A Commentary by Doug Draper
Coming right off the depressing news that Ontario and the rest of Canada suffered a net loss of 54,000 jobs this March, we’re now getting reports that one of the country’s wealthiest banking corporations is moving to replace some of its Canadian employees with cheaper labour shipped over from India and other countries.
Canada’s big banks just keep shoveling it in , with record profits, while the rest of us fall further and further behind.
The Royal Bank of Canada, which last year recorded the highest increase in profits over the previous year (more than $2.2 billion or 73 per cent over a 12 month period beginning in the fall of 2011) of all five major chartered banks in the country, is replacing at least 40 of its Canadian employees in Toronto with foreign workers.
All of this, according the CBC, which was the first to break the story over the April 6/7 weekend, is taking place under a “Temporary Foreign Worker Program” set up by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to allow companies to hire from abroad if they can’t find qualified Canadians to do the job.
Now correct me if I am wrong, but haven’t we been hearing the federal government and a number of companies in this country saying that they can’t find enough Canadians with the training or qualifications to fill the jobs out there for a while now? And how can that possibly be when there are more young Canadians than ever before – young people who are anxious to land jobs – graduating from our universities and colleges in every conceivable field? That doesn’t even take into account the number of older, skilled workers in Canada who, through no fault of their own, have lost their jobs due to restructuring and recession and are also anxious to get back into the workforce.
What is particularly suspicious about this latest reported incident involving the Royal Bank of Canada is that the bank and its offshore partner agency iGate is actually having the IT or computer specialists the bank is planning to replace train the foreign workers who will take over their jobs.
I know that in this brave new world of global plunder and exploitation, we have not come to expect much in the way of a heart from corporations, as much as a majority of judges on the American Supreme Court and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney want to convince us that “corporations are people too.” But how bloody sadistic and sociopathic can corporations like the Royal Bank of Canada get than to direct people from their own country, under their employee, train foreign workers to replace them? It’s kind of like having a group of people about to be executed load the guns for the firing squad.
And as if all this isn’t maddening enough, we now have Harper’s human resources minister, Diane Finley, saying she will look into these latest reports of chewing up and spitting out Canadian employees under this charade of a program because something “unacceptable” may have transpired here.
Piggy Bank pigs and their shareholders use Stephen Harper, Conservative governments foreign employment program to push up, even higher, their record profits.
She’s going to look into it? As a CBC Radio Noon phone-in program shows this April 8, the abuse of this program has been going on for at least two years now to replace everyone from Canadian-borne air pilots, to miners, farm labourers, university employees and others with foreign workers, and Finley and her government have been told about it time and time again. And they have done nothing!
Why have they done nothing? So far as anyone put it who called up the CBC radio program know, including someone who worked for a company doing this employee replacement work on behave of Canadian corporations before she, as she explained it, couldn’t live with herself in that job any more, it is mostly about replacing Canadians with people these corporations (many of them making huge profits and receiving tax cuts and other perks from the federal government) can employ for lower wages and little or no benefits in some cases.
What this adds up to, and we also saw it most recently in the news about super-rich Canadians allowed to evade paying their fair of taxes by stashing their money in off-shore tax havens, is a federal government under the leadership of Stephen Harper that cares more about rewarding the rich and super-rich than it does about protecting Canadian jobs and building a healthy, promising future for the people who were born and live here.
If you have a Conservative MPP representing you in your riding like Rick Dykstra in St. Catharines or Rob Nicholson in Niagara Falls, call or email their offices and demand that they put an end to this foreign employee abuse program and protect the jobs of Canadians!
It is a government that is not only allowing some of the wealthiest corporations in Canada and their shareholders to shovel more money in their pockets by killing Canadian jobs, but it is one that then turns around and builds an army of government goons to go out and kick down the doors of people who have lost their jobs and who it thinks might be abusing the unemployment insurance system.
What I think we ought to do as Canadians who live here and are willing to work hard to build a promising life for ourselves, our children and the communities we live in, is boycott outfits like the Royal Bank of Canada, who are engaged in job-killing practices like this, by depriving them of our money, and going to the Conservative MPs in our region – in Niagara, Ontario they are Rob Nicholson in Niagara Falls and Rick Dystra in St. Catharines – and making it clear to them that they will be out of a job if they don’t do something to stop their corporate friends from killing Canadian jobs.
Finally, can’t we please have enough of the Harper government and its clones in the Tim Hudak Conservative Party in Ontario automatically referring to corporations as “job creators” as an argument for granting each and every one of them another corporate tax cut. Since when is the work “corporation” synonymous” with “job creator,” when we are watching so many of these corporations further maximize profits for their owners and shareholders by outsourcing Canadian jobs?
If we want to give tax breaks to corporations, give it to the ones with a proven track record of creating Canadian jobs and leave greedy pigs like the Royal Bank of Canada out of it.
