Immigration and Labour: Critic or Catalyst?

Abstract

Among the major interest groups represented in public discussion of the Green Paper on Immigration, organized labour may be expected to attract more than average attention because of its traditional resistance to uncontrolled immigration and its grass-roots influence on manpower policies generally. In the context of a debate on long-term objectives, however, Canadian labour's contribution seems likely to go well beyond the traditional, into a level of economic planning which recent governments, preoccupied with short-term problems, have been unprepared hitherto to discuss with the public. Despite a necessary concern with unemployment, and frequently justifiable fears that some immigrant labour will be exploited, unions cannot be said to have obstructed the admission or integration of some four million newcomers in the postwar period. In many tangible ways they have facilitated this process. For nearly twenty years they have also advocated a longer-range approach to immigration planning, including a regular consultative mechanism to ensure continuous contact between the government and various organizations interested in immigration policy and its administration. Had labour's proposals been followed to the letter there is no reason to think that Canada would have received fewer immigrants in total, or that their ethnic composition would have been significantly different. In fact there might have been only one obvious difference in the present state of affairs: long-term immigration objectives would not lack definition and expression as the Green Paper now deplores. For present purposes we may take the policies of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) as having represented a general consensus of unions' views in all regions and industries. Formed in 1956 through a merger of the Trades and Labour Congress and the younger Canadian Congress of Labour, the CLC comprises most national and international unions outside the Quebec-based Confederation of National Trade Unions. It can also claim to speak for a large and increasing number of immigrants - not as immigrants necessarily, but as union members. While no estimate of the immigrant component of union