‘A negative brush’

It was with great distress that I read Murray Mandryk’s Sept. 5 column, “Government cellphone law still wrong”. While I can appreciate a good debate and understand issues often have many sides that need to be considered, it is absolutely essential that debates remain fact-based, and Mandyrk’s column took too many liberties.

First of all, I feel it is important to clarify that temporary foreign workers are not regulated by provincial laws. The Saskatchewan Party’s degree of control over this issue, contrary to Mandyrk’s assertions, is negligible.

Secondly, in the TFWP examples cited by Mandryk, the businesses involved adhered to the law and undertook a complex decision-making process. Layoffs always involve difficult choices and these businesses deserve better than to be persecuted by the press based on partial facts.

I am also mystified by the negative portrayals of business people that Mandryk puts forward as “facts” in this piece. Stating that employers view temporary foreign workers as “indentured servants” or that they insist employees answer phones while driving does not align with the real businesspeople I know.

Employers are not an elite group of evildoers; they are our friends and neighbours. I hope Mandryk can refrain from painting them with such a negative brush in the future. This is an important issue for Saskatchewan and it needs to be dealt with in a serious manner while paying attention to the facts, not just by listening to rhetoric.

Steve McLellan, Regina McLellan is CEO of the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce