah Gazan (Winnipeg Centre), made the following joint statement
“On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch released their world report, including Canada’s human rights violations against Indigenous peoples. They pointed to the ongoing genocide against Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people, a lack of access to clean drinking water and a housing crisis impacting Indigenous communities.
Despite Prime Minister Trudeau's own acknowledgment that the situation constitutes a genocide, Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people continue to go missing or be murdered at alarming rates. This is a national emergency that must be urgently addressed.
Other fundamental rights such as access to clean drinking water and basic housing continue to be in crisis. In Nunavut for example, living in overcrowded and dilapidated homes is the norm, with deeply inadequate government action to fix the housing crisis. Shockingly, families are often forced to use duct tape to repair their homes. All people have the right to live in dignity, including Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Equally concerning is the failure of the Liberal government to keep their promise of lifting all long-term water boil advisories by 2021. Shamefully, there are still 33 such advisories and 29 short-term drinking water advisories still in effect. This is an urgent crisis.
The federal government must act on the international concerns about their ongoing failure to uphold the rights of Indigenous peoples, rights affirmed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which is part of Canadian law as demonstrated by Bill C-15.
We call on the government to immediately implement the 231 Calls for Justice from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action and uphold all rights affirmed within UNDRIP. New Democrats will keep fighting to ensure the government takes action so, Indigenous peoples have the justice they deserve.”
NDP MP Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.), her party’s immigration critic, said the UN report should come as no surprise to the government, as it echoes “what migrant workers and labour advocates have been saying for a very long time.”
NDP MP Jenny Kwan says the power imbalance that leads to abuse is structural to the temporary foreign worker program, not just its low-wage stream. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade
“The way the program is set up exposes workers to exploitation and abuse because they’re reliant on their employer to retain their status in Canada,” Kwan explained. “If they face abuse and exploitation and complain about it, they stand to lose their job, and—in the worst-case scenario—they stand to be deported back to their country of origin.”
Kwan said the government has taken a “haphazard approach” to addressing problems with the TFWP to date, focused almost solely on the low-wage stream, but—while misuse of that stream is “particularly deplorable”—she said the root of the problem is structural to the entire program.
“The government has to address the main structural issue, and that is the power imbalance that exists between the temporary foreign worker and the employer,” Kwan said. “The only way to do that is to ensure that the temporary foreign workers actually have landed status on arrival, then they are not dependent on the employer, and would not have to suffer potential abuses and exploitation.”
“It doesn’t matter what stream it is, all the temporary foreign workers programs subject migrant workers to potential exploitation because of that power imbalance,” Kwan said, adding, though, that the NDP supports calls to end the program’s low-wage stream.
While the government and groups like the Canadian Chamber of Commerce may reject the UN rapporteur’s characterization of the program, the recent Senate report found similar abuses within the program.
"People are rightfully furious and deeply concerned to learn that a man allegedly linked to a terrorist group and heinous terrorist acts was given Canadian citizenship by the Liberal government," she said in a statement.
"This alarming failure only adds to the concerns that Canadians already have about Canada's public safety and immigration system."
On Tuesday, a parliamentary committee agreed to investigate the case amid questions about the immigration screening process for both men.
The committee hearings, set to begin later this month, will likely zero in on Canada's immigration process, its security screening capacity and how security officials handle domestic threats.