I’m pleased to see that there will be fines there for people who take away people’s passports and so on, but it does worry me, about enforcement. I also worry that perhaps people from the other side haven’t actually visited many of these places where foreign workers are employed. The living situations are often very crowded, unsanitary, and we know that COVID broke out in those places and that workers died, and yet OHIP is being denied to those workers. They also pay into WSIB, and they’re not eligible to collect.

What I would like to know is, what will be there in terms of health care for these workers from this government?

Thank you to the member from Sault Ste. Marie.

I’m just wondering if you can build on the additional amendments that are being made and tell us how the government is making amendments related to fines for holding passports and how this goes further to protect vulnerable workers.

I want to thank the member from Sault Ste. Marie for his debate. It was excellent. He was talking about the Occupational Health and Safety Act and increasing the maximum fines from $1.5 million to $2 million. I don’t expect him to have an answer to this, because I wouldn’t have an answer either, but I was curious when I saw this: How many fines were sent out at the maximum, in the last five years or 10 years? And how many fines in general were sent out along that line that would give us the information for why we would need to have the fines increased?

I don’t expect you to know how many, but I just ask as a commitment, when it goes to committee, if you could find that information, provide it to the committee, so we can make decent recommendations if this actually makes sense to increase the fines. Or maybe the recommendation should be that there should be more fines.