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The Trudeau government is under fire for changes it made to the temporary foreign worker program in 2022. The amendments boosted the number of people employed under the program, suppressing domestic wages and making life harder for workers, both foreign and domestic, during an affordability crisis, no less. The Liberals deserve the criticism. Indeed, the program is so toxic, the Liberals can hardly be trusted to govern.
The changes to the low-wage category of the program were designed to boost the labour supply in industries having a hard time finding workers. Orthodox economists – and basic math and psychology – will tell you the answer to that problem ought to be higher wages. That’s what we’re told time and time again: people respond to incentives and disincentives.
For workers, higher wages are a major incentive. But business didn’t want to pay, so they lobbied the feds, and the feds obliged by upping the numbers of low-wage temporary foreign workers, crushing labour rights in the process. Temporary foreign workers (TFWs) are easily exploited since they aren’t permanent residents and their temporary resident status is tied to a specific job, which frequently leads to employer abuse and denied employment rights, such as in British Columbia’s construction industry.
The government also rigged the market for industry, with the influx of cheap foreign labour suppressing the capacity for domestic workers to bargain for better wages and working conditions.
Two years later, the effects of the program are being felt. Young workers are struggling to find a job while employers – among them, the coffee-chain Tim Hortons – pass them over for cheap temporary foreign workers.
In 2023, Canada brought in roughly 240,000 temporary foreign workers across all program streams. That is more than double the pre-pandemic number that saw 109,000 TFWs admitted in 2018. Drawing on data from Employment and Social Development Canada, CBC’s Paula Duhatschek shows the rise in admissions was high in some industries – 67 per cent for farm workers, for instance – and beyond staggering in others, with a 1,414 per cent rise in light duty cleaners, a near 4,000 per cent increase in construction and labourers, and a 4,802 per cent jump in the food industry.
On X, formerly Twitter, economist Mike Moffat detailed how the changes led to a near tripling of temporary foreign workers entering the market under the low-wage stream since 2022. The trick was the government’s deregulation of the program, which included raising the percentage of workers a business could dedicate to temporary workers from 10 to 20 per cent, and as high as 30 per cent in some industries. On top of that, the Liberals waived a rule in certain high-unemployment regions that prevented temporary foreign workers being hired — meaning even economically struggling populations, in places like Nunavut, Newfoundland and Labrador, or Northern Manitoba, weren’t spared from the undervaluing of their labour.
Moffat’s conclusion is as scathing as it is incisive: “This was a deliberate move by the federal government to suppress wage growth for low-income Canadians, and increase the number of temporary workers, who have much weaker labour rights than permanent residents.”
In July, CBC reported that some temporary foreign workers in Alberta were being scammed into paying illegal fees to secure a job through the sale of labour market impact assessments which are part of the hiring process under the program. Some were hit for as much as $75,000, which immigration lawyer Jatin Shory called “a form of pseudo slavery.”
The word “slavery” is being used by others, too. A United Nations official called the program “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery” and warned in no uncertain terms that foreign workers were being exploited in Canada. He argues that without permanent resident status, foreign workers are at a higher risk of rights violations.
If the Liberals were trying to prove Karl Marx right, they did a good job. Just over 175 years ago, the economist and philosopher warned "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." That’s what the Liberals are: a government by and for the ownership class.
The government is now trying to clean up its own mess, or at least pretending to. Employment and Workforce Development Minister Boissonnault is talking about ending temporary foreign worker fraud, with his department describing the program as one that’s “designed as an extraordinary measure to be used when a qualified Canadian is not able to fill a job vacancy.” But fraud isn’t the central problem here, it’s the changes the government itself made to the low-wage stream in 2022. The call is coming from inside the house.
Boissonault is also considering reining in the low-wage stream of the program, refusing applications for TFW jobs that pay below the median wage by province or territory – a move which industry, predictably, opposes. That’s the least the government can do and it’s a scandal it hasn’t done so already.
The low-wage stream of the program ought to be massively reined in with an eye to eventually eliminating it for all but the most dire cases, and then providing those who do enter with high, stable wages and safe working conditions; permanent residency; and a fast path to citizenship.
