Dozens of Bell Canada’s union employees demonstrated at an Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce event to protest the company’s move to outsource its jobs to India.

The demonstration was held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre where The Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce was holding a gala event to promote more growth in trade between India and Canada.

“Bell Canada and like minded companies continue to show disregard for their employees and the communities within which they operate by sending good jobs overseas to the lowest bidder”, says Brenda Knight, President of the Canadian Telecommunications Employees’ Association.

 “We want to raise public and government awareness towards the fact that this issue affects not only our membership, but all Canadian working people.”

The CTEA is losing count of the number of decisions Bell Canada has made to the disadvantage of its employees: contracting out of Residential and Business Client Representative jobs, contracting out of account collection and repair services to Expertel, Minacs, and contractors overseas.

Bell Canada is continually seeking to lower its costs by reducing its Canadian staff and increasing “cheap labour,” the union said.

On May 2, Bell announced it had signed agreements with vendors in India to provide customer provisioning and activation work at a fraction of the cost of a Canadian worker.

Service centres in India will have access to the most sensitive information including names, addresses, SIN numbers, etc, the union claimed. But Canada’s minister of international trade David Emerson dismissed concerns the deal would jeopardize the Canadian job market.  Indian investment in Canada will help the Canadian economy and also bring jobs to Canada, he said.

While Ontario Opposition leader John Tory listened to the protesting workers outside, he said outsourcing jobs to countries such as India is a concern.

In 2006, direct investment between Canada and India reached $528 million.

As well, two-way trade grew to a record level of $3.6 billion, including a 55% increase in merchandise exports to India.

Statistics Canada said last month the move by Canadian companies to outsource some of their operations to lower-wage countries such as China and India has not had the effect on domestic employment that many feared, a new study suggests.

The findings run contrary to fears that began in the early 1980s, when it was argued that many manufacturing jobs in advanced economies were being lost to developing countries, Statistics Canada noted.

In fact, the study suggested, Canada has actually seen a net gain from the outsourcing trend.

In 2004, Canadian firms imported roughly $18 billion of computer, information and other business services. Of these, roughly $1 billion came from non-OECD countries such as India and China, Statistics Canada said.

At the same time, exports of computer, information and other business services totalled roughly $20 billion. Of this, $3.5 billion went to non-OECD countries, the agency added.

“This indicates that while some Canadian firms were increasingly involved in the foreign outsourcing of services, others were also benefiting from foreign insourcing,” the report said.