(Niagara At Large invites you to join in the conversation by sharing your views on the content of this post below. For reasons of transparency and promoting civil dialogue, NAL only posts comments from individuals who share their first and last name with their views.)
Niagara At Large 
This is a really good piece, Doug! Cheers, Fiona
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I have been thinking of leaving RBC for some time. They are the most greedy of any of the banks and are constantly in the pockets of their clients. Every time I turn around they are hitting me with some outrageous fee for an outrageous service which hardly qualifies as a “service” but only “serves” to increase their bottom line. Good luck sorting through the “legalese” in order to figure out what they are talking about. Who wrote the rules that they abide by and why is it the customer pays even though it is our money?
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When are we gonna start fighting back against these CORRUPT politicians????
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Excellent article. I am at a loss for words. How any thinking Canadian can support this charade of a government is beyond my comprehension. They have destroyed our economy, our jobs, and the lives of millions of Canadians, and STILL they have support in all the polls. Unbelievable.
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Look at the bright side, eventually Canadians are going to get pushed to the breaking point and then it’ll be time to bust out the pitchforks and torches.
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One of my favourite phrases is particularly appropriate for the Royal Bank of Canada …. Scum Sucking Bottom-feeders. (with apologies to catfish).
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At least catfish can be tasty. RBC, on the other hand, is a waste of our oxygen.
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Does it not assail your senses to be fed obviously conflicting diatribe valuable only to those spinning self-serving and disreputable hyperbole.
Suspicious ratings of Canadian Universities. Universities whose greatest claim to fame is their prowess in empire building. Colleges relying on in-house surveys of their own students that have no way to compare!
In some cases they charge $tens of thousands for courses fitting for unemployment or migration. University graduates continuing through community college hoping to learn skills to become employable.
It’s not enough that we fund obvious academe braggadocio but now we have to listen to more no-it-alls telling us that we must import skilled workers!
Is someone pissing down our leg and telling us its raining?
P.S. I wrote a little bitch book in the early nineties on the charter banks titled ‘Charter of Greed’.
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Harpo and his cons are trying to drive down wages for Canadians by bringing in TFW. they’re making cuts to essential services like search and rescue, or food safety inspections and for what so cons and their pals in the senate can get a fat pay raise. If something isn’t done about harpo and his cons, they’ll turn this country into a third world country. F*CK AUSTERITY!!! F*CK THE CONS!!!
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How many companies in Canada are using call centres located in India and other foreign countries. It isn’t only the Royal Bank but almost every big company in Canada. One day I called in a computer problem with the company I worked for and I talked to a rep in Alberta. A week later I called the same number and found out that at foriegn company was now handling the calls.It was disappointing to think of job loses in canada and also I couldn’t understand a thing the person on the other end was saying.
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Great article. At the bottom, however, on my screen there is an ad for the Royal Bank of Canada. I clicked on it, thinking it was a joke, but no, it seems authentic. How is this possible?
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RBC…”Really BAD Corporation” what a bunch of HYPOCRITES,and you call yourselves a Canadian institution..BS
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The most insulting part is that people are in essence, as Doug said, loading the guns for their own execution by teaching their replacements. As my dear late old auntie said, and you probably won’t print this…
“It’s bad enough when they sh*t on you but when they pull out your hair to wipe their a$$, it’s going too far!”
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Yep, put more people on welfare after throwing them all out of their jobs, and pretty soon they won’t be able to afford welfare, so they will have to hire call centre workers and IT workers overseas to handle these claims, as they grow by the millions. When is this government going to wake up and realize that a pro-austerity agenda is KILLING the economy?
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What about the call centers Bell and Rogers have set up offshore?????
Too many companies are using digital means to set up service centers designed to support Canadian business operations and this practice has to stop!
They deny Canadians employment and the service they provide sucks!!!!!
As for those iGate employees who somehow achieved landed status and have eliminated jobs for CANADIANS, where the hell is Jason Kenny on this. These workers should have been shipped back to where they came from and those jobs given to Canadians. Lord knows we have a ton if IT resources looking for work.
Sadly just sayin…….
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Cheer up folks. Look on the bright side. All this off-shoring & outsourcing must be raising the standard of living all underdog humanity all across the world; Canadian job & pay losses might be seen as our kindly charity to downtrodden others in the Third World. I am sure that’s how that RBC CEO fat-cat, ‘one-percenter’ justifies himself.
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There is a possibility that workers at The Royal Bank of Canada are being replaced by robots and the immigrant workers story is a distraction to what they are actually doing. Others too, like Bell. I was late with a payment and had my services cut until i made that payment. Eventually i did make the payment from my computer and then immediate (10 seconds later) i make a call and services were restored. “10 seconds”, and it was done. That is not the work of a human.
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Q: What do retired bankers do? They become Police Commissioners of small communities which gives the Banksters control of our police force. I have proof of this.
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