The temporary foreign worker is a tool for industry, with the state playing the role of servant for capital. These free marketeers don’t actually believe in the free market, in which the value of labour moves up when demand for workers rises. They want a rigged system with cheap labour, below market rate, and they want the state to artificially suppress wages to deliver that for them. The state has been happy to oblige. It’s spineless and cruel stuff and it needs to end now.
Comments
The attack from the left has to hit the Conservatives just as hard, though. Beating up Liberals from the left to hand the reins to Conservatives who will be worse may be some long-term strategy stuff, but it would hurt the people being championed, for years on end.
It's Poilievre who has to be asked to kill the program, and it fits with the Conservative anti-immigration angle. They could cut, if not immigrants, then foreigners "taking" Canadian jobs. But Poilievre would be *happy* to be elected as an "anti-immigration" candidate, and then expand this program even further.
Activists have to hit Poilievre with the demand, not Trudeau.
Well, that's impressively cynical. An excellent example of why genuine leftists and even genuine progressives who care about, you know, real people and not just symbolism, find it very hard to get along with liberals.
Trudeau expanded the program. Trudeau made the program even worse than it already was. Trudeau is the prime minister and has been for a long time. If Trudeau gave a damn about governing well, he would have axed it. If he gives a damn about not looking bad being caught boosting the program, he should axe it now. Otherwise, he can bloody well wear it. Poilievre has no more to do with it than Trudeau has to do with (nearly all the things Poilievre blames him for).
So you want to say we should pretend it isn't a problem and let Trudeau continue to do this evil thing without comment, otherwise the more-evil people will win. No. If Trudeau wants this kind of thing not to be a cause of losing elections, and if he's genuinely less evil than Poilievre making it worth while for anyone to consider supporting him, it is in his power to STOP DOING THIS STUFF.
This amounts to nothing more than modern day slavery. Disgraceful!
I stopped voting for the Liberals more than a decade ago once they revealed how much of their "governance" was nothing more than doing the bidding of lobbyists for all kinds of unsavoury predatory capitalism. I came to the conclusion that this generation of politicians didn't have the guts to do the hard work of actually trying to make this nation viable. They have systematically surrendered policy and programs to the whims and the greed of the same old extractive industries that the British Empire imposed on this colony - apparently agreeing that Canada was good for nothing else - "The land God gave to Cain" indeed.
The author completely ignores the reason why temporary workers in low wage industries were needed in 2022, which is the Pandemic and mass disability due to Covid and long-Covid which is still happening and which disproportionately affects low wage earners. The impacts of Covid are also reflected in the substantial rise in homelessness and food-bank use. The fact that Covid denial is pervasive in politics, the media and even in healthcare is problematic. Covid may have fallen from the 3rd largest cause of death to 10th, but that's still substantial, and the widespread occurrence of long-Covid is still causing significant harm to the economy and our general well-being.
Thank you for addressing the pandemic's affect on everything, including labour. And for mentioning that COVID is still with us, like an unwanted guest. We may now look like fearful dorks masking up in crowds, but when a member of the family is deeply immune compromised you gotta do what you gotta do.
Why did we have to reach the 3/4 mark in the article before encountering the phrase "path to citizenship?"
The majority of consumers are price-oriented all the time and must bear the responsibility for the demand for cheap labour in textiles and food.
How many middle class Canadians are willing to stoop for hours a day, day after day in all weather conditions to pick vegetables and fruit from farmer's fields, to clean toilets that even billionaires find neccessary to use, to mop floors, to pump gas, to drive cabs, to rent the cheapest shop space in slums to start marginal businesses? The smartest immigrants eventually find unionized work and then send their kids to university to earn a better place in society, a place not as readily available in Latin America or the poorest parts of Asia.
Doug Saunders wrote a book called 'Arrival City' that spent enormous effort to describe the actual paths to citizenship many lowly immigrants made in the West, even people who started as TFWs picking crops in farmer's fields by hand and who cleaned toilets, all of it exploitive. Their children offered the hope if a better place in society, and the majority of them do better in school than the non-immigrant kids. One memorable story was Saunder's pages on Sadiq Kahn, child of desperately poor immigrants, who is now the popular multiple term mayor of greater London, UK.
