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Far be it for me to intervene in the Conservative Party’s domestic hell but it should be pointed out that the government has taken steps to tighten up both the EI program and the Temporary Foreign Workers scheme.

In 2012, the Conservatives brought in new legislation that obliged healthy workers to take a job within a one-hour commute, even if wages were only 70% of their previous wage. The new law was designed to bring an end to the ridiculous situation where people describing their occupational classification as “food counter attendant” were claiming EI, while thousands of foreign workers filled those jobs.

Once again the Conservatives have not been given the benefit of the doubt because of their own history of hard-ball tactics

Last year, the government said it will reduce the number of temporary foreign workers allowed into the country from 31,000 — 1.1% of all workers in Canada — to 16,278 by 2016. Many small business people in the West argued that this is taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut and will drive up costs for those firms unable to fill all their vacancies from the domestic labour force.

But it suggests the scenario painted so colourfully by Mr. Williamson is rare, and likely getting more rare.

It may be that Mr. Williamson doesn’t think the government’s EI reforms have gone far enough. If that’s the case, he didn’t say so explicitly.

He did say that he believes employers in his region should fill job vacancies by prioritizing Canadians for available jobs.

Last year, the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, a Halifax-based think tank, released a report showing that the total number of temporary foreign workers in Atlantic Canada was 10,900 – three times as many as 2005. But the government’s TFW reforms should reverse that trend. It may be that further EI reforms are required to make sure it always pays to take a job. But that point has been lost in the race-baiting spat.