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Canada’s Conservative/Con-artist government has created a new loophole around labour laws, granting an exemption to Microsoft allowing them to use temporary foreign workers without even pretending to look for Canadians to fill the jobs first.

The feds ridiculously claim the arrangement will create jobs for Canadians. Apparently, the government expects you to believe that eliminating qualified Canadians from the pool of applicants and replacing them with a revolving door of temporary foreign workers will create more jobs for Canadians.

The CBC quotes Toronto immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman: “There is certainly no justification that I can see that would support granting an exemption to a large number of foreign workers to come into Canada to take away jobs that could easily filled by Canadians… On the one hand, the government is telling us they are protecting Canadian jobs; on the other hand they’re signing agreements with big corporations in which they’re allowing them to bring in foreign workers.”

Because foreign workers will be working in Canada for only 24 month periods, Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokesperson Sonia Lesage claims that the foreign workers are not going to be entering the Canadian workforce, and therefore won’t be competing with Canadian workers. Is Sonia Lesange completely out of her mind? How can any sane person make such claims and expect the public to take them seriously? These workers will be taking “jobs in Canada that require work permits, and they could find Canadian graduates from computer science programs to fill them”, says a source who works in immigration law.

Microsoft is in bed with the Harper government specifically to get around labour laws. Karen Jones, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, has said specifically that the deal will allow Microsoft to get around rules on visas for foreign workers. “The U.S. laws clearly did not meet our needs. We have to look to other places,” she told Bloomberg Businessweek. Obviously Canadian law did not meet their needs either, but Harper’s cronies are happy to make Microsoft exempt from the law.

As Waldman told the CBC: “There is no other exemption that is specific to a corporation, and it does not fall within any of the other categories where exemptions are normally given,”

This is a dangerous new precedent in corporate welfare.

Written by Alternative Free Press

Microsoft’s temporary foreign workers: Canada sets a dangerous new precedent in corporate welfare by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Source: Foreign workers: Microsoft gets green light from Ottawa for foreign trainees (CBC)