TFWs are not neccessary when you have a mature immigration system that accommodates graduated integration into our economy, which
like it or not, will be built by the children of today's immigrants, many of whom had parents who started as a TFW ?if not a laned immigrant) cleaning your office toilets and picking the blueberries you had at lunch for rock bottom wages.
The hot button issue in the current US election campaign is The Border, code for illegals entering the US. One popular online commenter said he has the solution: Anybody who hired an illegal / TFW and exploited their cheap labour, be it gardening, cleaning the house or business, nannying, digging ditches or harvesting crops in sun baked fields should be given a 6-month jail sentence. Would that to happen, the US economy would collapse over large swaths of the land, that is how deeply their mainstream economy relies on the underground economy. Thankfully, Kamala Harris is taking labour and citizenship seriously in her campaign on the border, and just might garner a majority in both houses of Congress to do actually do something about it.
Using TFWs as a cudgel to bash in Trudeau's head in articles like this does nothing to address the issue. Moscrop hates Liberals, that much is obvious. But he fails to address the weakness (NDP, Bloc) and ignorance (Conservatives) of the rest of the House of Commons on the same issue, and certainly doesn't elucidate in any way, shape or form a better immigration and economic policy, except casually mentioning "paths to citizenship" in a passing throw away line close to the end of his piece.
TFWs would not be necessary in a consumer society that does not expect to pay only cheap prices on everything and does not still harbour racism against the immigrants doing our dirty work, and where elected officials kowtow to profit motives that do not result from legitimately productive growth, but from cutting back on costs, most shamefully on humans labouring for our society. The NDP should be on top of this issue, but they are too weak to hold either of the bigger parties accountable.
This is not just a story about Liberals; it's a shameful story about all of us.
I am old Father Time, and my early memories are not reliable, but after WWII the world was bereft of too many of its male laborers, and women, who had filled the jobs left behind by world war mobilization were kicked out to make room for returning soldiers, or demoted to the usual lesser jobs until they eventually married or got pregnant, and the labor world returned to its male centric equilibrium, gaps being filled in many cases by the DP's and refugees from shattered nations.
There was some grumbling even then about the damned DP's but they helped Canada's extractive and agricultural sector, while various NGO and government programs helped them to re-settle, rescuing faltering towns, industries and services. Most of these people integrated into Canadian society without much difficulty, even the Japanese internees mostly rebuilt their lives after release from the camps, though many did not choose to return to the Pacific coast.
We toddled along without TFW for quite a while, but the baby boom generation mostly did not need or choose to work in low wage stoop labor, except some in their adolescence might work for a summer or two in the fields, or in Forestry - where some of them joined Frontier College to help fellow workers become literate and learn English.
Canada still needed to import labor, Canada has always needed to import labor, or settlers to farm the Prairies. It appears Canada STILL needs to import labor - only now, our ignorant, pur laine, snobby white people are imitating Americans and turning noses up at people who will do the work we disdain.
I grow tired Father Time, of the Human species. Ungrateful wretches, greed obsessed, willing to lie, cheat, defraud in the name of Capitalism. Until our Captains of Industry, our Titans of Tech, our Politicians, our Pundits, are willing to suck in their guts, tighten their belts and WORK, to straighten out our economy, our society; humanity is on the slippery slope to failure - perhaps just in time to save this planet.
Well said!
We vote. We engage in the economy to get by and thrive. Therefore, the Captains of Industry, Titans of Tech, Polititians and Pundits are us. And we are them.
To start with, when I finished this article I shook my head at how blatant an attempt it is to blame the liberals for the conservatives creation. it started with Mulroney's' free trade shutting down our manufacturing in favour of imports from cheaper labour. Not being able to pay minimum wage and compete was addressed by "The Harper Government" crafting this legislation making it easier, under supervised and ripe for abuse. Along comes Trudeau, finally addressing it, coming up short , and the spin is Trudeau is in to slavery. Not born, yesterday, Not buying the spin.